Like the Diving Museum mentioned earlier, Key West's own Haitian Art Company is a gallery founded by a person who was driven all his life by the subject on display. I'm moved to write about the Gallery at Frances and Southard especially because of its likely imminent demise.
The building that houses it has been for sale for some time and one hopes the owner is greedy and asks too much and thus allows his gallery to continue for a while, at least until real estate reasserts itself and we get back on an even keel selling our property wildly to the nearest speculator and developer with deep, soulless pockets. Besides all that, the economy is floundering, tourists are in short supply this year and the owner of this place is old and getting older and one can't assign blame for his wanting to end the business.
I guess I do have to blame Graham Greene for feeding my fascination with Haiti, he wrote about the world of Papa Doc in The Comedians, the mixture of true exoticism, terror and tropical nuttiness of the island. The fascination that was born in me when I read about Toussaint L'Ouverture and his rebellion and Sans Souci, the palace in the mountains and all the rest of the stuff that is Haiti, Baron Samedi and secret ceremonies, which comes to our country in the form of janitors, and street vendors and, as it happens, Art.
The top picture on my wall is Haitian, purchased in Key West and I see the colors and the form and I wish I was there, on the docks.
I was photographing homes on Frances Street last week and I saw this other picture in the window of the gallery and I wanted it, and I showed it to my wife and she nodded and maybe we will and maybe we won't, and if we don't the colors will remain in my mind half muted like in this photo, totally unlike the painting itself, that leaps out at you as you stroll past, and sucks you in:
The gallery is just a heap of Art, stuff I love and stuff I don't and stuff that gives me the creeps and stuff that makes me laugh out loud.
And when you look at it sideways through the plate glass you see Southard Street in all its 21st century glory overlaid on the charms of a bygone era:
I want to go to Haiti, I've wanted to sail there since God knows when. I've figured a way I could take a road trip on my motorcycle there. I've studied the maps and charts, and I've dithered and traveled elsewhere instead.When we were in the Dominican Republic, the Spanish two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola that escaped French domination, we met Haitian vendors in Sosua and I was astonished they were making a living selling Art in a country where the locals could use some employment. The vendor was educated too, he spoke French (I speak absolutely no Creole, the language of the poor), and he assured me Haiti was ripe for a visit from me, but still I balk and perhaps that's part of the fascination.
We flew away from Hispaniola passing far above the border between the two countries and below I could clearly see the Monte Cristi shoals off the coast of the Dominican Republic that I had studied in charts, imaging a landfall from the Bahamas, or perhaps further west at Fort Liberte, the Haitian harbor down the coast towards Cap Haitien. When we went to Jamaica last year my wife and I both were overwhelmed by the barely suppressed sense of violent antipathy on the island, and we both have traveled all over on our own. I fear the same in Haiti, and I am ashamed of my fear and irritated by my consolation, the beautiful art that reminds me of a place less traveled, that keeps me at arm's length and taunts me and won't let my imagination go.
Of course I don't believe in Voodoo at all, or any of that jiggery-pokery. I just like the Art.
