1972
In her honor
Before it was a gallery, it was her living room.
In 1972 Carmel André Delatour came home to Haiti after five years in New York, where she had built a jewelry business among the Haitian community. She turned the family house in Port-au-Prince into a gallery and opened The Rainbow Art Display.
She was already a serious collector. Painters such as Jacques-Enguerrand Gourgue, Préfète Duffaut, André Pierre, Wilson Bigaud and Paul Beauvoir were regular visitors to the house, and their work made up much of her first collection.
In the 1970s cruise ships brought visitors back to Port-au-Prince, and the number of galleries in the city grew from three to sixty-nine. The Rainbow Art Display was soon counted among the nine best-run galleries in the capital and became a favorite stop for the city's tourist guides, whom she welcomed with food, drink and a place to rest.
The Rainbow Art Display flourished for a decade, but unfortunately the country's economy took a turn for the worse in 1982, when Haitians were wrongly accused of being vectors of the AIDS virus. This deadly disease turned Haiti into a pariah state. As if that were not enough, political repression in the early eighties contributed greatly to the mass exodus of Haitians fleeing to the shores of the US in leaky boats. This phenomenon of desperate migrants came to be known as the Boat People and greatly tarnished the country's image.
Through it all, The Rainbow Art Display survived through thick and thin until it received the final blow on January 12, 2010, when a deadly magnitude 7.0 earthquake demolished the Delatour family home, The Rainbow Art Display, and took the lives of the loving Carmel and Cavour Delatour in the process.
True to their fighting spirit, the new generation of Delatours has taken on the mantle of their departed grandparents to continue promoting the talented art of Haitian artists all over the world. Sebastien Delatour and Bernard Delatour carry on Carmel's legacy and the Delatour family's 50-plus-year tradition of preserving Haitian art.
Today this unique artwork can be seen on the Haitian Art Display website. Your support is greatly appreciated.
