How it began
Georges Liautaud, born in 1899, was a blacksmith in Croix-des-Bouquets, near Port-au-Prince. According to SFO Museum, he made crosses for public cemeteries before moving on to more elaborate cut-metal pieces, and he started the Haitian metal sculpture movement in the 1950s. The museum records that a meeting in 1953 with the American painter DeWitt Peters, who helped found Le Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, led Liautaud to take the work further. The Haitian Art Society gives the same year for Peters's encouragement.
How it works
Discarded steel oil drums are the base material. The lids are cut out with a hammer and chisel and a long vertical split is made down the side. The inside is packed with dried sugarcane or grass and set alight to burn off residue. Once cool, the drum is flattened into a sheet. The design is drawn on in chalk, then cut out and shaped with hand tools only, and finished by hammering, embossing, punching holes and bending the metal.
How it spread
Liautaud passed the technique to younger artists, among them Murat Brierre and the brothers Seresier, Janvier and Joseph Louisjuste. They taught others in Croix-des-Bouquets, including Gabriel Bien-Aime, born in 1951, and Serge Jolimeau, born in 1952, whom SFO Museum names as the two leading Haitian metal sculptors at work. The village of Noailles in Croix-des-Bouquets became the center of the craft, with dozens of cooperative workshops and storefronts across nearly one square mile.
Where it stands today
SFO Museum reports that in recent years gang activity in Croix-des-Bouquets has forced artists to move and make their work elsewhere. The museum showed works by Liautaud, Brierre, the Louisjuste brothers, Bien-Aime and Jolimeau in an exhibition that ran from August 2023 to October 2024. Liautaud died in 1991.
