44 DAYS—Saint Toussaint and Sinner L’Ouverture: Hagiography or Cancellation?

Art Talk with Claude-Rheal Malary

Join the Museum of Art for an afternoon art talk with scholar and SMC professor Claude-Rhéal Malary. This talk will focus on Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture series featuring the beloved leader and cultural icon of the Haitian Revolution. Lawrence’s depiction of the leader, both as paintings 1936-38 and as prints in the later 1980s, reflect the political and social significance of memory and identity. Malary's talk will explore Lawrence's work through the diasporic lens of Black Americans, visual iconography, and cultural symbols. What might explain, he will ask, the lens with which Lawrence viewed, and therefore depicted, Toussaint? Has recent scholarship on the Haitian icon shattered that lens? If so, what might be the proper lens from which to view, and therefore depict, Toussaint today?

A native and a citizen of Haiti, Claude-Rhéal Malary earned his doctoral degree in Hispanic letters from Brown University. He teaches Hispanophone and Francophone literature in the department of World Languages and Cultures. He has published articles on plague representation, postmodernism, and immigrant women in Spain; the introduction to a book of poems; and a short story.