[Many thanks to Veerle Poupeye (Critical.Caribbean.Art) for bringing this item to our attention.] The Gilder Lehrman Center Annual Conference, organized around the theme “Haiti in the Age of Revolutions: Lafargue Rigaud’s Portraits of Independence,” will take place on November 13 and 14, 2026, at Henry R. Luce Hall, Yale University, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut. This exhibition coincides with the Yale Peabody Museum’s exhibit, “Haiti in the Age of Revolutions: Larfargue Rigaud’s Portraits of Independence” (November 9, 2026-March 30, 2027). Read a short description below and at the original at the Yale Macmillan Center page.

Description: Coinciding with the Yale Peabody Museum’s exhibit, “Haiti in the Age of Revolutions: Larfargue Rigaud’s Portraits of Independence” (November 9, 2026-March 30, 2027), this conference explores a transformative moment in Haitian and Black New World history through the lens of portraiture. The exhibit will feature Lafargue Rigaud’s rare nineteenth-century paintings of Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe, and other Haitian leaders, offering a window into the Haitian Revolution and Haitian statecraft. Part of the Yale Peabody Museum collection since 1963, this is the first time these portraits, which serve as visual records of leaders whose complicated legacies are interwoven with revolutionary movements across the Americas, will be on display at the museum.

The Lafargue Rigaud portraits portray the leaders who led the only successful slave revolt in modern history in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, leading to the formation of Haiti, the second independent state of the Americas (in 1804) and later the first Black republic (post-1806). They also showcase the importance of artists, image making, and projection in 19th-century Caribbean culture while foregrounding Haiti’s active participation in intellectual revolutionary debates in the Americas and in Europe, including the documented participation of freedom fighters from French Saint-Domingue (present day Haiti) in the American Revolutionary War. Held during the opening week of the exhibit, this conference will situate Haiti’s revolution and 19^th-century statecraft from a cultural and art historical perspective. 

To learn more about the painter Lafargue Rigaud, read Professor Marlene L. Daut’s article in Lapham’s Quarterly, “The Artist (Formerly) Known as Louis Rigaud”. 

Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center, Yale University; Yale Peabody Museum; Yale Center for British Art; and Yale University’s Departments of Black Studies and of French.

Register for this event.

For all information and schedule, see https://macmillan.yale.edu/glc/events/2026-11-13/gilder-lehrman-center-annual-conference-haiti-age-revolutions-lafargue