Haitian Art: Vodou Flags and the Centre d'Art

Haitian art rests on two pillars: the Centre d'Art, a Port-au-Prince school and gallery founded in 1944 that brought Haiti's modern painters to the world, and drapo Vodou, sequined flags made to salute the spirits. The flags open a ceremony. Neither one is folk craft. Both are the work of trained specialists. Both got filed for decades under a label almost nobody in Haiti asked for.

What was the Centre d'Art, and why does 1944 matter?

Before 1944, Haiti had no art galleries and no public art schools. That year the American watercolorist DeWitt Peters opened the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince alongside a group of Haitian artists and intellectuals including Maurice Borno, Albert Mangonès, Geo Remponeau, Jean Chenet, and Gérald Bloncourt. It functioned as a training space, a production space, and a gallery at once. In 1947 the Haitian state granted it public utility status.

It didn't come out of nowhere. The National Gallery of Art traces the roots of Haitian modernism to the Indigenist movement of the 1920s, when Haitian writers and artists set out to build a national identity from folklore and popular culture rather than from Paris. The Centre gave that project a building and a door that opened both ways.

The door mattered. Foreign critics, curators, and collectors started arriving in the mid 1940s, and Haitian painters started leaving for exhibitions abroad. The French surrealist André Breton visited in 1945 and praised the work of Hector Hyppolite for what he called its total authenticity. Hyppolite showed in Paris in 1947. He died in 1948, three years after joining the Centre.

Who were the painters the Centre d'Art brought forward?

Not a school with one style. Several, working in different cities with different subjects.

Hector Hyppolite painted spirits and dream logic. His 3 Marassa of 1947 refers to the Vodou concept of the marassa, twins plus the child born after them, understood as a powerful crossing point between the living and the dead. Hyppolite is often described as a third generation houngan, a male Vodou priest. The National Gallery notes that this claim may be a story Breton helped circulate, which is a useful reminder that a lot of what circulates about Haitian art abroad started as marketing.

Philomé Obin worked in the north and founded the Cap-Haïtien school, painting street life, local architecture, and national history. His President Tiresias Sam Entering Cap-Haïtien of 1958 shows a crowd greeting the president on a visit in 1901.

Rigaud Benoit, born in Port-au-Prince in 1911, painted the Annunciation in 1958 with Gabriel and Mary as Haitians standing in a Haitian landscape. Wilson Bigaud studied with Hyppolite and got picked up early. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his Murder in the Jungle shortly after he painted it at nineteen. Castera Bazile painted cockfights and market days and died of tuberculosis at forty-three, by then one of Haiti's most successful artists.

Two more are worth knowing because they complicate the usual story. André Pierre was a houngan who painted the lwa, and he began on the inside surfaces of hollowed gourds used for ceremonial offerings before moving to board and canvas in the 1950s. His stated aim was to show that Vodou deserves the same standing as any other major world religion. Louisiane Saint Fleurant started painting in her late forties after years of domestic work and became the oldest artist, and the only woman, in the Saint Soleil movement.

The Centre's reach went past painting. The Milwaukee Art Museum, which holds one of the strongest collections of twentieth century Haitian art anywhere, splits its holdings into a southern school leaning toward Vodou subjects, a northern school leaning toward secular and historical ones, and the cut steel drum sculpture of Croix-des-Bouquets.

What are drapo Vodou, and what are they actually for?

They are liturgical objects. That is the first and most important thing about them.

Vodou is practiced widely in Haiti, often by people who also belong to another faith. It is rooted in African religious systems and carries borrowings from Roman Catholicism, from Freemasonry, and from the island's Taíno culture. In 2003 a Haitian government directive established Vodou as an official religion with the right to issue official documents, which put baptisms and marriages conducted by houngans and manbos on legal footing.

A drapo is a flag, usually around three feet square, made from satin, velvet, or rayon and worked over with sequins, beads, or appliqué, with a geometric border and fringe. It is presented at the opening of a ceremony to salute the spirits and to gather the energy of the people present. Most temples or societies own at least two, representing the congregation and the spirits they serve, and those flags rank among the most sacred and most expensive ritual implements a society owns.

Each flag is typically dedicated to a single lwa and carries that spirit's colors and symbols, often including a vèvè, one of the geometric signs used to call a particular spirit during ritual. The design vocabulary is a genuine synthesis: African symbols set against and merged with Catholic processional banners, French military ensigns, and Masonic flags and aprons. When the Fowler Museum at UCLA showed its collection of more than 120 drapo in 2004, it chose flags for Ogou, the general of the pantheon, Danbala, the snake patriarch, and Ezili Danto, the earth mother and warrior, because those three carry the mythology of the Haitian Revolution fought from 1791 to 1804.

That is the part the word "voodoo" buried. The tradition was misportrayed abroad as black magic for the better part of a century, and the misportrayal did real political work, since a Black republic that had beaten Napoleon was more convenient to the outside world as a horror story than as a country. Getting the religion right is not a courtesy. It is a prerequisite for reading the art at all.

Who makes the flags, and how is the tradition changing?

Flagmakers are named artists, not anonymous artisans. Clotaire Bazile became a houngan in 1968 and made his first flag in 1972. Antoine Oleyant, who died in 1992, pushed the form toward independent artistic expression. Museum collections carry the names: the Art Institute of Chicago holds a Vodou Flag for the Marasa Guinin by Roland Rockville, born 1954, made in the mid 1990s from beads, sequins, thread, and satin.

The biggest recent shift is who is holding the needle. As late as 2004 the Fowler described women artists as having only recently begun working in the medium. Myrlande Constant is the reason that reads as dated now. She learned beading beside her mother in a factory that produced wedding dresses, brought the tambour stitch into flagmaking, and built dense, narrative, heavily beaded textiles at a scale the tradition had not attempted. She calls it painting with beads. In 2023 the Fowler gave her a thirty year retrospective, The Work of Radiance, curated by Katherine Smith and Jerry Philogene, billed as the first United States museum exhibition devoted to a contemporary Haitian woman artist.

Why was Haitian painting called "naive," and why is that wrong?

Because the buyers needed it to be.

The label arrived with the foreign collectors and writers who promoted the work in the late 1940s, and it did a specific job. It made the painting legible to a market that wanted untutored genius from the Caribbean and did not want to think about Haitian artists as peers with training, theories, workshops, and arguments. It also flattened enormous differences. Obin's civic history paintings and Hyppolite's spirit visions have almost nothing in common except a country and a gallery.

Curators have been dismantling it for a while. When Nottingham Contemporary mounted Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou in 2012 with roughly 200 works by 35 artists from the 1940s onward, it stated plainly that the naive label has often been applied and does not do the work justice. Contemporary Haitian artists have rejected the term for its condescension, and alternatives like self-taught and intuitive came into use partly in response to the Black Power and anticolonial arguments of the 1960s and 1970s. The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed how Black art gets categorized across the diaspora: the category tends to serve the person selling, not the person painting.

What did the 2010 earthquake take?

A great deal. Thousands of works were destroyed. The Centre d'Art's building was severely damaged, its director Francine Murat was killed, and the institution stayed closed for four years before reopening in November 2014 on its seventieth anniversary, working out of temporary structures on its historic site.

The clearest loss is the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Trinity in Port-au-Prince. Fourteen life sized murals of scenes from the life of Christ had been painted on its interior walls in the late 1940s and early 1950s by eight artists connected to the Centre d'Art. They were controversial when they went up because they showed Haitians in biblical roles. Three survived the January 12, 2010 earthquake, all badly damaged: Obin's The Last Supper, Préfète Duffaut's Native Procession, and Bazile's The Baptism of Christ.

Conservators Viviana Dominguez and Rosa Lowinger led a Haitian and American team under the Smithsonian's Haiti Cultural Recovery Project to take them off the ruined walls. Testing at the Getty Conservation Institute and the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute showed the murals were egg tempera over a thin mineral ground, powdery enough to crumble at a touch. The team used stacco, detaching the paint layer along with the mortar directly beneath it, and stored the fragments for eventual reinstallation in a rebuilt cathedral.

What does any of this have to do with a canvas on an American wall?

There is a direct line, and a museum has now drawn it. The National Gallery of Art's Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti, on view from September 29, 2024 through March 9, 2025 and curated by Kanitra Fletcher, gave its final room to African American artists who traveled to Haiti between the 1930s and the 1980s, among them Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, and William Edouard Scott. They went to a country that had won its own independence in 1804, they identified with its fights against racism and empire, and they brought the influence home. The serial history painting in Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series belongs to that same argument about Black artists telling their own history in paint.

Noirci Studio does not sell drapo, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does. A consecrated flag made for a peristyle is not decor and it is not ours to reproduce. What we make is African American art on archival canvas, printed to order in the United States, with the artist paid a royalty on every sale, and it sits at the American end of the same lineage the National Gallery traced. If that thread is what you are pulling, our Black power art collection is where it lives in our catalog.

If you want Haitian work specifically, buy it from Haitian artists and Haitian galleries, and see the real thing first. The Waterloo Center for the Arts in Iowa holds what it describes as the largest public collection of Haitian art in the world, built from a 1977 gift from Dr. and Mrs. F. Harold Reuling. Milwaukee has the Flagg collection, given in 1991. The Fowler has the flags. Once you have seen a drapo in person and understood what it is for, the question of how to live with diaspora art at home gets easier, because you stop shopping for a look and start collecting along a line of descent.

Sources

• National Gallery of Art, "10 Haitian Artists to Know"
• National Gallery of Art, "Landmark Exhibition Exploring Modern Haitian Art and Its Influences on View at National Gallery of Art" (Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti)
• Le Centre d'Art, Port-au-Prince, "Our Story"
• Fowler Museum at UCLA, "Saluting Vodou Spirits: Haitian Flags from the Fowler Collection"
• Fowler Museum at UCLA, "Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance"
• Smithsonian Institution, "Smithsonian Team Begins Removing Haitian Murals at St. Trinity Cathedral in Haiti"
• Milwaukee Art Museum, Haitian Collection
• Waterloo Center for the Arts, Collections
• Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois, "Sacred Symbols in Sequins: Haitian Vodou Flags"
• Nottingham Contemporary, "Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou"
• Art Institute of Chicago, Roland Rockville, "Vodou Flag for the Marasa Guinin (Drapo Vodou)"
• U.S. Department of State, "2019 Report on International Religious Freedom: Haiti"
• Bill Brubaker, "In Haiti, the Art of Resilience," Smithsonian Magazine, September 2010

Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.