Here is a teaser image from the show we are uploading to our Trocadero Cavin-Morris online exhibition space. The show will be up in a week or so. But better, if you can, to see it live on the gallery walls to catch the nuances of the paint etc. and the way the pieces work off each each other.

This is a classic Hector Hyppolite painting. He was a Vodou priest who first made elaborate paintings for his temple walls. He painted some other walls in his community as well. His life was a constant back and forth between the demands of his religion and the demands of the secular art world. His actual career was very brief and ended after four or five years in about 1949 with little over 100 paintings.

For me his life was the perfect meld of visionary and cultural gatekeeper. In this nude, for example, we see embedded his reverence for the Lwa Erzuli, her colors and her essence of cosmic femininity. Hyppolite is said to have made a mythical journey to Africa after befriending a rich Cuban woman. Once there he supported himself painting chamberpots. He saw the arrival of a white man who would buy five paintings from him in a dream....a short time later Andre Breton visited Haiti with the great Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam and bought five paintings from him. One of those paintings is in this exhibition as well. Hyppolite deserves a place in the pantheon with Pippin, Traylor and Edmondson. We hope this exhibition helps to remind people of his timeless greatness.