About the Grant

HADC is an NEH grant funded project exploring the current state of Haitian art resources and their accessibility, with the hopes of improving accessibility in the future. The projects is a collaboration between Grinnell College Libraries and the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA). Through the project, the team is considering best practices with regards to photographic documentation of art works and metadata to plan for an online database for the WCA. Eventually, this publicly accessible database could come to embrace the museum’s many collections, and serve as a model for a multi-institutional platform for scholars and researchers of Haitian art.

Over the summer, student researchers conducted an inventory of significant public collections of Haitian art across the United States, as well as a survey of major exhibitions around the globe since the 1970s. In addition to such inventories, students also worked with the WCA’s extant metadata, cleaning it up in preparation for a prototype database. Grinnell’s librarians advised students on establishing metadata to make it more accessible once placed in a database. The summer culminated in photographing over one hundred works of art in the WCA’s collection with professional photographer Jerry Grier. We documented the process for this website, considering best practices with regards to Haitian art objects. In all, the photography required only a few days – much faster than anticipated. The images from this session can be viewed under the Process tab.

During the school year, the Advisory Board met to discuss the progress of the project. Advisory Board members were very pleased with the quality of the images taken over the summer. Plans for a conference to discuss the state of Haitian art began to solidify at this meeting, and it was decided the conference would be held as a workshop, to spark conversations and collaborations.

In December, thanks to funding by Grinnell College’s Institute for Global Engagement, the team traveled to Miami to meet with important figures in the field, including curators to scholars, and to explore art collections throughout South Florida. Professor Rivera and the student researchers met with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) team at Florida International University and discussed possible collaboration. The team also spent time at the NSU Museum of Art-Ft. Lauderdale in order to view works by Haitian artists in their collection. Currently, the registrar is working to get a public portal for searching their collection up and running – a valuable piece of information only gained through meeting with the museum’s staff.

Our work considers both the needs of the Waterloo Center for the Arts and the field of Haitian art history more broadly. This collaboration is longstanding, as the Grinnell College Libraries will host a two-year CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Haitian Visual Art, with the intention of implementing a public facing online database.

The project is seeking collaborators. Questions may be forwarded to Fredo Rivera at riveraal@grinnell.edu