Amid the rubble in Haiti, some things still await rescue — the country’s art and artifacts.
The Jan. 12 earthquake shook more than just buildings and people. It shook the treasures of a nation’s heritage.
A group of Smithsonian conservators working with the Haitian government flew to the island nation last week and are now hoping to restore the most precious artworks of the country.
Based in a Port-au-Prince building that was once home to the United Nations Development Program, four American experts and their Haitian counterparts are surveying the capital in an effort to find art lost in the quake.
Smithsonian American Art museum conservator Hugh Shockey is documenting the journey in words and photos, published on the museum’s Facebook and Flickr pages.
Some of the artwork has already suffered damage in Haiti’s rainy season, including the murals at the Cathedrale Sainte Trinite in Port-Au-Prince.
“Everyone in the group felt a great urgency about the murals as it was apparent that the rains, despite the tarp covering, had caused water to run down the face of the murals, depositing a whitish haze on the surface,” Shockey reported in his travel log Friday.
The effort is part of the Smithsonian’s more long-term Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, which will see numerous volunteers and trips to Haiti to restore art through 2011, said Eryl Wentworth, executive director of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, a group working with the Smithsonian.
Wentworth said that although the conservation is still in the early stages, the Haiti initiative has already recovered hundreds of paintings.
The conservators will collect the artworks, restore them in a lab that still awaits setup, house art until galleries and museums are operational again and train Haitians to learn to recover and restore artworks on their own.
Online
» Check out the art museum’s blog, eyelevel.si.edu, for links to Shockey’s Facebook updates and Flickr photos.
