In a closetlike storage area, Barra kept some larger objects, which he fashioned from refuse and items found in the market. These were made of dolls and their various dissected body parts, common Catholic household saints in the form of pictures or small plastic statues, car headlights, rope, fabric scraps, and assorted bric-a-brac. The disparate materials were bundled in spangled satin or mounted on large pieces of fabric-wrapped cardboard.
Although Barra, a businessman of considerable acumen, began making these works for the rituals of oungans and manbos (priests and priestesses), he now sells many of them to foreign art collectors and dealers. "I don't mind people using them for decoration," he blithely explained through an interpreter during an interview in Port-au-Prince. "You would have to baptize them for it to have any spiritual meaning. Without the ceremony, they're just art."
Some examples of Barra's bizarre assemblages are now on view at the Center for the Fine Arts, part of the glorious, immensely engaging exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Like most of the other ceremonial objects and Vodou-inspired paintings and sculpture in the show, Barra's found-material conglomerations were created as representations of Vodou spirits. Some are celebratory and strangely elegant. Others, which sport dolls with dirty faces fastened to a cross, their heads covered with satin hoods or with blood-stained lips, are truly disturbing to behold.
"Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" showcases a broad spectrum of the accouterments of the Vodou religion in a fascinating display that reveals much of this art's aesthetic complexity and spiritual power. Donald J. Cosentino, one of two curators of the show (which originated at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History), refers to Vodou as a practice that, in a sense, has always been postmodern and is reflected in an artistic expression that has historically appropriated far-flung components. Since the Creole religion developed among the half-million African slaves of what was then called St. Domingue, the ceremonial artifacts of Vodou and the art it inspires have endured. Haiti's history of colonization, independence, imperialistic invasion, poverty, repression, and resistance is manifested in the Vodou rituals' incorporation of elements ranging from French military flags, Kongo medicine bundles, Catholic crucifixes, and Masonic shawls to Cabbage Patch dolls, Darth Vader action figures, and Dove soap.
"Vodou is the Haitian way of life," says Aboudja, a priest, in a short video about the history of the religion playing on a monitor on the museum's second floor. "It is what keeps this country alive, what keeps us going." The exhibition begins with an eclectic selection of illustrative paintings that depict important episodes in Haiti's history. Serge Moleon Blaise's naively realist Conversion of the Indians shows the native Taino Indians under military guard, being converted by Catholic priests. Dieudonne Caiman's dark, expressionist Ceremony at the Bois Caiman shows the mythic ceremonial sacrifice of a pig by an African priestess in preparation for the uprising led by the slave Boukman, which would lead to Haiti's independence in 1804. The Anti-Superstition Campaign, by Eddy Jacques, documents the destruction of Vodou temples and objects by leaders of the Catholic Church and the Haitian military in 1940. An outstanding oil on masonite painting, The Crucifixion of Charlemagne Peralt for Freedom, by famed painter Philome Obin, is a beautifully composed tableau depicting the executed peasant leader as a Christlike martyr. Miami-based Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie's Mardi-Gras at Ft. Dimanche is a fantastic vision of the Duvalier family inside a torture chamber, looking like death spirits, with Jean-Claude Duvalier in a wedding dress, a reference to rumors that he is gay. Several bloody, severed hands are nailed to the wall of the cell.
Visitors pass through a mirrored archway to the next section of the exhibition. Display cases here hold altar objects typically associated with the different Vodou deities, or lwas -- a parade of personalities who act as mediators between God and human beings. The Gedes and their chief Bawon Samdi are represented by a velvet top hat, a coffin bottle with a skull inside like those sold by Barra, Wayfarer sunglasses, a picture of St. Gerard (the Bawon's Catholic alter ego), and a wooden cane -- a spirit wand -- carved in the shape of an erect penis. Prior to installation, a condom was placed over the tip of this cane and another one in the show by priests in Haiti, in reaction to the AIDSepidemic. A display of articles intended for the ultra-feminine Ezili Freda, the mistress of love, includes a bottle of her favorite perfume Anais Anais and statues and pictures of madonnas. Her wilder counterpart Ezili Danto is personified by a black doll in a glittery dress and red do-rag, a picture of a black madonna, and a papier-mache pig representing those used in ritual sacrifice.
In the next room a fascinating display of ceremonial art includes several drums, whose rhythms are the heartbeat of Vodou. One is painted with an intricate cubist pattern, others are carved to reveal human faces or serpents. Bottles -- for spirit offerings and divination -- and medicine bundles, or "Kongo packets," rival the best surrealist objects in their composition. Pairs of scissors and small round mirrors are bound with rope to a square-sided bottle. Other fanciful bottles are covered in elaborate combinations of sequins or beads. The Kongo packets are talismans, round-bottomed bundles out of which rise long stems, symbolizing the umbilical cord. Some of those included here are fancily bedecked with ribbons and have two "arms" extending from the base of the stem, giving them the look of elegant dancing ladies.
Sequined flags are probably the best-known form of this art. Here a selection of the banners, embroidered with symbols of the lwas, are elegantly displayed on black walls. In the next gallery an exhibit dedicated to the roots of Vodou will give the uninitiated a better understanding of the religion's origins and visual references. Religious objects from Africa, Catholic iconography, books and cards used by European mystics, and Masonic vestments are included here along their counterparts from Haiti.
The exhibition moves from its more ethnographic focus to the work of artists whose personal vision has been inspired by Vodou beliefs. Hector Hyppolite, the Haitian naive painter who was a favorite of Andre Breton in the Forties, was a Vodou priest whose works combined lively images of lwas and Catholic saints. A large selection of his oil-and-masonite paintings is included in the show. In Magique Noire, impish spirits rise out of two large vases. A grinning gargoyle holds up a table on which two winged manbos have laid out cards, candles, a cross, and bottles of rum.
Georges Liautaud was trained as a blacksmith, and he made crosses for graves in his native Croix-des-Bouquet, just outside Port-au-Prince. Rather than Christian crucifixes, his crosses are iron manifestations of the veves -- cosmographic symbols of the spirits that are traced on the ground during Vodou ceremonies. Liautaud, who inspired what is now a largely commercial iron art industry in Croix-des-Bouquet, went on to make images of the spirits from iron scraps. The gentle but powerful works displayed here are vibrantly alive. They alone would be reason to visit this exhibition.
Edouard Duval-Carrie created a series of sculptures especially for this show. An early version of these Spirit Catchers was created for the first Vodou festival in Benin in 1993, where they were stuck into the beach so they could be seen from the water. Now cast in polished bronze and installed in the gallery, Duval-Carrie's modern-day spirits seem to undulate, flirting with passersby.
The exhibition ends with a realistic re-creation of a Vodou temple and three altars. A beautiful mural of Ezili Danto as a black madonna with stigmata on her face was painted on the temple wall in delicate shades of yellow, blue, red, and black by Rara Kuyu, a Haitian muralist who now lives in Miami. Three video monitors show footage from ceremonies in Haiti, filling the room with heart-pumping music and chanting. Watching this manic, moving family celebration in which practitioners dance, drink, and take on the personalities of different spirits, it is evident that the true art of Vodou is an art of performance. This view is enhanced by a series of incredible photos taken by Phyllis Galembo, which capture people possessed, or "mounted," by the spirits. One photo shows a woman sitting on a bed, dressed in red as an alluring Ezili Danto. Another is a portrait of a man in a straw hat -- Bawon Kriminel -- who stares defiantly at the camera. He holds a sword poised above a hard-boiled egg on a plate filled with feathers. According to several Haitian museumgoers who were viewing the show last week, the act of plunging a knife into a hard-boiled egg means death to the object of the ritual.
"Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" is designed to debunk the Afro-Haitian religion's widespread Hollywoodesque reputation as scary black magic. And the show gives Vodou the respect it deserves. But some works, such as the photo of Bawon Kriminel, and one of the aforementioned macabre assemblages by Barra, do allude to "serving the spirits with both hands," the term for using Vodou with evil intentions as well as good ones. Some Haitian visitors to the CFA have objected to what they see as the inclusion of a negative representation of Vodou. The large local Haitian population makes the exhibit a particularly relevant -- and long awaited -- event for Miami. Even at the show's September 19 opening, members of the Haitian community began to weigh in on a show about which they had an educated opinion. That discussion will undoubtedly continue after the exhibition ends.
Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Through December 1 . Center for the Fine Arts, 101 W Flagler St; 375-3000.
