1949: (The Murals of Holy Trinity Cathedral: Selden Rodman, Bishop Voegeli, Wilson Bigaud’s Miracle at Cana, and the Walls That Bloomed with a Haitian New Te…

1949: (The Murals of Holy Trinity Cathedral: Selden Rodman, Bishop Voegeli, Wilson Bigaud’s Miracle at Cana, and the Walls That Bloomed with a Haitian New Testament): Selden Rodman’s Miracle of Haitian Art tells the full story of how the bare walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral gradually bloomed with scenes from the New Testament that were uniquely and unforgettably Haitian. Rodman, in 1949 codirector of the Centre d’Art, was distressed to see the finest works leaving the country almost before the paint was dry — his suggestion that Haitian artists paint murals for the buildings being erected for Port-au-Prince’s bicentennial went unheeded by almost everyone, which was fortunate as many of those buildings have ceased to exist. Haiti’s Episcopal bishop, the Right Reverend C. Alfred Voegeli, one of the earliest connoisseurs of Haitian art, was more receptive. The project did not flow as smoothly as the wine in Wilson Bigaud’s sparkling Miracle at Cana, which now covers part of the transept — money had to be raised, the roof repaired, and a medium found that would enable the murals to withstand the rigors of the tropics. The Holy Trinity murals — scenes of the Christian gospel rendered in the visual language of Haitian peasant life, the Nativity set in a Haitian village, the saints garbed in the clothing of the market women and the cane cutters — performed at the level of sacred art what the Bois Caïman ceremony had performed at the level of sacred politics: the appropriation and transformation of a European spiritual tradition into an instrument of Caribbean self-expression, the colonizer’s religion returned to the colonizer transfigured by the creative genius of the colonized, so that the Christ who hung on those cathedral walls was no longer the pale figure of European devotion but the embodiment of a people who had reimagined divinity in their own image.