By Le Floridien Staff
The Vassar Haiti Project (VHP) seeks to put an end to the disregard for Haitian artists’ work by increasing public awareness of their work and enabling them to sell it for a profit. In order to foster great Haitian art, VHP presented the Jacquil Constant film “Haiti is a Nation of Artists,” which demonstrated the amazing potential of many Haitian artists.
According to the Haitian-American filmmaker during Q&A, this film showcases the exceptional skill of numerous Haitian artists, which offers us hope for the nation’s next artistic generations. In order to illustrate the nation’s socio-political difficulties, the documentary “Haiti is a Nation of Artists” is composed of a number of interviews with academics and Haitian artists. The process of gathering information and sitting down to have these conversations took ten years, and the director had to travel there and back to Haiti many times to finish the film. The documentary looks at how, despite Haiti’s incredibly diverse art scene, people from all over the world have historically regarded the island nation’s works of art as being of poor quality. This is merely a small part of the overall stereotypically unfavorable view of Haiti that many countries in the Global North hold. One of the interviewed artists, Saurel Louis, put it succinctly and eloquently this way: “Haiti is known for negative facts all over the world.
The goals of Constant’s film and the Vassar Haiti Project are similar in that they both encourage audiences to offer Haiti their undivided attention, care, and support. The Vassar Haiti Project buys works of art made in Haiti from galleries there and sells them to clients all around the world, enabling the artists’ creations to be seen by more people. The money made from these sales is then used to fund a number of initiatives in Haiti, including the planting of 40,000 trees there. Constant hopes that by showcasing the talents of the Haitian people through his video, more people would be motivated to support them. “These movies are like, ‘Do something in your community,'” he says, “that worry that you have about not being appreciated or deserved is unfounded”.
Constant’s conversations with the artists imply a potential shift. He claimed that change would occur in Haiti if everybody there behaved like Famille Louis. Too little has been done by the government to support Haitian art and make it possible for its people to use it as a way of self-expression. Constant hopes to aid in the creation of a Haitian art market where the government, galleries, buyers, and sellers can work together to give artists the respect and praise they so well deserve on a global scale. He said that, although the effort to establish such a market is still at the grassroots level, it is crucial for creating a culture that respects artists and demonstrates to future generations the potential that exists within a task that best fits one’s own artistic abilities.
The movie “Haiti is a Nation of Artists” appealed to the character of the Haitian people and answered emphatically “YES” to the issue of whether artists in the nation would carry on creating beautiful work even when many forces are working against them.
