The artistic practice of Rose-Marie Desruisseau centres on her research into and engagement with mysticism, with a view to raising the status of ancestral Vodou traditions. She stands out as the only Haitian woman artist to approach the narration of her country’s history through the medium of painting. Her body of work is infused with cultural and social values, yet it is equally deeply autobiographical. A consideration of her work reveals her enduring interest in the revival of collective memory.

Born on 30 August 1933 in Port-au-Prince, R.-M. Desruisseau grew up in Diquini, a district in the commune of Carrefour. At fifteen, she started attending the Centre d’art, taking her first drawing and painting lessons under the direction of Lucien Price (1915–1963). Despite family and social pressures that compelled her to distance herself from her medium for a decade, between 1957 and 1961 she would play an active role in the avant-garde art movements that flourished in the cultural hub of Port-au-Prince. In 1959, she was amongst the first students to attend the Académie des Beaux-Arts, studying under Amerigo Montagutelli (1899–1959) and Géo Remponeau (1916–2012), and later with Pétion Savain (1906–1973) in his atelier. She moved in the circles of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, singers and theatre people who frequented the Foyer des arts plastiques and the Brochette and Calfou galleries, and participated in group exhibitions alongside Luckner Lazard (1928–1998), Dieudonné Cédor (1925–2010), Tiga (1935–2010) and Antonio Joseph (1921–2016). Her explorations moved her to revisit Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism in the light of her own artistic concerns. Despite the fact that Haitian cultural life is present amongst her ongoing themes, the artist’s particular approach to Vodou subjects does not represent a quest for national identity, setting her apart from the indigenist artistic traditions of her contemporaries.

It was the 1963 exhibition Jeunes artistes d’aujourd’hui at the Esso Salon in Port-au-Prince, dedicated to eleven women painters, that revealed R.-M. Desruisseau as a master of her art. Between 1967 and 1972, her growing interest in Vodou led her to conduct extensive research with historian Jean Fouchard and ethnologist Gerson Alexis. Her investigations into gesture, dances and the use of colour in Vodou were woven into her practice and influenced her approach. In 1977, she became a part of the group of professors who taught at the Port-au-Prince Académie des beaux-arts and was involved in the foundation in 1983 of an École nationale des arts. Her international reach brought her into contact with a wide range of cultural and aesthetic influences, notably in Paris, New York and Montreal, but also in Senegal, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Martinique.

Over a period of fifteen years R.-M. Desruisseau worked on La Rencontre des trois mondes, a series of thirty-four paintings, which she completed in 1986. Five hundred years on from Christopher Columbus, the series invites us to rediscover Haiti. The artist does not simply illustrate history, she rewrites it. It is a powerful declaration of the self-determination of the Haitian people, in which she fuses narration, ethnography and spirituality, tracing an intimate itinerary of these struggles that are also her own. R.-M. Desruisseau died in Montreal in 1988, on January 1, the day of the anniversary of her country’s independence.