A selection of 15 pieces from the Waterloo Center for the Arts' Haitian art collection—the largest publicly held collection of its kind in the United States—is now on display at the Des Moines Art Center through summer 2025. The exhibition, titled "Light with Ourselves: Haitian Art in Iowa," includes paintings, metalwork, ritual objects, and beaded sequined banners called drapo, co-curated by Elizabeth Gollnick of the Des Moines Art Center and Chawne Paige of the Waterloo Center for the Arts. The collection began with a donation from F. Harold Reulin and his wife and has grown to over 2,000 pieces since 1977.
The exhibition matters because it highlights Iowa's unexpected role as a major repository of Haitian cultural heritage, while also underscoring the vulnerability of arts programming amid federal funding cuts. The Des Moines Art Center had been awarded an $11,275 NEH grant to support the exhibition's educational programming and logistics, but recent cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities have left reimbursement uncertain and forced the cancellation of a planned lecture on Haitian vodou. A related digitization project with Grinnell College also lost $350,000 in federal funding, illustrating how broader policy shifts directly impact cultural preservation and public access to art.