Haiti’s History Embedded in Amber: Historians and Artists

In the fall of 2010, as co-director of the Haiti Laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Center, I helped to lead a collaborative art project carried out with Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. Out of this yearlong collaboration came a large art installation that presents and explores the history and culture of Haiti in a series of thirty-five multi-layered, backlit resin blocks. Now a permanent installation at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, the piece is unusual both in terms of the process we went through to make it and its content. In this presentation I will reflect on the experience of creating this work of art. As a historian who has primarily worked through text, working in a visual medium was both a challenge and revelation. The question of how to tell history through images, but in a non-traditional form, pushed me to think about the creation of visual meaning through the interplay of historical signs and symbols—including contemporary portraits and documents. Working with history doctoral students on the project taught me to think differently about mentoring. And, looking back on the project, I can see how my work on it directly influenced the form and content of book, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, which I wrote during the same period. This project, I will suggest, can provide inspiration for other kinds of artistic and multi-media work involving historians.