Port-au-Prince’s walls continued to speak in 2020, with muralists responding to the year’s compounding crises — political stalemate, COVID-19, gang violence, economic collapse — with images that bore witness to lived experience and expressed demands for a better future. The street art of 2020 added new themes to the political imagery that had defined the PetroCaribe protest era, incorporating COVID imagery, portraits of healthcare workers, and expressions of solidarity with communities under gang violence.
COVID-related murals drew on both Haitian artistic traditions and the international visual vocabulary of pandemic response, producing images of masks, hands being washed, and healthcare workers that were distinctively Haitian in their style and cultural references. Some murals incorporated both COVID messaging and political commentary, connecting the pandemic response failures to the broader governance crisis.
Murals honoring healthcare workers and community health volunteers who had continued working under dangerous and underpaid conditions during the pandemic appeared in several neighborhoods, created by artists who wanted to acknowledge the sacrifices of those maintaining essential services. These works of appreciation in public space were a form of collective gratitude that the circumstances otherwise made difficult to express.
Art historians studying Haitian visual culture noted that 2020’s mural production would represent an important historical record of how Haitians experienced a uniquely difficult year. The walls of Port-au-Prince, like the city’s tap-taps, had always been a living archive of Haitian social and political history — and 2020 had given them much to record.