Tampa Museum of Art

The occupation of the Republic of Haiti by the US in the early part of the 20th-century lasted for more than three decades. By the time they left in the 1930s, after being mired in countless rebellions by the Haitian peasantry and a stiff opposition across the globe, Americans at home were well aware of the island to their south. Some of the cultural particularities of that nation piqued Hollywood’s interest and they did not miss on the salacious potential those unfamiliar customs could have on the public. Movies such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943) started a trend that to this day we cannot see its end, such as the international popularity of the television series The Walking Dead. Despite the cultural appropriation and misinterpretations of Haiti’s mystical traditions, the Caribbean Island captured the globe’s attention.

The opening of the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in 1944 by an American conscientious objector and a handful of Haitian intellectuals attracted artists from all walks of life to its galleries and open air studios. Artists streamed to the Centre from Haiti’s urban and rural communities and caused an immediate sensation in the art world. Presented at first as intuitive and naïve, what the artists proposed was in fact their vision of their world as they lived and saw it. After three centuries as slave labor in sugar plantations in the French colony of St. Domingue, and after a hard won freedom where they fought the most advanced army of its day—the French Army under Napoleon, and the scorn this created in most advanced nations, they were at last free to try to recollect their memories. The paintings on view in this exhibition, created between the 1950s and 1990s, demonstrate how Haitians finally felt liberated in their ability to reconstruct what they had lost or had been forbidden for so long—to honor their gods, spirituality, and sacred traditions. Through the prism of slavery and its hardships, their visions offered something new if not fantastic.

All of this did attract attention and for a time Haiti was visited by many tourists, amongst them art enthusiasts who became passionate collectors. Their connoisseurship and support of Haitian art has benefitted the permanent collection of the Tampa Museum of Art, who now holds one the most formidable holdings of Haitian art in the US. The fact the Museum has in its holdings such a large number of excellent works of art from their neighbor to the south enables visitors, as well as the many transplanted Haitians in the region, to grasp and admire a complex history through art and the spirit of Haiti.

A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections is presented in conjunction with Reframing Haitian Art: The Arthur Albrecht Collection and curated by Edouard Duval Carrié, guest curator.

A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections and Reframing Haitian Art: The Arthur Albrecht Collection in the adjacent gallery present luminary artists frequenting the Centre d’Art since in its beginnings in the late 1940s, as well as second- and third-generation artists of the organization. Even though many of them are not strictly affiliated with the Centre, most had their beginnings there and moved onward. Collectors traveling to Haiti not only visited the Centre but other art galleries that sprung up in Port-au-Prince. A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections highlights two collections acquired over a similar period yet housed on opposite coasts of the US.

The Arthur Albrecht Collection, San Francisco, California

In 2022, the Arthur Albrecht Revocable Trust gifted the Tampa Museum of Art a collection of 20th-century masterworks by Haitian artists. The Albrecht Collection, comprised of 89 paintings and sculptures, and 55 pieces of related support materials, is one of the most esteemed collections of modern Haitian art and has never been on view to the public until today. Arthur Albrecht (1927–2018) was an avid collector with a deep love for Haiti. He lived with this collection in his home on San Francisco’s famed Lombard Street. Although much of his connection to Haiti and its artists is unknown, his collecting interests focused primarily on the first- and second-generation artists associated with the Centre d’Art, Haiti’s premier art school and visual art center. The collection had not left private hands until now and the paintings and sculptures were in need of care and conservation. With grant funds from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the Museum was able to clean and restore the collection nearly to the objects’ original condition. As seen in this gallery, conservation care revealed the pristine quality of line, form, and color that heralds this group as master artists.

The Kay and Roderick Heller Collection, Tampa, Florida and Franklin, Tennessee

Kay Culbreath Heller has Haiti in her heart. Her involvement with the island started when she worked at Hospital Bon Samaritain with Dr. William Hodges and his family in the remote small town of Limbé in northern Haiti. The art of Haiti caught her eye and imagination, and she once wrote, “Nothing prepared me for the life and vitality of Haiti.” With Beverly Sullivan of Washington, Kay found ways to promote the artists through large fundraisers and art sales stateside benefitting Haitian medical, arts, and humanitarian organizations. In 2000, Kay co-curated the first exhibition of Haitian art at the Tampa Museum of Art entitled Island Delights: The Spirit and Passion of Haitian Art.

This passion for Haiti extended to Roderick Heller, a distinguished lawyer and preservationist from Washington, DC who has employed his academic rigor to an all-encompassing project on Haiti’s art. He is assembling a catalogue raisonné of his favorite Haitian artist, Rigaud Benoit, one of the initial group of artists who joined the Centre in its early days. This is not an easy task as works of art by this artist and others are today scattered all over the world. The Hellers’ goal through international research is to help illuminate the artistic legacy and creativity of Haiti and its people.

Funds for the conservation of the Arthur Albrecht Collection were generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project

A celebrated artist, Garry Winogrand transformed the genre of street photography in the 1960s. With his Leica camera in hand, he captured the movements, both hurried and introspective, and raw emotions of his subjects. Initially published as a monograph, the portfolio Women are Beautiful (1975) represents Winogrand’s most significant project. Comprised of 85 photographs, the series features women engaged a range of ordinary activities –walking across the street, enjoying a conversation, and dancing in a crowd. Some of the photos are direct, with the woman walking straight towards Winogrand’s lens, while others reveal the photographer observing quiet moments of solitude.

In the early 1980s, the Tampa Museum of Art established photography—with an emphasis on work created after 1970—as a primary collecting area. The collection now comprises more than 950 photographs and demonstrates how the medium evolved throughout the 20th-century. TMA’s photography collection includes works by John Baldessari, James Casebere, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the candid photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andy Warhol, and Winogrand.

This exhibition is sponsored by David Hall and Judy Tampa

Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic represents the first survey of Pepe Mar’s art and highlights 15-years of the artist’s practice, from 2006 to 2023. Presented as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the exhibition itself has been conceptualized as an immersive artwork with the objects on view complemented by the artist’s vibrant fabric walls, plush poufs for sitting, and lush orange carpet. Each work is uniquely different yet incorporates Mar’s signature materials—such as paper cut-outs from magazines, catalogues, and books, decorative textile motifs, clay vessels and figurines, as well as found objects discovered by the artist in shops and thrift stores throughout the world.

Mar opens the exhibition with a sculpture garden and introduces the figure “Paprika,” the artist’s alter ego. Paprika anchors Mar’s work and represents the personal and the Other, as well as the fusion of medium and object. Loosely chronological, Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic is organized by concepts and processes present in Mar’s oeuvre: Assemblage, Revival and Mythologies, Face-Off, and Fabric Paintings. Assemblage examines personal and social identities as well as Queer aesthetics. Revival and Mythologies explores the artist as collector and ethnographer. In this section, the magnum opus The Cabinet of Dr. Mar highlights visual traditions and personal lore. The grid of collages entitled Face-Off illustrates Mar’s approach to portraiture, masking, and explorations of self. Fabric Paintings serve as an archive of the artist’s past works with sculptures, assemblages, and photographs transformed into colorful textiles.

Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic features 60 works of art from public and private collections across the United States, including Burning Up, a collage sculpture acquired by the Tampa Museum of Art in 2019 that served as the inspiration for this survey exhibition. The title of the exhibition pays homage to the 1979 exhibition of Mexican master painter Rufino Tamayo entitled Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, organized by the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York City. While the works on view highlight Mar’s influences—art history, Mexican artifacts and architecture, fashion, science fiction, and pop culture—the exhibition also speaks to the artist’s biography. Living between the border of the US and Mexico, and later establishing roots in Miami, Florida, the art on view reveals the connections between self and site, and material as metaphor. As seen in Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic, the works from the past 15 years reflect the evolution of an artist, as well as a transformative return to his creative roots.

The accompanying catalogue Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic will be published in Fall 2023.

Born in 1977 in Reynosa, Mexico, close to the Mexico/United States border, Pepe Mar spent his childhood living between two cultures. His family moved to Brownsville, Texas during Mar’s teenage years and he started making art in his family’s garage. As a young artist, he purchased inexpensive materials such as feathers and beads from craft stores such as Michael’s. He received his BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and earned his MFA from Florida International University in Miami.

Mar has received several prominent grants, including an Ellies Award from Oolite Arts in 2020 and 2018. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2022); Frost Art Museum at FIU (2020), Miami, FL; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); and Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2018). In Fall 2023, a solo exhibition of Mar’s work will be presented at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY. Mar is represented by David Castillo. The artist lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Supported in part by:

Haiti emerged as a sovereign state after a massive slave rebellion overturned the established order in a dramatic and violent revolution. Since 1804, the island nation has embarked in continual attempts at self-rule but many of these efforts proved unsuccessful, never fulfilling the dreams of a better life cherished by the former enslaved. France, the former colonial power ousted by the rebellion and bitter at the loss of her crown jewel, made sure itself and its allies never gave the first Black republic a fair chance to compete fairly in the concert of nations. The successive governments of Haiti could not garner enough economic clout to make the transfer of impoverished and destitute slaves into a citizenry that could muster and foster a stable, progressive society. All in all, the former slaves were left mostly to their own devices when it came to nation building. Forming an identity needed and required with their new freedoms remained unresolved for centuries. Today, they remain in that constant quest for social cohesion but Haitians noteworthy accomplishments in the field of visual art helped define its national character. 

Contrary to most of its neighbors in the Caribbean archipelago, one can say that Haiti’s visual culture emanates from its majority working class rather than from a well-tutored elite or directed from government led cultural initiatives.  Early travelers’ accounts to the island revealed cultural flourishes peculiar and distinct from Haiti’s neighbors. Their narratives perceived the Black republic as a place of wonder. One could sense it in the reports detailed in Eugène Aubin’s In Haiti: Planters of Yesteryears, Negroes of Today (1910) or William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island (1929). Published in the early 20^th-century, both books featured extensive photographic coverage of the island nation but revealed unsympathetic and unabashedly racist opinions of Haiti. However, the publications’ images included ornate wall paintings unique to the rural habitats and sacred sites of Vodou temples, which were profusely decorated inside and outside. These photographs provided a glimpse of what would become decades later, a “discovery” of Haiti’s creative legacy. 

In 1944, Haitian intellectuals collaborated with Dewitt Peters, an American conscientious objector, to found the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. The institution provided access to art to all strata of Haitian society. Artists gravitated to the Centre d’Art and what they brought with them was, though very far from any academia, a varied, fresh, and startling artistic expression. Each artist depicted a world they envisioned or observed in their own way. At the time the devotional practice of Vaudo was prohibited yet the artists creatively revealed the outlawed spirits and lwas (Vodou deities) to the world. The artists also depicted a way of life—simple and ordered—as probably more a wish than everyday circumstances. The bucolic aspect of these works likely triggered the term “naïve” as an explanation of Haiti’s art yet it was anything but simple. The art served as a form of protest in that artists pointed out at what Haitian’s expected, wanted, and deserved, and not what they had.  Learn more from guest curator, Edouard Duval-Carrié:

This exhibition aims to reframe the context of modern Haitian art. The paintings in this gallery, all masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection, attest to the unique and complex history of Haiti and its cultural legacy. Displayed at different heights yet in dialogue with each other, this installation metaphorically represents the artists’ ideas and ideals. Spiritual figures hover above mortals, as seen in works by André Pierre and Robert Saint Brice. Paintings by the Obin Family, Riguad Benoit, and Salnave Philippe-Auguste hang at a height that envelops the viewer rather than serve as a passive encounter with the artists’ world. The Albrecht Collection provides an overview of the production of art from an island nation, that despite adversity and strife, has and continues to strive in its creative practices.  

Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection was curated by Edouard Duval Carrié, guest curator. 

Funds for the conservation of the Arthur Albrecht Collection were generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project.