Art is a well-established field of inquiry for anthropologists and art historians working on Haiti. Some recurring issues addressed by contemporary scholars are art's origins and the role of external influences in its emergence and development. It is now accepted that the development of Haitian art began before the creation of the Centre d'art, a training and exhibition space developed by the United States artist Dewitt Peters in 1944, and is not limited to the art naïf that came to epitomize the country's artistic production in the minds of art historians, art dealers, and artists themselves. A continuing issue, however, is clarifying the relationship between different types of artistic production and Vodou, the Haitian vernacular religion. “Vodou art” has come to define, not so much a specific range of works produced for the practice of Vodou, but artwork whose manufacture is inspired by a Vodou worldview, whether used for a...

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