Pòtoprens

Reviewed by: Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince/Atis nan vil Pòtoprens ed. by Leah Gordon and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro LeGrace Benson Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince/Atis nan vil Pòtoprens. Edited by Leah Gordon and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, with additional essays by Edouard Duval-Carrié and Gina Ulysse. Brooklyn, NY: Pioneer Works, 2021. ISBN: 978-1945711060. 416 pp. $55 hardcover. Even before beginning to read the text, it is wise to feel the material weight of this tome. Then leaf through the pages of maps, charts, photographs, images of the works, noting how the bilingual pages, even in the same typeface, reveal differences in the amount of air and room they require. The front cover features an impressed stone face looking at the opening edge, and the back has names of all the artists impressed in silver on stark black. The book is a populated environment. Leah Gordon has been crucial to bringing attention to the Haitian art scene abroad, especially in Europe, with scholars such as Charlotte Hammond and David Frohnapfel critically engaging her curatorial practices in their own books.1 In harmony with this approach, co-editor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, a geographer and writer who contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books, created an inclusive Introduction, featuring texts, charts, maps, and photographs that situate the artists of Port-au-Prince in the f low of events and the surfaces, community work, and machinery of the city from the second third of the twentieth century to the time of the eponymous exhibition. Jelly-Schapiro writes: “Haiti’s restive and storied capital . . . is at once a place and an idea, a geography and a history, a past and a now” (20). He goes on to provide a brief history illuminated and detailed by the visuals. There is a helpful timeline that is a brilliant demonstration of the melded English and Kreyòl approach of the editors. The two rows of data have their labels “braided” with words interchanged across the dividing line. The Timeline/Delè thus teaches readers of either language a bit of the other. This is a model to be emulated. In addition to historical photographs of Port-au-Prince, the book includes recent ones by Maggie Steber and Roberto Stephenson. There is also a section with stills from the twelve films screened during the exhibition, and photos of one of the art installations: an entire Haitian barbershop, set up and serving customers in the garden of Pioneer Works. Finally, there are multiple photos of events during the various stages of the exhibition period, [End Page 238] a checklist and photos of all items in the exhibition, and biographies of all contributors. The book is a detailed, documented historic record that will be permanently valuable. Pòtoprens brings insights and revelations shaped by and shaping a long moment of history, social arrangements, belief systems, political and economic relationships. The sharpest focus is on four communities of artists, all located in districts in and adjacent to the largest population concentration in Haiti. This book, an art object in its own right as well as being encyclopedic in scope, offers valuable discernments. Leah Gordon and Edouard Duval-Carrié, co-creators of the 2021 exhibition at the Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, are fluent in English and Kreyòl, as are many of the artists. Exhibition labels and texts are rendered in both languages. It is noteworthy that the book and exhibition were conceived of in both languages, not simply displayed or written in one and then translated into the other. It seems possible that the artists, most of them multilingual but for whom Kreyòl is the mother language and medium of daily conversation, may have, in a sense, “double thought” their essays that form a substantial portion of the book. Rather than being a series of interviews, where the interviewer’s point of view and interests unavoidably have some degree of influence, the artists themselves created their statements. These unique personal views reveal how each artist understands themselves and their works, and also offer insight into the harmonies and differences in the community of

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