Partnerships

The Waterloo Center for the Arts’ purpose is to initiate and further awareness, appreciation, and support of the arts by a diverse audience. Located on the banks of the scenic Cedar River in downtown Waterloo, the Center works in partnership with the community to provide cultural experiences for all ages. The Center collects Midwest Art, American Decorative Arts, and International Folk Art, including a significant collection of Mexican Folk Art and the world’s largest public collection of Haitian Art. Selections from their collection are always on display. They also feature changing exhibits in five separate galleries throughout the building. From live music concerts, riverside luncheons, film series, and performance art to community events and festivals, the Waterloo Center for the Arts offers a variety of cultural programs and events throughout the year. The Pavilion is an interactive children’s museum featuring over 40 hands-on exhibits for all ages to explore. Milk a life-size cow, drive a tractor through a Grant Wood painting, test your skill at digital finger painting, explore the music, language, and culture of other countries, and more!

Founded in 2016, the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute at Brooklyn College is one of the premier academic institutes for Haitian studies. The institute recently received a donation of artworks from the estate of Yvette Feldman, a French/Francophone professor at Columbia University for over 60 years, which included 30 Haitian artworks and her private documents highlighting her relationship with the Haitian art community. The small collection includes paintings by celebrated painters dating back to the 1930s until the 1990s. The institution plans to restore minimal damage to digitize the items properly. Also, the Program does not have a designated area on campus where they can permanently display the works to share them with the college and local community. By working with HADC, the Haitian Studies Institute looks to create opportunities for the community to engage with the works and consider how the collection enhances its broader mission.

The Haitian American Museum of Chicago is an institution focused on promoting Haitian art, culture, and history in Greater Chicago. Alongside photographing and digitizing their collection of about 500 artworks, including painting, sculpture, mixed-media, and textile art, we plan to assess the condition of their collection and document their exhibition history from the past nine years.

The Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance (HCAA) is an organization dedicated to the promotion of Afro-Caribbean culture with a focus on Haiti. HCAA has a rich history of community engagement in Miami through cultural programming and exhibitions. Active for three decades, the organization has no formal documentation of its institutional history. The HADC team will work directly with Executive Director Carle Juste and Founder Edouard Duval-Carrié to inventory and digitize their holdings, including exhibition histories and a collection of historic maps. This includes documenting over 30 exhibitions, including 12 years of the Global Caribbeans exhibition series and works by over one hundred artists.

The Art Galleries at Ramapo College of New Jersey maintains the personal collection of Selden Rodman, a founding co-director of the renowned Centre d’Art, founded in 1945 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Ramapo’s prominent collection of around 350 artworks provides a rubric for reconsidering and decolonizing narratives of Haitian art and connecting to Haitian diaspora and Black communities in the tri-state area. We aim to address significant space and capacity concerns, and aid in photographing and digitizing of artworks. This photograph displays several artworks displayed at The Art Galleries at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The collection of works we will digitize ranges in scale and format, including sculpture, painting, and mixed-media works. Currently, the majority of the Haitian art collection is within limited storage facilities adjacent to the galleries in the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts. More information on the collection is available at:
https://www.ramapo.edu/berriecenter/art-galleries/selden-rodman.

The Haitian Cultural Legacy Collection is a privately owned collection of over 400 acrylic paintings, oil paintings, ironworks, and sculptures created by Haitian artists and collected by the late Dr. Jean Chenier Brierre and his wife Nicole Riboul Brierre. Since the 1940s, Dr. Brierre and his wife collected works from talented Haitian artists to create a magnificent collection that tells the historical legacy of their home country, Haiti. As avid art lovers who were passionate about their country, they believed that through art, the history and culture of Haiti could be shared with people of all nationalities. New Orleans-based artist and curator Nic Brierre Aziz will provide HADC access to his family’s prominent collection which is currently in storage as plans for a museum on Haitian art. Digitizing the collection in the process of the creation of a museum allows an opportunity to explore and highlight connections between 20th-century and contemporary Haitian art with broader historical connections and heritages to Haiti within New Orleans and Louisiana. 

The Sant d’A Jakmel (Jacmel Arts Center) in the southern city of Jacmel was founded in 2003 by a collective of local artists. The center functioned as an academy, community space, and gallery, and is the primary arts center in Jacmel today. Jacmel is a coastal city known for its Carnaval and colonial-era architecture, with its historic center recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jacmel is also known for its rich traditions in the visual arts and craft, with many of its painters rising to national and global prominence. The collection of over 400 artworks at Sant d’A highlights the unique painting and artistic traditions of Jacmel, with significant works from contemporary artists. While Jacmel was greatly impacted by the 2010 earthquake, the center holds strong thanks to committed members of the city’s artist community, who maintain the facilities and programming. Jacmel’s geography, previous organizational leadership, and current limited capacity have prevented the arts center from envisioning the digitization of its collection. Sant d’A Jakmel provides the opportunity to engage Jacmel’s rich artist community in the midst of and as a means to inform our digitization effort.

The Na-Ri-VéH Ounfò/Voudou Temple is the former family estate of Jean-Daniel Lafontant located in the John Brown section of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The two-story compound sits on a little over an acre of land on the main street surrounded by Christian evangelical churches. The Temple was home to a unique collection of over 2,000 pieces of contemporary artwork donated by artists and patrons with whom Lafontant has worked throughout the past 20 years. However, in September 2021, tragedy struck the Temple when a fire destroyed the art collection and a significant portion of the estate.  Within the Temple, artistic spaces were found along a long corridor that leads to a patio-covered inner courtyard, the peristil (the sacred spaces used for Vodou ceremonies), and nine sacred chambers dedicated to families of Voudou lwas (deities). Each space was decorated with a mélange of modern and traditional representations of the Vodou lwas. This was the first notable collection where contemporary art was initiated and utilized for ceremonial purposes.  From the ashes, a new initiative was born in the redesign of the structure and the collection. This site, which stood for decades as a community center and an informal sanctuary for artists, will now also serve as an incubator for the creative community. Very simply put… this is an opportunity to allow artists throughout the Diaspora and Haiti, influenced by Vodou and the Haitian culture, to develop their understanding and contribute to the rebuild of this site.  This initiative develops the praxis of the contemporary narrative of Haitian art in an organic process connecting directly to the source of Haitian and Kreyol inspiration.  This reboot will build context through its residency program in designing and creating a network of new and emerging artists. The HADC team plans to work closely with Mr. Lafontant on considering the role of Haitian art, from the museum and marketplace to places of worship and devotion.