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Photographer Brings Dominican Cave Art to Streets of Northern Manhattan

By Carla Zanoni | September 21, 2011 7:39pm

UPPER MANHATTAN — Daniel DuVall used to sell his photos outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side when visiting New York, but sitting alongside rows of other vendors and artists soon grew stale.

But in Northern Manhattan, vendors selling unique paintings and photography are rare, which is why DuVall’s presence in Inwood and Washington Heights has immediately stirred up interest.

DuVall’s work features images of cave drawings found in the depths of caves in the Dominican Republic, where he moved about a decade ago after vacationing at his sister’s home.

“It gets kind of boring in one spot,” he said of vending on Museum Mile. “So I thought, ‘why not try Washington Heights, there are Dominicans there, maybe they would be interested.'"

Pictographs drawn on cave walls in the Dominican Republic by the indigenous peoples who lived there before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Pictographs drawn on cave walls in the Dominican Republic by the indigenous peoples who lived there before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
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Daniel DuVall

Indeed, people originally from the Dominican Republic and uptowners intrigued by the idea of owning a slice of pre-Columbian history (before Christopher Columbus came to the island), trickled by his stand outside Fort Tryon Park on Dyckman Street and Broadway over the weekend.

“The Dominican people I’ve met are proud, they’re like, ‘that’s my country, I didn’t know that was there,’” he said. “It’s sort of like bumping into someone from your hometown.”

He said people in the Dominican Republic were astonished a “gringo” had thought of documenting the cave art, but have been mainly supportive of his work.

“Everyone has been positive, thanking me for doing this, for documenting their history,” he said.

DuVall is originally from Western Massachusettes, where he spent eight years teaching photography at Simon’s Rock College before stumbling upon the cave drawings while on vacation in the Dominican Republic.

He found that despite many of the drawings being out in the open and near tour sites, few people knew of the work.

“The more I did it down there, the more I learned how little it had been documented,” he said.

DuVall began his work as a photographer taking artistic shots of chalkboards with remnants of work scribbled in chalk and said the jump from chalkboard (white images drawn on dark board) was not so far to cave drawings (black images drawn on light stone).

“They are both of complex symbols that are no longer understood once erased,” DuVall, 56, said.
DuVall will be in the city through the weekend before returning to Santo Domingo, but he keeps up his contacts with folks in the United States through his blog, which details life in a “poor neighborhood” in Santo Domingo, the country’s largest city and capital.

According to Daniel DuVall, the
According to Daniel DuVall, the "pictographs were found in the entrances of the caves."
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Daniel DuVall

He plans to return to his spot at the entrance of Fort Tryon Park on Saturday and Sunday as well as the bustling strip of Hudson Heights on West 187th Street near Fort Washington Avenue. He also published a book featuring his photos called Rock Art Imagery of the Dominican Republic

Items sell from $20 for a five-by-seven matted print of the drawings to just under $100 for larger scale prints, and are also available on his website.

"I want the work to be in reach for people," he said, "especially in this economy."