Skip to content
Home/ Riding with Death: Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-Au-Prince
Riding with Death: Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-Au-Prince
Save Ask us

Riding with Death: Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-Au-Prince

No customer reviews yet ISBN 9781496812742
Published
May 2017
Language
English
$127.35
In stock
Most orders arrive within 3 weeks. Shipping policy
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery over $35 · 15-day returns

Condition

Brand New

An unread, unused copy: no writing or highlighting, and no missing or damaged pages. Every book we sell is brand new, including our lowest-priced titles.

About this book

On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse.

Established by artists Andre Eugene and Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics--defined by motifs of machinic urbanism, Vodou bricolage, the postprimitivist altermodern, and performative politics--radically challenge ideas about consumption, waste, and environmental hazards, as well as consider innovative solutions to these problems in the midst of poverty, insufficient social welfare, lack of access to arts, education, and basic needs.

In Riding with Death, Jana Braziel explores the urban environmental aesthetics of the Grand Rue Sculptors and the beautifully constructed sculptures they have designed from salvaged automobile parts, rubber tires, carved wood, and other recycled materials. Through first-person accounts and fieldwork, Braziel constructs an urban ecological framework for understanding these sculptures amid environmental degradation and grinding poverty. Influenced by urban geographers, art historians, and political theorists, the book regards the underdeveloped cities of the Global South as alternate spaces for challenging the profit-driven machinations of global capitalism. Above all, Braziel presents Haitian artists who live on the most challenged Caribbean island, yet who thrive as creators reinventing refuse as art and resisting the abjection of their circumstances.

Specifications

PublishedMay 16, 2017
ISBN-101496812743
ISBN-139781496812742
LanguageEnglish

Buying from Saanjhi

  • Ships from the USA. Delivery to US addresses only.
  • Free delivery on orders over $35.
  • 15-day returns. Unless we send the wrong book or it arrives damaged, you pay return shipping and a 15% restocking fee.
  • Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Caribbean & Latin American
See all
Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States
<p>In <i>The Americas Revealed</i>, distinguished art historian and curator Edward J. Sullivan brings together a vibrant group of essays that explore the formation, in the United States, of public and private collections of art from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas.</p><p>The contributors to this volume trace the major milestones and emerging approaches to collecting and presenting Spanish Colonial and modern Latin American art by museums, galleries, private collections, and corporations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In chronicling the roles played by determined collectors from New York to San Francisco, the essays examine a range of subjects from MoMA's mid-twentieth-century acquisition strategies to the growing taste on the West Coast for the work of Diego Rivera. They consider the impact of various political shifts on art collecting, from reactions against the "American exceptionalism" of the Monroe Doctrine to the aesthetic biases of government-sponsored art academies in Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, and Havana. The final three chapters focus on living collectors such as Roberta and Richard Huber, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Estrellita B. Brodsky.</p><p>A thorough and definitive account of the changing course of private and public collections and their important connection to underlying political and cultural relations between the United States and Latin American countries, this volume gives a rare glimpse into the practice of collecting from the collectors' own point of view.</p><p>In addition to the editor, contributors to this volume are Miriam Margarita Basilio, Estrellita B. Brodsky, Vanessa K. Davidson, Anna Indych-López, Ronda Kasl, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Berit Potter, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Joseph Rishel, Delia Solomons, and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt.</p>
$32.63