haiticollectionpri

Saint Soleil emerged in 1973 and was founded by artists Jean-Claude “Tiga” Garoute and Maud Guerdes Robard. They provided local farmers art supplies and encouraged them to draw and paint. The Saint Soleil style is often described as surrealist, with figurative paintings rendered in vivid colors and a mystical sensibility. Vodou symbolism appears in many works, but Haitian art scholar Selden Rodman observed that Saint Soleil created art for the deities rather than paint their likeness. The...

This vibrant Kombit by Haitian master Gérard Valcin (1925–1988) celebrates one of the most profound traditions of Haitian rural life: collective labor. A kombit or coumbite is a communal gathering in which neighbors work together in the fields, sharing the physical effort of cultivation and transforming labor into an act of solidarity. The Haitian proverb “Anpil men chay pa lou” — many hands make the load lighter — expresses the spirit at the heart of the tradition. In the painting, men and...

There are paintings you look at, and then there are paintings that look back. Frantz Zéphirin's work belongs firmly to the latter category—an explosion of mythological power, spiritual tension, and the untamed imagination of Haitian Vodou cosmology rendered in breathtaking detail.