Catch “Spirit and Strength: Modern Art From Haiti” at the National Gallery of Art before it closes

Amid the gray stone walls of the East Building at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition “Spirit and Strength: Modern Art from Haiti” immerses visitors in bright yellows, soft pinks and sky blues.

“These are the colors that are coming from Haiti, and [they represent the] way Haitians adorn and decorate their own buildings,” says Dr. Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art at the National Gallery of Art. The show, she says, “speaks to larger aspects of [Haiti] beyond art.”

“Spirit and Strength” showcases 15 paintings by Haitian artists, along with works from African American artists who visited Haiti throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. 

“Spirit and Strength” is also the “first of its kind” for the National Gallery of Art, according to Fletcher. The 15 paintings by Haitian artists were donated in 2023 by the Kay and Roderick Heller Collection of Franklin, Tennessee, and the Beverly and John Fox Sullivan Collection of Washington, Virginia. These donations marked the first time the art museum received works by Haitian artists.

“With it being the first, I wanted to create many different entry points into Haiti and Haitian culture,” expands Fletcher.

As a pioneering exhibition for the National Gallery of Art, “Spirit and Strength” opens the door to analyzing the historical dialogue between the Caribbean island and the United States. This relationship was shaped by Haiti’s revolutionary independence from France in 1804 and abolishment of slavery, the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 and 1934 and the deep sense of hope that African American communities felt for the world’s first Black republic.

During the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic movement in the United States that lasted from the 1910s to the 1930s, exchanges between Haitian artists, musicians and politicians from the United States were common. African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who studied Haitian Vodou, and African American poet Langston Hughes, who visited Haiti in 1931, critiqued the occupation.

Haiti’s impact on the United States can be traced even further back to 19th century revolts led by enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which took place in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, cited the Haitian Revolution as inspiration. Denmark Vesey’s thwarted insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 called for participants to flee to Haiti.

“There was absolutely a lot of recognition of a similar circumstance [that] Black Americans were facing in the United States … with the occupation of Haiti being enacted by the same people who were oppressing [Black Americans at home],” says Fletcher.

Fletcher, who curated the exhibition with Justin M. Brown (a Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellow at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), has long been invested in exploring Afro-Diasporic connections and problematizing the idea of a homogenous Black identity. She earned her master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctorate in history of art and visual studies from Cornell University focused on “Black artists who were really challenging what it meant to be Black and how to express that through their artwork.”

In 2021, Fletcher curated the North American tour of “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” (Afro-Atlantic Histories) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While the North American exhibition featured over 130 paintings, the original that premiered at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 2018 presented 450 art pieces from 214 artists. In 2022, Fletcher also helped bring the exhibition to the National Gallery.

During a speech at the opening of the exhibition, former Vice President Kamala Harris referred to it as “world history … American history. And, for many of us, it is also family history.” 

This global lens and the desire to push against a Black monolith is evident in “Spirit and Strength.” Considering the exhibition only features 21 paintings altogether, Fletcher had to find creative ways to present Haiti beyond the art pieces. One way she did so was by designing interactive components. Visitors can listen to Haitian music, color their own versions of the featured paintings and read books on Haitian life and history.

Dr. Petrouchka Moïse, an assistant professor and digital curator at Grinnell College Libraries in Grinnell, Iowa, visited the opening of the exhibition with the Haitian Art Society last September. Moïse, who is Haitian American and holds a doctorate of design in cultural preservation, is currently developing a massive digital project called Haitian Art: A Digital Crossroads.

Moïse recounts how during her visit to the National Gallery, she was deeply impacted by the exhibition’s wall-to-wall rendering of the mural once located in the apse of the now-devastated Cathédrale de la Sainte-Trinité (Holy Trinity Cathedral) in Port-au-Prince. 

The mural was commissioned in the 1950s and features paintings that follow the life and death of Jesus, beginning first with Rigaud Benoit’s “Nativity” then moving onto Philomé Obin’s “The Crucifixion” before transitioning to Castera Bazile’s “Ascension.” Most of the mural, along with the cathedral, was destroyed during the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook Haiti to its core in 2010.

“[The mural] was so significant,” says Moïse, “and it’s been destroyed forever, but the ability to just walk into that space and feel the magnitude of that mural [that] we only see in photos … was magnificent.”

All the artists who painted the mural lived through the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Those harsh 19 years saw the expansion of the Haitian gendarmerie (police force), the outlawing of Vodou and a revival of the colonial-era corvée labor system.

Moïse explains that “because of the government’s anti-Haitian laws and discrimination, museums became this silent sanctuary where artists could embed [Vodou] imagery and symbolism into [their] work … Three out of the four artists that did the mural were vodou priests.”

In response to the exterior threat of the United States, artists and writers of the time began to promote peasant culture as the crux of Haitian identity. Moïse points out, however, that the concept of “Haitian modern art” as the “countryside” was not only dictated by Haitian voices but also by external factors like American tourism and exoticism that played into the exportation of a curated image of Haiti.

“There was all of this materiality that was being formed to talk about the importance of our daily life, of honoring our ancestors and memory,” says Moïse. “The rules of this [period] were that you needed to paint the people, [and] you needed to paint the landscape [because] it was going to be an acceptable visual narration.”

Moïse, who is both an educator and artist, hopes that those who visit the exhibition think deeply about these national narratives, be it questioning why certain images are privileged over others or wrestling with what artistic survival looks like after a natural catastrophe.

She urges visitors to connect with the art on a more human level, saying, “I hope everyone that walks through the National Gallery finds a piece of themselves when they are finding a piece of us.”

Fletcher echoes this broader perspective. Through her work, she aims to question the paradigm that Black life must always be in relation to resistance. While one aspect of Haitian history is certainly tied to its revolutionary origins, the paintings also allow visitors to see ordinary people as valuable subjects, just as much as venerated war heroes.

“For me, it comes down to humanity, the humanization of Black people which is so lost in these ideas of resistance,” says Fletcher. “These are all aspects of Black culture that should be celebrated and dealt with, but they are also [just] one facet of being a Black person. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking that I am going to protest, that is just one part of life. There is love, joy, sadness, anger — all these aspects of Black lives need to be recognized.”

It may be these raw human emotions that make the paintings in “Spirit and Strength” so captivating — that such sadness, joy, love and anger can be found in the ordinary as well the extraordinary. It is possible that this struggle for universalism may be the most revolutionary message coming out of Haiti after the occupation — that neither French bayonets nor U.S. war machines could ever truly extinguish the spirit and strength of community.

“Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti” is on view at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, Mezzanine, Gallery 214, through March 9.

– Story by Tricia De Souza

– Copy edited by Kami Waller and Michelle Benitez