by Sue Eisenfeld
When I arrived at the exhibit, “Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti,” in Washington DC, the National Gallery of Art’s first-ever collection and exhibition of Haitian art in its 88-year history, I came with an expectation —
Revolution.
It was only October 2024, an eon ago. Biden was still president. But before the pandemic, I had toured the sites of the Nat Turner Revolt in southeastern Virginia—the dull greys and beiges of fallow peanut fields and chopped-down cotton stalks blanketing the landscape. A descendant of one of the white enslavers who survived the slave revolt showed us where everything had happened: the scraggly woods where enslaved men had gathered to plan, the empty lots where they once had cached weapons and ammunition, the moldering houses of murder sites where they used the desperate measures available to them to try to gain their freedom.
It was the beginning of an obsession.
Surely, I assumed as I walked through the bright halls of the East Wing, the modern folk art by renowned Haitian painters at the National Gallery would have some focus on, or at least include depictions of, the greatest slave revolt of all time: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) — the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world. Men and women forced to work on 8,000 plantations rose up against their French enslavers and then freed the country of its colonizers to become the second independent nation in the Americas after the United States. The museum that ranks among the largest and most visited in the United States and that had been working for four years to “diversify the stories we tell” hand selected the art from two American couples who donated it.
Alas, none of the art selected for the permanent collection featured anything about the revolution: no military officers in uniform or on horseback, no blood, no weapons, no landscapes of war. I found only one portrait on loan for the temporary exhibit, created by an American artist rather than a Haitian one: a 1986 silkscreen, General Toussaint L’Ouverture, by Jacob Lawrence. Indeed, the museum’s art label describes the general in the painting as a “stately military officer,” and he is depicted in a rust and gold uniform, with locks of grey hair and two tones of chocolate skin against a forest green background. The label indicates that the piece was “inspired by Haiti’s revolutionary past” and celebrates “the spirit of resistance in Haiti and throughout the Black Diaspora.”
But so much was left unsaid.
Though the exhibit did name L’Ouverture as “the leader of the Haitian Revolution” and referred to Haiti as “the world’s first Black republic when the Haitian people won independence from France in 1804,” nothing pointed out an essential biographical detail: Toussaint L’Ouverture was a formerly enslaved equestrian and coachman who became the leader and general who helped overthrow the iron grip of the island’s 32,000 enslavers and formed a new government, becoming governor-general.
If all you knew about Haiti was its catastrophic earthquakes, its “shithole country” moniker, and the claim that Haitian Americans eat cats and dogs, you might not be excited about Haiti. But Haiti has a story worth knowing: Prior to the Haitian Revolution, the French colony was the most prosperous on earth and the world’s top producer of sugar and coffee, its wealth gained from the forced labor of 500,000 people. But once the Black residents won the country for themselves, the white sugar-buying nations of the world shunned the country for decades, not wanting to inspire their own countries’ slave revolts, nor to trade with a Black revolutionary government. On top of that, in what one scholar calls “the greatest heist in history,” France demanded the new, struggling nation pay reparations to former French enslavers, creating a debt that took 122 years to pay off. Haiti’s economy plunged into a downward spiral from which it has never recovered.
Part of the American story of Haiti is that, just as white enslavers in the United States had feared, L’Ouverture’s goal of ending slavery did inspire enslaved people here to lead rebellions against their captors, too, in small and large revolutions all over the South. Charles Deslondes, one of the enslaved leaders of the 1811 German Coast Uprising near New Orleans, amassed 500 enslaved people to revolt, based on L’Ouverture’s inspiration. Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina, modeled his 1822 rebellion of free and enslaved Blacks after L’Ouverture’s and planned to lead his hundreds (if not thousands) of followers to Haiti after the insurrection. L’Ouverture also put ideas into the mind of Nat Turner, who had been enslaved for 31 years when he organized more than 70 free and enslaved Blacks to rebel in Viginia in 1831.
I left the Haitian exhibit disappointed. Then I started visiting other museums in and around the nation’s capital and poking around on their websites to see whether or how other slave revolts have been depicted in art. My unscientific survey found that only Nat Turner’s revolt is acknowledged in art currently on view. Christopher Myers’ 2022 tapestry The Grim Work of Death is a colorful fabric artwork of several enslaved people engaged in the action of insurrection, with horses, weapons, and blood, and it hangs in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The other hundreds of revolts, rebellions, insurrections, and conspiracies — all the ones most of us never heard of: the New York Slave Revolt of 1712; the Stono Rebellion of 1739 near Charleston; Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800 in Richmond, Virginia; the Chatham Slave Revolt in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1805 — appear to be unvisualized in art (though many are acknowledged at National Park Service sites, as National Historic Landmarks, and on the National Register of Historic Places).
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At the root of my fascination with and respect for these slave revolt leaders is this: While kidnapped people’s stolen labor was yielding unimaginable riches for white enslavers and building the foundation of our country’s (and Haiti’s) wealth and infrastructure, and while these individuals were subject to whipping, rape, and torture, some among them rose up to become the generals of their time, demonstrating deep wisdom; leadership; and intuitive, multi-faceted military strategy and ingenuity—as if they had studied Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, from 500 B.C.E.
Withstanding ghastly acts like being roasted alive over a fire, or having limbs, ears, or genitals mutilated, or being forced to wear an iron collar that does not permit sleep, burnt with wax or boiling cane sugar, buried up to their necks and smeared with sugar, or forced to eat their own excrement, many people engaged in acts of everyday rebellion, such as going on hunger strikes, feigning illness, sabotaging tools, and sometimes escaping. Others acquired the ammunition, horses, and recruits needed to launch well-planned revolts.
They customized tools and weapons like axes and cane knives. They engaged in secret communications and codes, tapped into geographic and topographic knowledge, cultivated trust with key white people, and mastered organizational and administrative details like time discipline and leadership. Their cultural awareness of and fluency with different classes of whites, along with other communications channels like Black waterman who traveled away from plantations, created an information superhighway to keep them informed of local, national, and international news and events.
Characteristics like patience and timing and keen observation of their enslavers’ behavior and weaknesses, plus assessments of weather and conditions, allowed them to optimize strategic moments to act. Some of these enslaved leaders also possessed specialized skills like reading and speaking numerous languages. Nearly all had developed physical strength and were adept in skills like carpentry and horsemanship they had developed as laborers.
The Jacob Lawrence silkscreen print of General Toussaint L’Ouverture was not meant to be the star of the show at the National Gallery. But I became fascinated with it, given its distinction as the only representative of the revolution in the show and that fact that Lawrence, a Black American artist, clearly revered the general. It is, I learned, one of a 15-image series Lawrence made and reproduced in the 1980s and 1990s, based on a series of 41 original tempera paintings he created in the 1930s, both series called “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture,” depicting L’Ouverture’s childhood, revolt planning, and battle action. Many of our nation’s galleries had been amassing Lawrence’s L’Ouvertures for years.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture possesses all 15 images of the L’Ouverture print series, and three of them are on display right now. The National Gallery of Art owns four. The nearby Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia, unveiled another set of the 15 prints in its “Jacob Lawrence: 3 Series of Prints” exhibition that runs through August.
What’s more, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s Archives Center holds a Toussaint Louverture Collection that contains seven portraits of the man by unknown artists. In the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection, but not on view, is the American painter William H. Johnson’s ca. 1945 Toussaint l’Ouverture, Haiti, an oil painting on paperboard (as well as his Nat Turner, also ca. 1945, oil on paperboard); and Ousame Sow’s 1989 sculpture, Toussant Louverture la vieille esclave, is part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.
Looking back, it’s almost as of the National Gallery knew what was coming.
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I wanted to know more about Haitian art, so I went to visit one of the donors of nearly half the artworks in the new collection. John Fox Sullivan, 82, is the former publisher at large for the Atlantic Media Company and a two-term former mayor of “Little Washington,” Virginia, an 84-person town 90 minutes outside of DC, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As it happens, over the last 12 years, I have been a weekender at a cabin just three miles outside of Little Washington and have been a visitor throughout the surrounding Rappahannock County for more than 30 years. Facebook let me know that Sullivan and I have four friends in common, so I decided to contact him.
“Some people call it folk art, primitive, self-taught, indigenous, innocent,” Sullivan said of the Haitian art he and his late wife Beverly began collecting in 1977, scoffing at those terms. “I find it distinctive. It’s vibrant, it’s colorful, it’s extraordinary.” He explained that many of the most renowned Haitian artists were not formally trained. “Some of the finest painters were some guy’s driver,” he said of their lot in life.
Sullivan mentions somewhat bashfully that their collection, amassed over 50 years, is “what some people consider the largest and finest collection” of Haitian art in the world. In fact, their home stands as a museum unto itself, with den, living room, kitchen, hallway, and bathroom packed with dozens of paintings, plus some sequined empty rum bottles and iron sculptures. Like the National Gallery exhibit, many paintings in his home depict market scenes, nature and animals, community gatherings, religious ceremonies, including church and vodou, weddings, funerals, and other aspects of everyday life, with exaggerated portrayals of people and landscapes using irony, humor, and symbols. Unlike at the National Gallery, however, several of the artworks depict the revolutionaries: Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Sabes Petion, François Capois, Henri Christophe, and others depict generic military figures named for Haitian vodou spirits, together comprising 10 percent of the collection. The National Gallery could have picked any of them.
“Haitians are the only people who threw the white [people] out,” Sullivan said. “They threw out the colonists, they overthrew their enslavers.” The spirit of this revolution “is innate” in all of them.
Matt Dunn, a board member of the Haitian Art Society whose collection in DC contains about 15 percent revolutionaries, said he is “thrilled” that the Haitian collection is at the National Gallery, but he found the lack of representation of the Haitian Revolution “surprising.”
“The exhibit tells a story, but it’s not the best story. The Haitian Revolution is more the story,” he told me before the show closed. “So much of Haitian art portrays the revolution, heroes of the revolution…It’s part of the culture, and it’s meaningful to the artists.”
After the inauguration, after the National Gallery of Art closed its office of belonging and inclusion and then the Smithsonian Institution did the same as a result of an executive order calling such initiatives “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”; and after a March executive order cast a shadow over the Smithsonian’s whole 21-facility enterprise of museums, libraries, research centers, and zoos by prohibiting federal money to be spent on exhibitions or programs that fall outside the administration’s new and narrow ideology, I came across an African proverb: Until the lion writes his own story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
This is the story of the lion! The National Gallery’s act of placing Haitian art in its permanent collection enshrined that art and the people who made it to the status of “world class.” Pre-emptively defiant, I realized, it hung the L’Ouverture (a name that means “the opening” in French) to imbue the exhibit with the context that all modern Haitian art, creativity, and lifeforce stems from Haiti’s original liberation. Those artworks—the rich and nuanced depictions of life, culture, and the world through Haitians’ eyes—represent the inheritance of any enslaved revolt leader’s wildest dream: free bodies, free minds, unleashing the rainbow spectrum of infinite possibility.
Sue Eisenfeld’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Forward, Smithsonian, Civil War Times, and nearly every literary journal in the Washington, DC area, including Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Little Patuxent Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Full Bleed, After the Art, Gargoyle (forthcoming), and many other publications. Her essays have been listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays. She is the author of two books of creative nonfiction and teaches in the Johns Hopkins University M.A. in Science Writing program. www.sueeisenfeld.com
After the Art 