Your Black Bloggers The official gathering spot for black bloggers
Walk into the Birmingham Museum of Art this winter and you’ll find yourself immersed in a strange and ecstatic experience, somewhere between an aesthetic encounter, a religious ritual and a history lesson.
Hanging from the museum’s blue walls are Haitian Vodou flags, hypnotic tapestries made from satin and sequins and sacred symbols. “They are dazzling, they just shimmer,” Dr. Emily Hanna, Senior Curator and Curator of the Arts of Africa and the Americas, explained to The Huffington Post. “Very much like stained glass in a church.”
The story of Vodou begins around 1492, with the Spanish colonization of Hispaniola, an island now split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Not long after, the French and English appeared too, killing off the native Taino population. Hundreds of thousands of West and Central Africans were shipped in as slaves to work on sugarcane, cotton and coffee plantations. Under these tense and oppressive circumstances, a new religion emerged, melding elements of African beliefs with Roman Catholicism.
The resulting belief system is a vibrant and multifarious medley, aptly translated onto the flattened wonderlands of the flags they incorporate. A traditional Vodou altar revolves around a depiction of a Christian saint, circled with hodgepodge elements including “Buddhas, Roman Catholic holy cards, playing cards, political portraits, satin-swathed bottles, perfume atomizers, rosaries, carved phalluses, Masonic diagrams, candles, kerchiefs, money, mirrors, fruit, rum, flowers and human and animal skulls.”
