Colonial Networks

Colonial Networks is a multiformat project that explores deep, often unknown, connections between Haiti (formerly the French colony of Saint-Domingue) and the Paris art world in the years before and after the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1780s and 1790s.

Mapping and Remapping

This project emerged through encounters with colonial maps of Haiti/Saint-Domingue, like this 1786 property map showing the region around the city of Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien). The patchwork of shapes on the map represent the boundaries of plantations, each labeled with the name of the person who owned it. For art historians, the names of the French plantation owners on maps like this read like a who’s who of the Paris art world, revealing the art collectors, artists, architects, and other art-world figures with direct ties to the profits and violence of colonial commerce and enslavement.

These maps have become pivotal sources in our project’s interconnected activities, which include:

• critically remapping Haiti/Saint-Domingue’s Black and Indigenous geographies of art, which are rendered almost invisible on these colonial property maps
• researching the social networks and financial connections between the Paris art world and Haiti/Saint-Domingue
• collaborating with museums to consider the legacy of these histories through specific objects and collection histories

To find out more about our current research, you can visit our About page for more information, explore different project pages via the images below, or check out Activities for upcoming talks and events.

Colonial Networks is a digital decolonial art history project, based between New York University and Queen Mary University of London. The Project Directors are Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams.