Georges Liautaud, who turned oil drums into sculpture, is born

Georges Liautaud was born at Croix-des-Bouquets on this day, son of Omera Liautaud and Elvira Cantave. He was a blacksmith. He made iron crosses for the town cemetery, and in 1953 DeWitt Peters of the Centre d’Art saw them and asked who had done the work. Liautaud began cutting flat figures from flattened steel oil drums, and that trade, bosmetal, is now the living of hundreds of families in Croix-des-Bouquets. His Vodou spirits in cut iron hang in museums from Port-au-Prince to New York. He died in 1991.