Indigo Arts | News | Earthquake in Haiti 2010

The news coming in of the earthquake in Haiti has been almost incomprehensibly dreadful. We are responding to this disaster in several ways.

The first is directed at the current catastrophe. We are supporting, and urge our friends and customers to support one or more of the relief and development groups working in Haiti: Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, Unicef, Catholic Relief Services, Konbit Pou Ayiti, Fonkoze, the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, are some that come to mind. Please send them Money! We are also encouraging you to contribute to an excellent organization in Jacmel, Haiti, the Art Creation Foundation for Children. You can learn more about them below. There is also an excellent list of small organizations which are doing good work in Haiti on Bill Bollendorf's Galerie Macondo website.

The second is directed to Haiti's future, through the creation of a Haitian Artists' Relief Fund. The people that we know the best are the artists and craftspeople of Haiti. The have brought their vibrant culture to the rest of the world, and will lead the way toward Haiti's rebirth. We are trying to learn the fate of our many artists and other friends in Haiti. The artists we deal with live in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Unfortunately we've heard reports of devastation in most of them. As a first step to helping the artists and their families we are establishing a Haitian Artists' Relief Fund in cooperation with artist and musician Nancy Josephson, author of the book Spirits in Sequins: Vodou Flags of Haiti, and founder of The Angel Band. We need the help of our friends and customers. We have put a number of Haitian vodou flags and other artworks for sale on our site and in the gallery. 100% of the proceeds for these will go to the artists, to help in their recovery from this disaster. A similar effort has been mounted by our friend Ted Frankel, fellow Haitian art aficionado and owner of SIDESHOW, the store at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

The pieces we are offering for sale are shown here on the Haitian Artists' Relief Fund page (see below). 100% of the proceeds will go to a fund for Haitian artists. For the month of February we are also donating 20% of the sales of all other Haitian art (excluding consignment work, which we do not own) - paintings, vodou flags and sculpture to the Haitian relief funds above.

Work is on display at Indigo Arts Gallery, through the month of February.

Another important benefit event is in the planning. On the evening of March 5th, Indigo Arts Gallery will host an exhibit and silent auction of photographs of Haiti in conjunction with the Society for Photographic Education annual conference in Philadelphia. The exhibit and auction are an opportunity to buy works by some of the leading photographers who have photographed in Haiti in recent years, and in so doing to support Partners in Health fund to provide tents for earthquake survivors.