Join Haiti Cultural Exchange for the opening of Sacred Banners of Haitian Vodou on Thursday, January 30 at the HCX Gallery. This exhibition will then be on view until Sunday, February 23.
Opening: January 30, 2025
On View: Thursday, January 30 – Sunday, February 23, 2025
Thursday – Sunday, 1-6pm
Wednesday by appointment.
Inspired by 18th and 19th century French church ornaments and army flags, the Haitian banners started being produced to decorate altars and to be carried around in dancing processions in Vodou Temples. This show includes works by numerous Temples and flag makers, expressing various artistic styles and beading techniques.
Curated by Axelle Liautaud
Artists featured:
- Sius Jean
- Clotaire Bazile
- Maxon Scylla
- Mireille Delice
- Jean Baptiste Jean Joseph
- Myrlande Constant
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Axelle Liautaud
Axelle Liautaud is a Haitian art historian and curator. She is also a designer who works with artists and craftsmen to create unique items. For more than 30 years, she has worked to promote Haitian art and crafts in Europe and the United States. Axelle started collecting Vodou Flags in the 1980s and was the first to introduce Haitian Flags to the international market. With Virgil Young, she organized a collection of beaded artwork in collaboration with great American artists such as Keith Haring, Alison Saar and others. She has collaborated with many museums on exhibitions of Haitian art—most notably, the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles for The Sacred Art of Vodou (1995) which traveled to major museums, including The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, The Museum of Natural History, NY, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Axelle has been the curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Naive Art in Paris (Halles St. Pierre) (1988), as well as the Organization of American States in Washington (1999), and the Bass Museum in Miami for the Allegories of Haitian Art exhibition, where the filmmaker Jonathan Demme’s collection was put on display (2006).
Axelle has been a member of Le Centre d’Art’s Board of Directors since 1997 and became Acting President following the 2010 earthquake, the death of Francine Murat, and the collapse of the Centre’s building. After the earthquake, she led efforts to rescue the collections from the rubble, including 4,000 paintings, more than 1,000 sculptures, 500 works on paper, and the largest art and cultural archives in Haiti. In collaboration with the Smithsonian Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, the art and documents were preserved and eventually returned to the Centre d’Art. As president of the Centre, she organized the Piasa Art Auction in Paris in 2017 and curated the Jasmin Joseph show that opened in Port-au-Prince in 2016 which traveled to various museums in France. Axelle stepped down from her role as President at Le Centre d’Art in 2021.