Explore Port-au-Prince’s Triumphant Art Scene

In the 1940s, a watercolor painter from the United States, DeWitt Peters , moved to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When he arrived, he observed the sprawling amounts of local art—adorning everything from walls and sidewalks to the local taxi buses called "tap-taps." The Indigenist movement was in full swing in Haiti; local artists were making both a name for themselves in the country and helping establish the nation's identity as separate from the United States' occupation through the art they created.

At the time, though, Haitian artists hadn’t considered that they could make money from their art. The small nation didn't even have its own art museum yet, so Peters opened Le Centre d'Art , an art gallery and school to encourage and promote local untrained artists, in 1944. Artists already popular in Haiti, including Hector Hyppolite , the Voodoo artist colloquially known as the "grandfather of Haitian art," made their way to the center and took up residence there; the center provided government-funded equipment and materials many artists couldn't afford.

Locally, the work produced at the center became well known, bringing in more students, most of whom were low-income locals. The government paid salaries to all the teachers, among them Peters and other accomplished Haitian artists of the time. And internationally, Haitian art took hold thanks to tourists visiting the small nation, spreading the word and bringing work back home. New York's Museum of Modern Art was the first major museum to acquire a piece of Haitian art: René Vincent’s 1940 painting Le combat des coqs (Cock Fight) . The museum bought it in 1944 through Peters' work as an art dealer in Haiti; the purchase was made just before he opened the center. One of the first major Haitian art collectors was U.S. poet Selden Rodman . Since then, international leaders and celebrities, including the Kennedys (who collected paintings by Prefete Duffaut) and the Clintons (who collect Haitian paintings and metalwork), and thousands of others have collected Haitian art created by Laurent Casimir, Jean-René Jérôme, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Hector Hyppolite, Philomé Obin, and more.

When a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, museums, cathedrals, art galleries, even Le Centre d'Art crumbled to the ground, destroying valuable art. Haitians began to work around the rubble, rebuilding and even creating art pieces out of crumbled walls. (An exhibition called " PÒTOPRENS : The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince" is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, highlighting a group of artists that make sculptures out of earthquake debris.) The Smithsonian Institution offered assistance as well, by way of the Haiti Cultural Recovery Project , which not only rescued Haitian artworks, but also helped to rebuild Le Centre d'Art.

Now, nearly a decade later, the art scene is thriving, particularly in Port-au-Prince, just 16 miles west of the historic quake's epicenter. According to Lorraine Mangones, the executive director of FOKAL , Haiti’s main cultural and educational foundation, Le Centre d'Art recently received an investment to construct a new art center and next year will begin having Caribbean artists-in-residence. Plus, repairs are underway to reopen the Museum of Haitian Art of St. Pierre College, which had about 9,000 visitors per year before the earthquake; a single room has reopened to display prized Haitian art for now.

These six spots in the capital area will show you the best of Haitian art.

Le Centre d’Art was the first art gallery in Haiti, opening more than 70 years ago as an art school and display place for art of all types. When the earthquake hit in 2010, the building was completely destroyed. An art school and gallery, with sculptures throughout the grounds, took its place in 2014, and with the Smithsonian's help , the school was able to save more than 5,000 pieces of art. Le Centre d’Art has a close relationship with the Louvre as well, and even sent its archivists to be trained at the French institution. The Louvre maintains a collection assessment of the artwork at Le Centre d'Art and runs a three-year internship program in conjunction with the school to continue the assessment and help with communications.

A Swiss couple—Freda and Roger Monnin, who actively participated in the Port-au-Prince art scene since they settled in the city in 1947—opened Galerie Monnin downtown with European art in 1956. The gallery began to build a collection of sacred voodoo art in the late 60s, when the second generation signed on to help run the business. Since then, the gallery has opened in a new location in Pétionville and runs an art school as well. The collection has grown to include a consistent high-end exhibition of voodoo art, in addition to showcasing both Haitian art and artwork from artists-in-residence, including Greek painter Lilika Papagrigoriou and British artist Sally Leonard.

This isn’t only the largest art gallery in the Caribbean, but also one of the largest Haitian art collections in the world. The Galerie D’Art Nader in Pétionville is owned by Georges Nader, Jr., who took over when his father, Georges S. Nader, retired as an art dealer. Nader the elder opened the original gallery in downtown Port-au-Prince in 1966, but it crumbled with the earthquake. Everything that could be salvaged (about 3,000 paintings, 1,800 of them damaged, of nearly 15,000) moved to the Pétionville location. Now the gallery's collection has more than 17,000 pieces of mostly modern art from the 1940s on. The family is planning to build a national art museum where they will exhibit 1,000 hand-picked pieces, painted by the most renowned Haitian artists—though as of yet the art list and timeline are still undisclosed.

This gallery was originally opened by Issa el Saieh , a prominent musician that introduced big band music to Haiti in the 1940s and '50s. In the 1960s, el Saieh was imprisoned by Haitian president Papa Doc’s regime; according to his son—who runs the gallery now—el Saieh was held in a cell for 22 days without the ability to stand up straight or sit down fully. Once he was released (the exact reason behind his imprisonment is unclear), he opened El-Saieh Gallery , which was the second art gallery to open in the country. It instantly became a gathering space for the artistic luminaries of the time. Now, the gallery overlooks the port and boasts a large cross-section of traditional and modern Haitian art, including Vodoo sculpture by local woodcarver and artist Guyodo and colorful paintings by André Normil , an influential Haitian artist who created depictions of Noah's Ark, paradise and Carnival.

This isn’t an art gallery, but rather an event. Since 2009, the Ghetto Biennale has run every two years, hosted by the artists collective Atis Rezistans. The next installment is this year, from November 29 to December 20, with works focusing on the Haitian Revolution. The Biennale is a chance for urban untrained artists to showcase the artwork they’ve created, and for local artists to collaborate with international ones—for example, for the 2017 Biennale, local artist Love Leonce worked together with Chicago-based artist and curator Sabrina Greig on a collaborative printmaking workshop for locals and visitors. Other collaborations have included a California-based tattoo artist creating tattoos drawn by local artists, a music composition by British musician Bill Drummond performed by 100 local Haitians, and two European artists enlisting the help of Port-au-Prince residents to create a building from trash. The event is held in two different neighborhoods, Lakou Cheri and Ghetto Leanne. Themes for the event revolve around migration and freedom, and past participants have included filmmakers, lecturers, musicians, writers, architects, photographers and other artists.

Hotels throughout Port-au-Prince often tend to double as art galleries, with local artists creating many of the pieces on display. The Marriott Port-au-Prince was one of the first. The hotel hired local artist and art curator Philippe Dodard to stock the property with art. “I took art from both modern artists in Haiti and street artists,” says Dodard. “The art scene suffered after the earthquake, but it allowed street art to rise up again. Now I’m concerned that Haiti will be rebuilt with large buildings with no character reflecting Haitian culture.” For his part, he’s doing his best to avoid that fate with the Marriott. Pieces on display include everything from decorated vases and wall tiles to voodoo flags and fiber art. Dodard himself designed the massive iron panels in the lobby.

What Do Bovids, Bridges and the West Have to Do With American Art?

In the decades following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, millions of European-Americans migrated west of the Appalachian Mountains displacing Indian peoples and bringing vast changes to the region and its ecosystems. As they did, “The West” developed a mythical status as a land of beauty, adventure and possibility. Though indigenous peoples had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, the West was seen as a landscape unspoiled by civilization—an “American Eden.” This romantic vision was aided in no small part by the territory’s unique fauna. Chief among them, both in stature and significance, was the American bison.

“The Great Plains were dominated by Indian peoples—Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apsáalooke (Crow), Blackfeet, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Assiniboine, for example—whose religious beliefs and oral narratives exalted the power and majesty of the buffalo,” writes the Smithsonian’s Cécile R. Ganteaume in Officially Indian: Symbols That Define the United States. Natives relied on the buffalo for food, clothing and shelter.

These creatures became symbolic of the mythic West. In 1912, sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor created Buffalo (model for Q Street Bridge) . The 13-inch-tall bronze depicts an alert male bison, standing on all fours with a jauntily flickering tail. The piece was the model for the magnificent sculptures that today can be seen on Washington, D.C.’s stately neoclassical Dumbarton Bridge , which spans Rock Creek Park between Georgetown and Dupont Circle.

While Proctor titled the work Buffalo , it actually depicts an American bison —buffalo are native to Africa and Asia. This month, the Smithsonian American Art Museum debuts a new video web series, titled, “Re:Frame,” featuring host Melissa Hendrickson, who explores the museum’s collections from different vantage points and with the helpful expertise of specialists working throughout the Smithsonian Institution. The first episode investigates Proctor’s sculpture as well as the relationship between bison and perceptions of the West, as well as the connection between this charismatic megafauna and the early days of the Smithsonian Institution.

Proctor’s family moved west from Michigan in 1871, settling in Colorado when the artist was 11 years old. Growing up, Proctor fully embraced the life of a frontiersman, learning to hunt, track and live off the land. “He [spent] the rest of his childhood hunting big game and just loving the West and all its nature,” says the museum's curator of sculpture Karen Lemmey .

By the time Proctor was a young man, European-Americans’ perceptions of the West had already begun to change. The transcontinental railroad eased overland travel and the California Gold Rush accelerated population growth. Fear grew that “Eden” would be lost. In the words of famed sculpture Frederic Remington , “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever… and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed.”

This worry was particularly valid when it came to bison. Before 1800, estimates placed wild bison populations at 30 to 100 million animals , but by the 1890s, less than 1,000 remained. Industrial-scale hunting depleted the vast herds, says Ganteaume of the American Indian Museum. “So dependent was the American Industrial Revolution on buffalo hides to make conveyors and belts to propel machinery into mass-producing commercial products that the American bison was on the verge of extinction,” she writes.

As Americans anticipated the extinction of the Western way of life, the peoples, animals and landscapes of the region became popular subjects for artwork. The bison “itself was iconic as a symbol of the West, as a symbol of the fading of the myth of the west, the demise of the West,” says Lemmey.

Proctor, having grown up in the region, became famous for detailed sculptures of animals he knew intimately from his boyhood days. “He was so good at sculpting animals that other sculptors, like Augustus Saint-Gaudens , who was really the premier American sculptor at that time, commissioned Proctor to do the horses for his equestrian monuments,” says Lemmey.

“When he was trying to sculpt an animal, he strove for extraordinary accuracy,” she adds.

After receiving a prestigious commission to sculpt native North American animals for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Proctor’s renown grew. In 1911, the Fine Art’s Commission of Washington, D.C. asked Proctor to create a sculpture to crown the planned Dumbarton Bridge. The Art’s Commission wanted the decorations for the bridge to have a distinctly “American character.” To achieve it, along with the monumental bison for its ends, Proctor created fifty-six identical reliefs of the face of the Oglala Sioux Chief Matȟó Wanáȟtake, also known as Kicking Bear, to cap the bridge’s corbels. The Kicking Bear heads, notes Ganteaume, were created from a life mask anthropologists made at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History when the Lakota leader visited Washington, D.C. in 1896.

Ironically, Proctor had to travel to Canada to create his sculpture of the buffalo. “Proctor resurrects this animal in his work by studying it from life. Not in the United States, but in Canada because that’s where he was able to find a sizeable herd,” says Lemmey. His depiction of this quintessentially American animal is actually based on a Canadian bison.

Thankfully, bison were spared from extinction. “They’re a success story for conservation,” says Tony Barthel , curator at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park . “Bison are not on the endangered species list… the population today is stable. It depends how you count the numbers, but about 13,000 to 20,000 bison are part of the pure, or wild, bison that live in wild lands.”

The Smithsonian’s relationship to bison, and their conservation, dates back to the time Proctor lived among them in the West. “The Smithsonian taxidermist William Temple Hornaday went on an expedition out West to collect some bison for exhibition in the museum. On that trip, he was shocked to discover how few there were,” says Barthel. Hornaday returned to the Capital City determined to help save the American bison and immediately began lobbying Congress for the establishment of a zoological park.

“We had a small group of bison that were actually living on the National Mall,” says Barthel.

Eventually, Congress approved funding and the National Zoo opened its doors in 1891. “The bison were some of the first families,” he adds. Today, visitors to Washington, D.C. can still see American bison at the Zoo .

Proctor’s sculptures remain at the ends of the Q Street Bridge in Washington, D.C. The model the artist used to create them is now a permanent part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. “It gives us an opportunity to study the monument up close,” says Lemmey.

While perceptions of the West may have shifted, bison continue to hold symbolic meaning. In 2016, they were declared the first ever National Mammal of the United States , joining the Bald Eagle as an official emblem of American identity.

The 1912 Buffalo (model for Q Street Bridge) by A. Phimister Proctor is on view on the second floor in the south wing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

This Holiday Season, Travel With Your Nose

Nothing brings me right back to the holidays in South Jersey, where I grew up, like the scent of a bag of warm Philly soft pretzels: a fragrance that’s doughy and sweet, with a twinge of saltiness. It’s often mixed with a minty whiff of wintergreen Altoids and the crisp, flowery aroma of Dove body wash, a unique combination of scents that inevitably enfolds me when my dad greets me at Philadelphia International Airport most Decembers.

I’m not alone in my nostalgia: people associate innumerable smells with the holiday season around the world. Consider the scent of cloves and cinnamon rising from a steaming cup of mulled wine at one of Germany’s beloved Christmas markets, perhaps in Wiesbaden or Dresden, and the fresh fragrance of fir trees recently covered with snow in Lake Tahoe, California, and across Christmas tree lots throughout the U.S. There’s also the deep-frying goodness of Hanukkah’s citrusy scented sufganiyot doughnuts found at Israel’s open-air markets, or kitchens filled with the seaworthy smells of salt cod, shrimp and octopus all being baked, fried and sauteed for a Christmas Eve feast in Napoli.

But while many of us, including myself, will be trading our traditional holiday gatherings for Zoom parties and other online get-togethers this year, the seasonal scents that we find most comforting can still help us feel like we're on the road, even when we’re not. Although olfaction, or the sense of smell, doesn't literally transport us, it can help us tap into those cherished memories that we associate so dearly with the holiday season—especially when we combine our favorite scents with other sensory experiences.

“Our sense of smell of place is so tied to a specific context and environment, that when we catch something similar to it, we reconnect to that place where we first encountered those elements,” says olfactory artist Kate McLean , who leads public “smellwalks” through places like Staten Island and Pamplona, Spain, which she then translates into digitally designed maps. For example, a particularly warm December day coupled with the lingering scent of barbecue might bring you right back to that Christmas you spent in Sydney during college. Or a warm loaf of panettone bread fresh from the oven could call to mind Christmas Eve dinner with your nonna, who would come from Italy each year to celebrate the holidays with you and your family. “Really, it’s that combination of smell and environment,” says McLean, whether the latter comes from visual stimuli, like the falling of snow outside, or the feeling of coziness that comes from a warm kitchen, “that completes the association in your mind.”

The “Proust effect or phenomenon,” as it is called by psychiatrists and scientists, refers to how our senses can trigger an involuntary memory, much the way French writer Marcel Proust’s narrator in his masterwork Remembrance of Things Past found himself whisked away to childhood the moment he bit into a madeleine cookie. But, as Dmitry Rinberg, an associate professor at NYU Langone Health’s Neuroscience Institute who studies how olfactory information is represented in the brain, says, “The connection between smell and places is, in my opinion, still very anecdotal and without a real scientific basis.” What has been scientifically proven, says Rinberg, is the role that context plays in the perception of scent.

“Humans have innate predispositions for some odors. We almost all like the smell of roses and we don't like the smell of trash,” says Rinberg. But because olfactory is so pliable, these predispositions can also be strongly modulated, he says, by our own experiences. Take the smell of Roquefort cheese, an overtly pungent blue cheese from southern France. “Most children would turn away at the smell of Roquefort,” he says, “but if I gave that cheese to you it might be a different story.” Rinberg says it’s because as adults, we’ve likely already experienced the cheese and have what can be considered a comforting association. Just the sight of it, or its creamy taste, helps us go beyond a smell that’s simply pleasant or unpleasant. “This is where multisensory experiences come in. It's often much more difficult to place an odor without other cues,” he says. “For instance, if you have your eyes shut.” But when we see or taste Roquefort, it might bring us back to that meal we had in Paris on a January night, or an evening of tasting cheeses along the San Francisco waterfront.

This is one of the reasons that our sense of smell is seemingly on high-alert throughout the holidays, when scents are more episodic. This means that the scents occur at a certain time of day or year (unlike background smells, which are permanent), like the woodsy, refreshing scents of pine or douglas fir at a Christmas tree farm in late November, or the sweet smell of hot cocoa mingling with the scent of maple wood from a roaring fire on Christmas morning. In instances like these it’s not simply our olfactory bulbs that are kicking into high gear, but our other senses as well.

Still, once that association between scent and place is made, it can be easier to conjure. At least, that’s the idea behind Homesick Candles. Founded in 2016, this home fragrance and lifestyle brand taps into our general longing to recapture a specific moment or place in time. “This year in particular, our candles are helping to really take the edge off of missing home,” says Lauren Lamagna, the company’s director of product development. Their selection of hundreds of candle scents highlight the unique olfaction of all 50 U.S. states, various cities, countries like Canada, Mexico and Brazil, as well as a growing number of “memory” scents. “Holiday Stroll” smells of sugar plums, red currants and sandalwood, while “Latkes and Lights” has notes of baked apple, potato and sugar.

With so many travelers staying at home throughout most of 2020, Homesick Candles’ sales have more than doubled from last year, says Lamagna. In fact, one of their top sellers has been Hawaii, a candle that mixes the scents of pineapple, coconut and seashore, with sales up more than 450 percent from 2019. “I had no idea how many Hawaiian vacations were planned this year, and cancelled by the pandemic, until I took a deep dive into our reviews,” says Lamagna. Other Homesick Candle scents topping Christmas lists this holiday season include the United Kingdom, France and New York City.

Although the scent of a destination is purely subjective, Homesick tries to capture what Lamagna calls “the commonalities and experiences of each place, while also making sure that we're hitting on those nuances that the locals love and that they're going to resonate with.” Their research delves into the local flora, climate and foods of a place (for instance, the United Kingdom candle includes notes of grass, rain and toffee), and the company gets input through their social media channels and customer base.

Still, says olfactory artist Maki Ueda, it’s important to remember that the most authentic scent of a place depends entirely upon your own personal experience. Ueda, who uses a scientific approach to minimize other senses and focus on each smell’s “pure experiences,” stresses that while scents are often associated with a specific area, like the fragrant aroma of shell ginger in Okinawa, where Ueda resides, “we all have our own interpretations.”

One way to really remember those interpretations, and perhaps even revisit them in the future, says McLean, is to be consciously and actively aware while you’re experiencing them. To practice, she suggests taking a walk in your own town or city this holiday season and writing down three smells that you encounter: one that's reassuring, another that’s entirely out of place, and a third that’s anything you like. Also, sniff, in the same way that a dog might; this method of smelling increases your air flow and doubles your chances of catching anything on the breeze. Once you do catch a whiff of something, try and visual it. “Did the smell come gently wafting by light clouds or is it something that hits you like a smack in the face, meaning it's so powerful that it impacts a particular moment?” she says. “These are the kinds of questions you’ll want to ask yourself.”

If you’re going to try and recreate your favorite holiday memories through scent, McLean suggests limiting yourself to just one fragrance, like using cedar wood in a fireplace to create the scent of the outdoors in winter, or unwrapping that bar of handmade soap you purchased on a trip to Estonia. Then close your eyes and reimagine the rest. “Think about where you’d like to revisit in your mind,” says McLean, “and pick out a singular smell that reminds you of it.” From that, she says, you can create a multi-sensory experience by adding visual or audio cues, like a framed photo of your travels or a song you heard during that specific trip abroad.

For McLean, some of the most memorable scents, holiday or otherwise, are also the ones that are the most unexpected, like the time that she walked into a clothing store in Norway and was greeted with what smelled like bacon. Turns out the shop was also selling hot dog sausages inside. “It was completely unexpected,” she says, “but it’s things like this that become the markers which actually help differentiate that one particular experience from any other. That's what makes it both special, and easier to recall.”