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ATIS REZISTANS
or ARTISTS OF THE GRAND RUE
A few months back while working in my kitchen with the Travel Channel playing in the background, I was pleasantly surprised to catch Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" episode on Haiti. http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Anthony_Bourdain/Episodes_Travel_Guides/Haiti I was even more surprised and pleased to see Tony branching out from his usual edgy food report to include a visit to a group of artists known as Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) aka Artists of the Grand Rue. The Grand Rue is the main road that runs north and south through downtown Port-au-Prince. At the southern end is a neighborhood where most of the woodcarving is done for the tourist trade in the Caribbean. The area is surrounded by the city's makeshift auto repair district. It is within this junkyard of a neighborhood that a close-knit community of artists has emerged within the last fourteen years or so.
 | | The welcoming committee, photo by Bill Bollendorf |
The art they produce is basically three-dimensional bricolage or assemblage from automobile parts, discarded TV's, old toys, pieces of wood, worn out tires, human skulls, you name it.This in itself is nothing new. The late Pierrot Barra did much the same thing in the Iron Market with his altars and Mojo boards made from old dolls and bits of cloth. Contemporary artists have been engaged in bricolage art for a long time. What is new about the work of the Grand Rue artists is the sheer physical scale and the radical inclusiveness of their pieces. Not only are individual pieces large (before the 2010 earthquake you would be greeted in the neighborhood's main open area by a trio of gigantic figures -- a 14' Baron Samedi with a 5' phallus, Bossou and Cousin Zaka) but the entire neighborhood has become an expansive gallery of assemblage art created by the folks living there. It's not a stretch to say the neighborhood itself is a constantly evolving piece of installation art, Vodou yard art on steroids. All of the work is, of course, informed by the material poverty, political inertia and injustice the people in the community struggle with. But at the same time the work is imbued with a dark whimsy that accompanies all the spirits of Vodou.
 | | André Eugène, photo by Bill Bollendorf |
Atis Rezistans was originally started by three artists - André Eugène Jean Robert, Jean Hérard Celeur and Frantz Jacques aka Guyodo. Eugène speaks for the community when he says, "The West dumps its rubbish on Haiti, we take it, we transform it, we make it into art and sell it back to them to put in their living rooms." But they are doing more than selling us back our rubbish. They are also sending us a message that the Haitian masses are not anonymous and not without voices. Artis Rezistans is making sure of that. We are pleased to offer a small Lasiren by André Eugène. http://www.ridgeart.com/Eugene4660.html. This lady is not Walt Disney's mermaid. This is Mami Wata. Her core is a  Nkisi-like wooden sculpture with rounded nails fetishizing her exaggerated pubic area, thus releasing her immense power. She is embellished with spray painted tin and plastic components from undetermined objects. She blows her melody on a broken toy horn. For other pieces by Atis Rezistans check out the website of my comrade-in-the-arts Bill Bollendorf of Gallery Macondo, a real booster of these artists. http://www.artshaitian.com/Pages/granruemaster.html Laurie Beasley, owner |
