Remapping Paris in Haiti/Saint-Domingue

Pushing against longstanding curatorial norms and disciplinary practices among art scholars, this paper reveals the importance of slave plantations in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to the production and consumption of art and architecture in Paris in the years preceding the French and Haitian Revolutions. It focuses on two plantation owners, Charles de Wailly and Jean-Joseph de Laborde, who played major roles in the Paris art world as patrons, collectors, artists, architects, and real estate speculators. The paper considers the larger implications of such connections for scholarship, teaching, and museum display, while also discussing a collaborative project to map this colonial network and, in so doing, to profoundly shift prevailing views of eighteenth-century art and architecture.