USCBS News

Episcopal News Service - By Mary Frances Schjonberg, May 27, 2010

http://www.episcopal-life.org/79425_122550_ENG_HTM.htm

Some of the world-famous murals that adorned the walls of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti’s Holy Trinity cathedral prior to the Jan. 12 earthquake, and gave Haitians of all faiths a vision of their place in the stories of the Bible, could be preserved and possibly even restored.

That’s the assessment of a team of art experts who have surveyed artworks and other cultural artifacts that were damaged in the magnitiude-7 quake. However, they said, decisions about the murals’ fate need to be made soon.

“The murals are running out of time,” said Corine Wegener, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which is dedicated to the protection of cultural property worldwide during armed conflict. A retired Army officer, she was posted to Iraq just after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum.

“They’re really, really at risk and there are going to have to be some decisions in order for us to move forward,” Wegner said of the murals. “What nobody wants to have happen is that while we are making these decisions, a small aftershock [occurs] and they’re gone.”

Richard Kurin, Smithsonian Institution undersecretary for history, art and culture, echoed those concerns. “If we leave them in their current state, they will indeed suffer increasingly more damage,” he said. “They are not going to last for a very long time.”

Episcopal Diocese of Haiti Bishop Jean Zaché told ENS by phone from Haiti May 27 that “it is so important that we keep them and preserve them, so even though we will rebuild the cathedral where it was” the question is, indeed, how to protect the remaining murals in the meantime. Duracin said he envisions the survivors being incorporated into a new cathedral.

“When we have the design of the plan of the [new] cathedral, we will protect them,” Duracin said. Meanwhile, he said, he believes the murals can stay in place due to work that has already occurred to begin to stabilize them.

Duracin hopes to convene a meeting in Port-au-Prince soon to discuss rebuilding plans with representatives of the many groups that cherish the cathedral and are eager to help in its rebuilding. One of those representatives is Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe Bishop Pierre Whalon, whom Duracin asked earlier this year to help guide those efforts. Duracin said that an architectural firm is already helping the diocese in the planning process.

“It is the will of Haitian people to rebuild the cathedral because the cathedral has been for us our mother church here in Haiti,” he said.

The cathedral is still operating on the site, albeit without walls in what Duracin calls the “open-air cathedral.” It consists of plastic sheeting stretched over a frame of two-by-fours that shelters some pews rescued from the cathedral ruins.

The diocese will celebrate Trinity Sunday at the site on May 30 and take up its second diocesan-wide offering for the rebuilding effort.

“That will be our second symbolic but very important effort to rebuild the cathedral,” he said.

The first offering, collected during the diocese’s April 6-8 synod meeting, netted $6,000.

Kurin, who returned from Haiti on May 25 after negotiating a cultural-heritage recovery plan with Haitian government officials, told ENS that he had not seen the Holy Trinity murals prior to the earthquake, despite having been in Port-au-Prince many times.

“It was incredibly striking and sad and in some ways strangely uplifting to see those murals in their current state,” he said. “When you see the ruins of those walls and the murals still standing, they are standing there proudly amidst the destruction.”

Kurin said he was also struck by what he called the “Haitization” of biblical stories portrayed in the murals. “In that fact, there’s a respect for the people of Haiti in those murals … the art of those murals incorporates Haitians in that story and that’s very moving,” he said. “Those murals represent a coming together of different cultural traditions and making them particularly and especially Haitian. They’re unique; they’re beautiful.”

Kurin and others hoped to include the murals in the Smithsonian’s Haiti Cultural Recovery Project. The project will operate in a 7,500-square-foot, three-story air-conditioned building in Port-au-Prince that once housed the United Nations Development Programme, according to a Smithsonian news release. It will be a place where objects retrieved from the rubble can be assessed, conserved and stored. Haitians will be trained to take over the conservation effort in a few years.
 
The effort is being conducted in partnership with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities with assistance from three U.S. federal agencies: National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additional money is coming from the Broadway League.

Both Kurin and Wegener said that the cathedral murals’ importance reaches far beyond the diocese.

“Of all the Haitians I’ve spoken to about some of the most at-risk and most-important cultural heritage, without exception the Holy Trinity murals are mentioned time and time again as such a critical part of Haiti’s cultural identity and heritage,” Wegener said.
“Whether you’re Episcopal or not, everybody realizes that that was such an important moment in the development of Haitian art and that those have to be preserved if we can do it.”

Holy Trinity was established in Port-au-Prince on Pentecost, May 25, 1863. Its church building has since been destroyed six times, often by fire and once by an earthquake in the 1920s. The paintings, completed in 1950-51, portrayed biblical stories in Haitian motifs and were crafted by some of the best-known Haitian painters of the 20th century.

“It has been said that Bishop [Alfred] Voegli had his Bible in his hand with the painters and he explained the Bible to them and asked them to how to put the Bible in the Haitian context,” Duracin told ENS. To do so meant that elements of Voodoo, so pervasive in Haitian culture, were included, and Voegli was severely criticized at the time.

“Many people had left the church because they could not understand that,” he said. It took years for people to realize the value of the murals, he added.

Some progress has been made toward stabilizing the murals in the ruins, according to Kurin, Wegener and Susan Blakney, an art conservator from Skaneateles, New York, who trained in emergency conservation efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

Wegener said that during her first visit to the site in early March, the murals were free-standing and exposed to the elements. By her return in late March, she said, Haitian artist and architect Patrick Vilaire had purchased materials and erected scaffolding around some of the murals and draped some of the remaining walls.

“The murals right now are very fragmented. There was one mural that was very tightly buttoned up with a blue tarp. I climbed up to look at it, but they had closed it up so tightly that I couldn’t even peek in,” Susan Blakney told ENS, describing her early May visit to the cathedral with the Smithsonian team.

“What we’ve got now is fragments” of varying sizes, Blakney said, ranging from the relatively intact Baptism of Christ and Last Supper murals to more roughly damaged murals to piles of rubble. Parts of some of the murals, which are painted on an approximately one-inch thick coating that had been applied over rough walls “have already started to delaminate or shear” from the walls, she said.

However, she added, “what’s there could be saved” and there are many options for that work.

The three conservators said that the walls and their murals could remain in place, possibly with a shelter built around them in which on-going conservation and/or restoration work could be done. They could be removed, requiring a not-impossible but very complicated effort that would combine engineering with art conservation. They could then be taken offsite for additional work.

Part of the decision, they said, depends on whether the diocese wants to restore the murals to their pre-Jan. 12 state, preserve the murals in their current state as relics of the quake, forego any work with an eye to creating new murals in a new cathedral building or consider some combination of those choices.

“We have to have those decisions from them before we can go forward,” Wegener said.

Even at a time when Haiti is still struggling to house and feed earthquake survivors in the face of the oncoming hurricane season, Kurin said efforts such as the Smithsonian’s project is humanitarian work.

“Culture feeds the soul,” he said. “Things that stir and inspire the soul are part of being human.”

– The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is a national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service and Episcopal News Monthly editor.

USCBS President Corine Wegener, American Institute for Conservation Cultural Emergency Response Team members Susan Blakney and Vicki Lee, and Smithsonian Institution conservator Hugh Shockey team up in Haiti! 

Kate Taylor, New York Times, May 11, 2010 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Susan Blakney, a paintings conservator from New York, scrambled up a mound of rubble left by the collapse of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral here, searching for small shards of the cathedral’s murals.

The cathedral is a cherished part of this country’s cultural heritage and most of its murals were destroyed in the earthquake that struck here in January. Two from the north transept, though, one depicting the Last Supper and the other the baptism of Christ, remain largely intact.

“It looks like there are some chunks underneath here,” Ms. Blakney, 62, yelled to colleagues working with her last Thursday in an effort to save thousands of works of art damaged in the quake.

The rescue is being organized by the Smithsonian Institution, which is to open a center here in June where American conservators will work side-by-side with Haitian staff members to repair torn paintings, shattered sculptures and other works pulled from the rubble of museums and churches.

Haitian artists and cultural professionals have been conducting informal salvage operations for the past four months. But the Americans are bringing conservation expertise — there are few if any professionally trained art conservators in Haiti — and special equipment, much of it paid for by private money.

The initiative, in its swiftness, its close collaboration with a foreign government and its combination of private and government financing, represents a new model of American cultural diplomacy, one that organizers believe stands in stark contrast to the apathy Americans were accused of exhibiting during the looting of Iraqi artistic treasures in 2003.

“Mistakes have been made in the past, in times of great tragedy or upheaval, by not protecting and prioritizing a country’s cultural heritage,” said Rachel Goslins, the executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which has been involved in finding money for the project. “I think this is a huge opportunity for us to say, ‘We get it.’ ”

The initial financing is coming from three federal agencies and the Broadway League, the trade group for theater owners and producers. Smithsonian officials say the project will cost $2 million to $3 million over the next year and a half, after which the center is expected to be turned over to the Haitian government.

Ms. Blakney traveled here last week with two other conservators, a museum curator, and a group of engineers and planning experts from the Smithsonian. The conservators’ task was to assess precisely what kinds of damage the art had sustained, not just from the earthquake but from subsequent exposure to rain and sun and from improper storage both before and after the quake. Based on that information, they will decide what specialized equipment that they, or whoever the Smithsonian ends up sending to work at the center, will need.

Restoring the most compromised art will not be a job for beginners. If the Episcopal Church decides to save the surviving murals from Holy Trinity, which were painted in the early 1950s by some of Haiti’s most famous artists, they will probably need to be removed from the damaged building — a feat of engineering as much as conservation that would involve gluing a piece of fabric to the face of each mural and attaching the mural to a secondary support structure of plywood or steel before chiseling it away from the wall.

In her search through the rubble, Ms. Blakney found some small pieces of painted concrete that have now been brought to the Smithsonian for an analysis that will help to determine the right adhesive to use.

The American conservators will spend part of their time training Haitians in conservation, in preparation for turning the laboratory over to them.

The rescue operation came together largely because of the efforts of Corine Wegener, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a retired Army major who served in Iraq shortly after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, and Richard Kurin, the under secretary for history, art and culture at the Smithsonian Institution. Three weeks after the earthquake, Ms. Wegener convened a meeting of art professionals and State Department officials in Washington about how to provide cultural assistance, and invited Mr. Kurin, who already had ties to Haiti from organizing programs on Haitian art and culture for the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival in 2004.

Ms. Wegener, who also made the trip last week, said she had been horrified by what had happened at the Iraqi National Museum, where she worked as a liaison between staff members and American officials during her deployment. “It was so disturbing for me as a museum professional to see the staff so completely in shock,” she said. “How would I feel if I came to work one day and found 15,000 objects had been looted?” She was determined not to see history repeat itself in Haiti, she said, and believed that the sooner conservators arrived on the ground, the more artworks could be saved.

Mr. Kurin conveyed the need for help to Ms. Goslins of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a group that includes the heads of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as well-connected art patrons like the Broadway producer Margo Lion. The three agencies ended up committing $30,000 each, while the Broadway League, of which Ms. Lion is a member, contributed $276,000.

As for the rest of the money that’s needed, Ms. Goslins expressed confidence that it would materialize once the center was operating.

“We’ve been having conversations with both the federal and the private sector about further support,” Ms. Goslins said, “and I’m optimistic that once we get through the initial urgent phase of getting this up and running, we’ll be able to see the project through.”

The conservators and Ms. Wegener spent four days here, visiting museums, churches and libraries, accompanied by Olsen Jean Julien, a former minister of culture and communication, who is acting as an intermediary between the Smithsonian and the Haitian government.

They visited the ruins of the Musée d’Art Nader, a private museum that before the earthquake housed 12,000 paintings and sculptures by 20th-century Haitian masters like Hector Hyppolite and Préfète Duffaut, thousands of which were either destroyed or badly damaged when the museum collapsed. They also saw what was left of the Centre d’Art, a workshop where many of those artists trained in the 1940s and 1950s, which also collapsed. In the weeks after the earthquake, volunteers pulled thousands of paintings from the wreckage, which were stashed inside two storage containers parked in the sun in front of the ruined building.

Some of the Haitian officials and cultural professionals with whom the group met were hearing about the conservation center for the first time, and responded with relief and many questions, like when it would be open and how much money was being set aside.

The American aid is “fundamental for us,” said Patrick Vilaire, a sculptor, who took the lead in saving the collections of several damaged libraries after the earthquake.

A few, however, expressed frustration that aid had not come sooner and a worry that foreign experts were better at conducting visits and assessments than providing real, practical help.

At a meeting with Daniel Elie, the head of the government agency in charge of preserving Haiti’s national heritage, the discussion in front of the plywood shack from which he and his staff have operated since January turned momentarily tense when his colleague and translator, Monique Rocourt, said she was fed up with hosting visiting advisers who came and did nothing.

“If I bring another team of experts to Jacmel,” she said, referring to a city in southern Haiti that was seriously damaged in the quake, “we will look in front of the population like we’re just bringing foreigners to look at disasters. It’s cynical, but that’s what people will think.”

Ms. Wegener is sensitive to such concerns, she said on another occasion. She noted that this was her third trip to Haiti since the earthquake. “We’re showing a constant presence,” she said, “and now we’re bringing people who are specialists.”

At the same time, Ms. Wegener and her colleagues appeared anxious not to seem like cultural imperialists, frequently repeating that they wanted to know first what the Haitians wanted to do.

Occasionally, their efforts clearly seemed like overkill to some of the people they encountered. When Ms. Wegener suggested to two members of a foundation that supports voodoo art that they write a proposal outlining what the Americans could do to help, one of the two practically rolled her eyes.

“Everyone is coming here and asking us for a proposal,” the woman, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, said. “You write us a proposal.”

Ms. Wegener, anxious to explain, said that they did not want to create the impression “that we’re telling you what you want.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ms. Beauvoir-Dominique’s husband, Didier Dominique, interrupted, adding with a smile, “We know what we want.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/arts/design/11restore.html?pagewanted=print