
Installation view of Atis Rezistans / Ghetto Biennale at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, featuring works by Evel Romain along the wall, André Eugéne in the foreground, and glass mixed media by Edouard Duval-Carrié
Leonardo da Vinci taught that a portrait should begin with the skeleton, to which muscles, flesh, and if appropriate, clothing would be added. The point was to be aware of the presence within the subject of those parts that gave form to the person: the form that became the subject matter of the work. We should not forget that the artists of his time were strongly influenced by deep religious convictions, which helped power the shared visualization that characterized their art.
Another culture animated by spiritual concepts and feelings—clearly quite different ones—is that of Haiti. They also make very different use of skeletons than was taught by Leonardo, but it’s hard to imagine him demurring in light of Haiti’s social plight. Death is much a part of everyday life amid poverty and violence, and skulls in particular are part of both the religious rites, where they are fed to keep the spirits of their former occupants alive, and in art, where they are treated much like found objects. Consider “Masisi” and “Vyej Mari,” two sculptures by Claude Saintilus, currently on view as part of Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) at UMOCA. Masisi was a childhood friend of the sculptor, whom he represents twice: once as a babe in company with his mother, shown as the Virgin Mary, and a second time in his shroud. Two of these three figures are presented in skeletal form, while the infant takes the form of a realistic doll almost certainly recovered from a trash heap. Here the inevitability of death in life is joined by the disposability of local children.
With the help of information imparted by surrounding works, it’s possible to decode what this work intends to communicate. Haitian culture is widely syncretized, having taken elements from too many traditional African and Native American practices to count and absorbed them into its predominantly Christian practice. In much of the work here, it’s important to understand that the boundaries between life and death are so porous they’re essentially non-existent. As one artist explains in a video featuring leading figures in the Ghetto Biennale, he is already dead, only he hasn’t died yet, and expects to live again. In his art, in turn, he makes the dead live again so they can be judged.

Claude Saintilus’ “Masisi”
An open mind is essential when contemplating Saintilus’ work, which is meant to be enjoyed as much as to be moved by. An example of the Haitian artist’s humor is the brake shoes he placed over Masisi’s mouth, an antidote to his tendency to speak too freely in life, and which may in fact have led to his death. How many sincere memorials gently mock their subjects? On a slightly different plane, there is the very real likelihood that this is Masisi’s actual skull. And what are we to make of the comment that because a sculptor makes real things that last, he will never die, while those who make nothing will perish?
It’s been said that the closer an art work approaches the existential minimums necessary to constitute life, the more compelling it becomes. Hence, perhaps, our local focus on the traumatic deterioration of the Great Salt Lake. In the case of Haiti, a former European colony populated largely by the descendants of African slaves brought there to work in the hellish sugar cane fields, and which occupies the western three-fifths of the island of Hispaniola, it is now the most populous, poorest, and most anarchic nation in the Caribbean Sea, and it’s become difficult to see how people can live in a place where violent gangs control more than 90% of the country. UMOCA’s decision to showcase this art, from one of the most distressed places on Earth, is to be commended.
That said, it’s an excellent beginning. The arts flourish in Haiti as they do in few places, ranging from the elegant and sophisticated “Museum of Trance,” a sort of juke box built like so much modern architecture around a pipe organ that might otherwise be found leading the service in an ordinary church, to the scattered, street-side work spaces that turn the detritus of failed capitalist economics into satirical assemblies, which are then situated like 3-D murals around the slums where dwell what locals have taken to calling “the dominant class”—dominant in numbers, though necessarily the lowest and least powerful order of society.

Bastian Hagedorn & Henrike Naumann’s “Museum of Trance”

Three images from Leah Gordon’s Caste Portrait Series
In between are works that still display the craft ethos imported from Africa by those kidnapped for slavery. Evel Romain and André Eugéne are both members of Atis Rezistans, an organization that supports their combinations of traditional, skilled techniques and revolutionary aesthetic expressions. For 15 years, since the founding of the Ghetto Biennale in the slums of Port au Prince, they have also encouraged artists from around the world to come and work with them in Haiti. It’s a process that works in reverse as well, as Haitian artists have traveled among peers in other countries, learning techniques they can adapt. One example, Edouard Duval-Carrié, having participated in the struggle against the violent regimes of “Papa Doc” and his son, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, contributes three antique-styled, mixed media portraits of women who played important roles in the centuries-long turmoil of their island’s history. These he laboriously hand-etched into blue glass mirrors so viewers would see themselves as part of the resulting scenes.
One of the more deceptively anodyne works here comprises nine elegantly-dressed and well-presented examples from photographer Leah Gordon’s Caste Portrait Series, which recalls a once-official system for dividing the population by skin color, from white to Black in infinitesimal degrees, with a wide variety of mostly demeaning titles for the tones. The set provides an alternate reality, a point of view on the fate of generations of innocent victims of flagrant racism, each person being reimagined as an alternative version of a high-status European. “Noir,” the purest black, wears a hat commonly seen on Renaissance leaders, while “Griffe,” or Claw (designating someone presumed to be three-quarters Black and one quarter white) appears in the attire worn by the Italian banker in the famous painting that has come to be known as “The Marriage of Arnolfini,” which image presents the luxurious lifestyle that came about for a privileged few during the early years of international banking. Race, of course, is a social category, not a biological one, riddled with error and presumption, and there are dark-skinned people cast in lifetime roles as African-Americans, yet who have not a single gene of African origin. Leah Gordon risked her reputation as a vital influence when she cast herself as “Blanche.”

Laura Heyman’s “Don’t Move Again”
I can only speak for myself when I say that I don’t always approve of how art historical procedures, which may belong in the library more than the gallery, are applied in the evaluation of individual artists and their works. But I must make an exception for this presentation by the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. The amount and quality of research that went into choosing the artists and works, let alone writing the extensive gallery notes, keeps the lively reality of Haitian art vividly present. No resumé can compensate for poorly conceived or executed work, but in this case what may be the most meaningful, moving art shown this year is reinforced by the skill of scholars.
A remarkable project that began during the early years of the Ghetto Biannale, and has continued for the dozen years since, Laura Heyman’s Don’t Move Again allows participants from every category of Haitian life to decide where they want to be photographed and how they want to present themselves to the camera. A selection of photos relevant to this exhibition includes a wide angle view of Atis Rezistans life, but one photo stood out for me. When we contemplate the end of the hottest year in recorded history, and think about how much progress has been reversed so far in the ‘twenties, and how much more is now in jeopardy, we may well worry about what kind of future our children will face. Yet it’s hard to compare their prospects to those of Haitian children, in the first Caribbean country to win its independence from European colonial powers, yet where since 1986 there have been twelve presidents, not one of whom has completed his elected term of office, where some have become dictators and the latest was assassinated with no one held accountable, where earthquakes have destroyed vast swaths of areas in the cities and, despite pledges of aid, almost none has come forth. There is one image in Don’t Move Again that seems to capture how the future may well look to a Haitian child, and that one alone is, as they say, worth the price of admission to Atis Rezistans / Ghetto Biennale.

Detail from Laura Heyman’s “Don’t Move Again”
Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through Feb. 22, 2025
All images courtesy of the author
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts