About

Axelle Liautaud is a Haitian art historian and curator. She is a designer who works with artists and craftsmen to create unique items. She began visiting Le Centre d’Art and other art galleries from a very young age, thereby gaining an introduction to art. For 30 years, she worked to promote Haitian art and crafts in Europe and the United States. With Virgil Young, she organized a collection of artwork in collaboration with great American artists such as Keith Haring and Alison Saar. She has collaborated with many museums in preparing exhibitions of Haitian art—most notably, the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles for The Sacred Art of Vodou (1995). The Sacred Art of Vodou show traveled to major museums from 1995 to 1998 including The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, The Museum of Natural History, NY, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She also collaborated with the Frost Museum in Miami for Lespri Endepandan (2004). She has been the curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Naive Art in Paris (Halles St. Pierre) (1988), as well as the Organization of American States in Washington (1999), and the Bass Museum in Miami for the Allegories of Haitian Art exhibition, where the filmmaker Jonathan Demme’s collection was put on display (2006).

Axelle has been a member of Le Centre d’Art’s Board of Directors since 1997 and became Acting President following the 2010 earthquake, the death of Francine Murat, and the collapse of the Centre’s building. After the earthquake, she led efforts to rescue the collections from the rubble, including 4,000 paintings, more than 1,000 sculptures, 500 works on paper, and the largest art and cultural archives in Haiti. In collaboration with the Smithsonian Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, the art and documents were preserved and eventually returned to the Centre d’Art. As president of the Centre, she organized the Piasa Art Auction in Paris in 2017 and curated the Jasmin Joseph show that opened in Port-au-Prince in 2016 and traveled to various museums in France. Axelle stepped down from her role at Le Centre d’Art in 2021.