Known for his immersive documentary style, American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon traveled to Haiti several times between 1983 and 1986 to experience the lively club scene in Port-au-Prince. What he captured instead was a portrait of a country in the grip of a revolution against the violent and bloody Duvalier family dictatorship, which spanned from the 1950s to the 1980s.
"Beyond the Mountains," a collection of 38 black-and-white images by Lyon, is opening at the Chrysler Museum of Art on Friday. The photos were a gift to the museum from television host, political commentator and photography collector George Stephanopoulos, and were published in Lyon’s 1986 book, "Merci Gonaïves: A Photographer's Account of Haiti and the February Revolution." The phrase “Mercy Gonaïves” appeared on the streets after the Duvalier regime fell, offering thanks to the town of Gonaïves, one of the most significant birthplaces of the revolution.
The exhibition is open through May 17, 2026.
Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. His totalitarian regime was characterized by corruption, torture and killing of his opponents. His 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude, assumed office after his father’s death and established a regime defined by corruption and an opulent lifestyle. Economic uprisings and pressure from the Catholic church forced Jean-Claude into voluntary exile in 1986; he returned to Haiti in 2011, where he was taken into custody and lenient house arrest. He died three years later from a heart attack.
Lyon's approach to his work was shaped by the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and '70s, which is characterized by a more emotionally engaging, though factual, perspective. He had embedded himself among activists in the Civil Rights Movement, outlaw motorcycle gangs and prisoners. Vivid, empathetic and raw, his sometimes controversial images have been widely published in iconic books such as "The Movement," "The Bikeriders" and "Conversations with the Dead."
Other photographers who documented Haiti’s revolution often depicted the violence and militarism of the late Duvalier era. In contrast, Lyon revealed a more complex, layered reality in largely multivalent photos. In “Gonaïves, February 9, 1986,” he hints at the intersection of political struggle, poverty and joie de vivre by juxtaposing graffiti, crumbling walls, and a young girl in a puff-sleeved dress moving jauntily along the sidewalk.
In “February 7, Port-au-Prince,” a differently composed image, students enter the capital sitting atop a tap-tap vehicle, waving green branches and pieces of uniforms torn from the Tonton Macoute or paramilitary secret police. Their bodies form a strong triumphant triangle not unlike Delacroix's “Liberty Leading the People” or Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” But, rather than romanticism and idealization, Lyon depicts a human, improvised celebration of youthful jubilance and makeshift ceremony.
Nyree Dowdy, curator of the exhibition, said the show developed from a "kismet moment."
Dowdy is in the last year of a three-year curatorial fellowship through the Art Bridges Foundation, which was created in 2017 by Alice Walton, a philanthropist, arts patron and billionaire heiress to the Walmart fortune. The Foundation aims to increase access to museum collections by expanding audiences and introducing innovative programming.
The Fellows Program was established to expand career access for those in historically underrepresented groups in the arts while broadening fellowship roles within museums. Most of Dowdy’s work has been with the Atlantic Coast Cohort, an Art Bridges-funded partnership, which takes pieces from the Chrysler’s collection to three regional historically Black colleges and universities.
Chelsea Pierce, the Chrysler’s curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, asked Dowdy to peruse the photography collection with an eye toward an exhibition since the museum currently has no photography curator. Dowdy was especially drawn to Lyon’s photos, having learned of another Chrysler curator’s connection to Haiti.
Dowdy found that the images spoke not only to protest but also to tourism, the relationship to the Dominican Republic and the politics of desire. She learned that Lyon, who is white, called himself an outsider and she became aware of her own outsider status as a non-Haitian. This caused her to want to “dig out the narratives beyond Lyon’s” and other outsiders’ points of view.
She sought out the work of academics such as the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a Haitian professor of anthropology and social sciences at the University of Chicago, and “Zoomed” with Gina Athena Ulysse, an interdisciplinary artist, scholar and writer. She also did a deep dive into the music of Haitian-American classical and folk musician, Leyla McCalla, who served as artist in residence and visiting scholar at the University of Richmond from 2022-2025.
While reading Trouillot’s 1995 book, "Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History," Dowdy considered the importance of whose stories are told and whose voices are telling them. From Ulysse, known for her work on Black feminism and the diaspora, she discovered the concept of “rasanblaj,” an interweaving of people and things, ideas and spirituality. Dowdy realized she had inadvertently adopted this approach in her exploration of Lyon’s work, dipping into the arts and humanities, geopolitics and social sciences.
From McCalla, Dowdy experienced the power of a cross-cultural perspective. Combing through university archives and combining African rhythms with Haitian and New Orleans folk traditions resulted in music that has been described as pulsing with history while feeling original and innovative.
Through Dowdy’s hybrid chronological and thematic approach to exhibition design, she aims for an approach to "Beyond the Mountains" that is similarly fresh and unexpected.
"Beyond the Mountains" opens Friday, Dec. 19 at the Chrysler Museum of Art, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, 757-664-6200, www.chrysler.org