Haiti in Miami: from the Centre d'Art to Edouard Duval-Carrié's Little Haiti

The art world comes to Miami Beach in December, but some of the city's deepest art history is across the bay, in a few blocks of Little Haiti. If you have a morning free in Art Week, spend it there, and if you can come before November 15, see Edouard Duval-Carrié's retrospective at The Betsy on Ocean Drive first. Together they tell a story that runs from a gingerbread house in Port-au-Prince in 1944 to the central pavilion of this year's Venice Biennale, and it passes through Miami.

It is a story about pictures that travelled before people did, about a migration by sea, and about a neighbourhood that named itself and then built a place for its artists. The facts below come from Le Centre d'Art, La Biennale di Venezia, the City of Miami, the museums involved and reporting by WLRN, the Miami Herald and others, checked on October 24, 2026. Where the sources disagree, we say so.

Port-au-Prince, 1944: an art center in a country with no galleries

In 1944 Haiti had no art galleries and no public art school. That year DeWitt Peters, an American watercolorist teaching English in Port-au-Prince during the war, founded Le Centre d'Art with a group of Haitian intellectuals, among them Maurice Borno, Albert Mangonès, Geo Remponeau, Jean Chenet and Gérald Bloncourt, in a gingerbread house of 1912 (Le Centre d'Art). It gave painters materials, a place to work and somewhere to sell, and from 1945 it was the home of the movement the outside world would call, too easily, Haitian "naïve" painting.

The artists who came to it had never been to art school. Philomé Obin, from Cap-Haïtien, sent Peters a small painting thanking Franklin D. Roosevelt for ending the American occupation of 1915 to 1934; Peters paid him $5 for it, and the next year put him on a monthly salary (Haitian Art Society). Hector Hyppolite, a Vodou priest and house painter from Saint-Marc, was noticed for the doors he painted, and became the movement's first star before his death in 1948.

The world noticed fast. In September 1944 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired its first Haitian painting, a cockfight by René Vincent, bought through Peters for $30 plus shipping (MoMA). In late 1945 the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam arrived, and André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, soon after; Lam showed at the Centre in January 1946, and Breton bought several Hyppolites (Wifredo Lam). The American writer Selden Rodman gave the movement its name in his 1948 book Renaissance in Haiti. Around 1950, Peters and Rodman organised the painting of murals in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince by Obin, Rigaud Benoit, Préfète Duffaut, Castera Bazile, Wilson Bigaud and others: biblical scenes in which every figure is Black (Anglican Journal).

On January 12, 2010, the earthquake brought down the Centre's building and damaged about 5,000 works and its archives. Of the cathedral's fourteen murals, eleven were destroyed; Smithsonian conservators lifted the three survivors off the walls in 142 sections (Smithsonian). The Centre reopened in temporary pavilions in November 2014, for its 70th anniversary.

The pictures travel north

Haitian painting found its American homes in unlikely places. A pathologist, Walter Neiswanger, began buying Haitian art on a cruise in 1961 and in 1967 gave 19 works to the museum in Davenport, Iowa, now the Figge Art Museum; the museum calls it the first permanent collection of Haitian art in a museum outside Haiti. In 1977 a gift founded the Haitian collection of the Waterloo Center for the Arts, also in Iowa, which now holds more than 2,000 works, the largest public collection in the United States, according to its director (WLRN). Richard and Erna Flagg, who began collecting in 1973, gave more than 90 works to the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1991.

The pictures came back south, in a way. In 2024 and 2025 the Little Haiti Cultural Complex showed sixteen enlarged reproductions from the Waterloo collection outdoors, in an exhibition called Haiti in the Heartland.

The people come by sea

Haitians came to South Florida in numbers later, and harder. On December 12, 1972, the Saint Sauveur, carrying 65 people, landed at Pompano Beach: the first documented boat of Haitian refugees. The passengers were taken to jail (NBC Miami). Through the 1970s thousands more followed. A priest, Gérard Jean-Juste, came to Miami in 1978 and fought their deportations in court, and in 1980, the year of the Mariel boatlift, tens of thousands of Haitians arrived. In October 1981 a boat capsized off Hillsboro Beach and 33 people drowned.

Many settled north of the Design District, in the old neighbourhoods of Lemon City and Edison. Viter Juste, who sold records and books on NE 2nd Avenue, is credited, with the community association he helped found, with naming the area: he once explained that "Little Port-au-Prince" was too long (CBS Miami). Little Haiti it became, informally for decades, and officially in May 2016, when the city commission voted for the name over the objections of some historians and developers.

The neighbourhood built its own landmarks. In 1984 a design competition for a Haitian market went to Charles Harrison Pawley, an architect born in Haiti to American parents, who drew on Port-au-Prince's gingerbread houses and its Iron Market; the Caribbean Marketplace opened in 1990, won a national award from the American Institute of Architects, closed, was nearly demolished and was saved by community protest (Florida historical marker). In the same year the poet Jan Mapou, who had been jailed under the Duvalier regime, opened Libreri Mapou, a Haitian bookshop that began as a booth of about 300 books in the market (Hyperallergic). The Little Haiti Cultural Complex, the vision of the late Commissioner Arthur E. Teele Jr. and designed by Bernard Zyscovich, broke ground in 2006 and opened by 2009 (City of Miami).

Edouard Duval-Carrié: the heir on 59th Street

Edouard Duval-Carrié was born in Port-au-Prince in 1954. His family left for Puerto Rico under François Duvalier, when he was nine and the schools were closed; he studied in Montreal, graduating from Loyola College in 1978, and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and lived in France for years (Duval-Carrié). He settled in Miami in the early 1990s, just as the military coup of 1991 sent another wave of Haitians to sea.

What he saw became his subject. In paintings and sculptures he gave the lwa, the spirits of Vodou, a modern history: in The World at Present (Èzili Intercepted) of 1996, Ezili, the goddess of love, is stopped by the Coast Guard. His work has a jeweller's finish and a historian's memory; for his 2014 show at PAMM, Imagined Landscapes, he remade 19th-century views of the Caribbean and Florida by painters such as Frederic Edwin Church entirely in black and silver glitter (PAMM).

He also built the place he works in. In 1994 he helped found the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance, and when the city planned the cultural complex he insisted it include a gallery. "I really demanded that they have a gallery," he told CBS Miami (CBS Miami). Since 2009 he has curated Global Caribbean, later Global Borderless Caribbean, an exhibition that usually opens there in Art Week. His studio is on the same block, at 225 NE 59th Street. In 2024 Miami-Dade County named him its second artist-in-residence, and on Miami Beach his Trapeze Contortionists, aluminium dancers hung over Española Way, opened Art Week in 2022.

2026: Venice, and a homecoming on Ocean Drive

This year Duval-Carrié is one of about 110 artists in In Minor Keys, the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, selected by the curator Koyo Kouoh before her death in 2025 and realised by her team (La Biennale di Venezia). He is not Haiti's national representative, whose pavilion shows Enock Placide, and it is not his first Biennale: he was in Haiti's first national pavilion in 2011. In the central pavilion he shows a pantheon of lwa in bronze and oil, among them the death spirit Bawon Samdi and an Ezili surrounded by United States Marines. The exhibition closes on November 22.

At home, From Venice with Love brings a retrospective to The Betsy hotel on Ocean Drive, with The World at Present (Èzili Intercepted) animated on the hotel's sculptural orb and a series of light boxes in its bar (WLRN). Its curator is the photographer Carl-Philippe Juste, Viter Juste's son: the man whose father named Little Haiti has brought its most celebrated artist to the beach. It closes on November 15, two weeks before the fair.

The next generation

Duval-Carrié is not alone. Adler Guerrier, born in Port-au-Prince in 1975, came to Miami at twelve, showed in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and had a survey at PAMM in 2014. Didier William, who grew up in North Miami near the museum, came back to MOCA North Miami for a solo show in 2022 (The Art Newspaper). Firelei Báez, born in the Dominican Republic to a father of Haitian descent, grew up in Miami. And the painter Tomm El-Saieh, grandson of Issa El-Saieh, whose Galerie Issa sold Haitian painting in Port-au-Prince from the 1950s, helps run Central Fine, a Miami gallery whose roster includes Haitian masters such as Myrlande Constant.

Seeing Haitian art in Miami in Art Week

The two Duval-Carrié shows close before the fair, and the cultural complex had not posted its Art Week programme when we checked. Still, Little Haiti repays a morning, ideally with a December edition of Global Borderless Caribbean to see; check the complex's listings in November.

• Little Haiti Cultural Complex: the gallery, a theatre and studios, at 212–260 NE 59th Terrace; open Monday to Friday, 9 am to 9 pm, and Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm, closed Sunday (City of Miami). December is one of its busiest months for exhibitions.
• Caribbean Marketplace: Pawley's market hall, 5925 NE 2nd Avenue, Monday to Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm.
• Libreri Mapou: the Haitian bookshop next door, at 5919 NE 2nd Avenue.
• Notre Dame d'Haiti: the church at 110 NE 62nd Street, where Jean-Juste ran his refugee center.
• Central Fine: 36 NE 54th Street, for Haitian painting among its contemporary program.
• PAMM: Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols, through June 2027. PAMM itself draws the line from Jean-Michel Basquiat's Haitian father to Miami; it is in our museums guide.

For the galleries around it in Little River and Little Haiti, and the rest of the week, see what Miami Art Week is.