The Biggest Gifts to University Art Museums in 2026

34 Modern Haitian paintings to the Princeton University Art Museum

In June, the Princeton University Art Museum announced it had received 34 20th-century Haitian paintings from the Hellers’ collection, including works by many of Haiti’s most celebrated modern artists—Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Hector Hyppolite, Jasmin Joseph, Philomé Obin, Sénèque Obin, André Pierre, Louisiane Saint-Fleurant and Gerard Valcin among them. The gift forms the foundation of a new collection of Haitian art at the museum, expanding its representation of the Caribbean, a region long overlooked in global art history. Beginning this fall, paintings from the gift will be installed throughout the museum’s galleries, creating cross-cultural dialogues with the collection rather than being compartmentalized as a separate grouping. 

A successful businessman and lawyer who studied history at Princeton before continuing his studies at Harvard, J. Roderick Heller has maintained a lifelong passion for history and preservation. He has also served as vice chairman and trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and as founding chairman of the Civil War Trust. The Caribbean, however, was a passion his wife, Kay, had long held and eventually shared with him. Her connection to Haiti began when she worked at Hôpital Bon Samaritain with Dr. William Hodges and his family in the small, remote town of Limbé in northern Haiti. The country’s art immediately captured her attention and imagination, and she once wrote, “Nothing prepared me for the life and vitality of Haiti.”

The Heller collection centers on artists associated with Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, founded in 1944, and reflects Haiti’s artistic production throughout the 20th Century. In 2024, some of the works were featured in the exhibition “A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections” at the Tampa Museum of Art. The show followed another exhibition at the museum, “Island Delights: The Spirit and Passion of Haitian Art,” which Kay co-curated in 2000 and which marked the institution’s first presentation of Caribbean art. Meanwhile, Roderick Heller has also undertaken the ambitious task of assembling a catalog raisonné of his favorite Haitian artist, Rigaud Benoit—one of the first artists to join the Center d’Art in its early years.