There are two conventional stories of Haitian 20th century art history. The first posits a narrative that Haitian art belongs to a school of “primitivism,” a kind of folklorist genre of art produced by untrained or what has been called within the regimes of art in the Caribbean, “institutives.” The second conventional narrative is to argue that given the 1940s relationship between Andre Breton and Haiti and the fact that in 1947 at the first UNCESCO International Art exhibition Breton made sure that works of the Haitian artist Hector Hypppolite were included within the exhibition, along with various lectures he gave in Haiti on surrealism that Haitian art is a form of Afro–Surrealism. This talk will argue against these frames and posit that there is a radical anticolonial aesthetic frame of the marvelous which produces alternative ways of grappling with Haitian art.
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