Museums Special Section - Haiti’s Visionaries, Rising From the Rubble - NYTimes.com

Museums Special Section - Haiti’s Visionaries, Rising From the Rubble - NYTimes.com:

a reminder that art is something fundamentally human, a way of making sense when nothing does, necessary even in times of catastrophe...



"A funky downtown section of Port-au-Prince called the Grand Rue was the scene, in December, of a first-time art event called the “Ghetto Biennial.” Based on international models but operating on a tiny budget, it brought in a few artists from abroad but was basically a showcase for a collective of Haitian sculptors who call themselves Atis Rezistans. The group’s three senior members — Andr�Eug�ne, Jean H�rard Celeur and Frantz Jacques, known as Guyodo — work together in the Grand Rue, in a warren of cinderblock car-repair shops that supply the material for their art: rusted chassis, steering wheels, hubcaps, broken crankshafts, cast-off oil filters. With the help of young assistants, they turn this industrial junk into demonic doomsday figures with giant phalluses and gargoylish bodies topped by plastic doll heads or human skulls."