Salvaging Haiti's Culture

As an art historian and curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Cori Wegener specializes in American and European decorative arts. But this past year, Wegener got a different view of the art world.

She has spearheaded the Smithsonian Institution's Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, an ongoing effort to restore art treasures buried under rubble during the island nation's catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

Wegener has traveled to Haiti six times in the past year. Though she wasn't familiar with Haiti's art history prior to the project, "Once I got there and saw the beauty of it, especially the fabulous painting tradition, and met the people, I was mesmerized and fell in love with it," Wegener says.

Her unique background made her an ideal choice for the rescue mission. The 47-year-old curator has a graduate degree in art history and also served in the U.S. Army Reserves for 21 years. After 2003 looting of the Iraqi National Museum, Wegener was tapped to help with Iraq's cultural recovery efforts and also helped conceive a U.S. Army training manual on rescuing cultural treasures.

When Haiti's 7.0 quake hit on January 12, 2010, she was ready to help again.

"The United States is a next-door neighbor [to Haiti]," says Wegener, president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which provides emergency aid to countries whose cultural heritage is threatened by disaster. "If we're right here and we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world, then we better figure out a way to help."

From metal sculptures to book collections to paintings, the Haiti Cultural Recovery Project has retrieved thousands of pieces of Haiti's history. Currently Wegener and her team are working on recovering three murals from the destroyed Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince, and the murals will be moved to a new home in the next few months.

Shortly after the project started in May 2010, Wegener spent her first trip to Port-au-Prince assessing damage with representatives from Haiti's Ministry of Culture and the U.S. Embassy. "It was really sort of shocking to see the level of damage to places like the Holy Trinity Cathedral and the Presidential Palace -- where the whole center just collapsed," she says.

On subsequent visits, she got the project up and running, finding a work site, locating vehicles and gear, and staffing the restoration team amid the chaotic aftermath of the earthquake.

Wegener brought along a team of conservators to train Haitians in the basics of salvaging and restoring art. She established a professional conservation staff, which is painstakingly restoring more than 3,000 paintings from the Centre d'Art -- including work by 20th century Haitian masters such as Hector Hyppolite and Prèféte Duffaut -- by vacuuming and dry-cleaning each piece. Next the paintings will be catalogued, photographed and stored.

To date, the project has spent $1.5 million in U.S. funds, grants and private donations. Now that the local conservation teams are in place, Wegener plans to hand off the restored artifacts to the Haitian Ministry of Culture by November 2011.

"One of the most gratifying things I've ever done was work with these young Haitians who are so proud of their cultural heritage," she says. "I have every confidence in their abilities and their passion."