Orville Bulman, Bateau Rapide (purchased 1957).
This exhibition is held in conjunction with Haiti 2012: Dreams and reality € pays rêvé, pays réel: (March 5-9, 2012), a celebration of contemporary Haitian art, cinema and literature. Two years after a catastrophic earthquake devastated Haiti, this conference, the first of its kind in the United States, focuses on the vibrancy of Haitian cultural production in the twenty-first century by highlighting three art forms in three days: cinema, visual arts, and literature. The presenters include six prominent, award-winning Haitian filmmakers, artists, writers and journalists living in Haiti or in exile. More details on the conference here.
Orville Bulman,(1904-1978) was a very successful Midwestern businessman and largely self-taught artist. During the early 1950s he happened upon pictures of Haiti in travel brochures and admired the island’s style, verve and gracefully trimmed houses. Subsequent visits to Haiti and the Caribbean had a profound influence on his increasingly fantastical artmaking. Bulman died in 1978.
This exhibition examines the role played by Haiti in the imagination of a Midwestern businessman whose popularity among his society patrons— the Duchess of Windsor and Robert F. Kennedy, among others, collected his works, and Peg Bradley, who knew Bulman in Florida, owned as many as 18 of his paintings at one time--served to perpetuate an image of the country as a quaint, colorful prelapsarian paradise.
Also on view: watercolors of Haiti by Oscar Sanchez.
