Michel Martelly construction and briefly attended a community college in Miami. In 1986, after one semester, he returned to Haiti just as Jean-Claude Duvalier, then president-for-life, was heading into exile. In 1987, Martelly returned to Miami with his then-girlfriend, Sophia Saint-Rémy, whom he later married in a small ceremony in Miami, Florida. They returned to Haiti in 1988. Upon his return to Haiti, Martelly had his first breakthrough in the music industry when he began playing keyboard as a fill-in musician in local venues in Pétion-Ville and Kenscoff, upscale suburbs of Port-au-Prince. Martelly "sang playful, romantic numbers over a slow méringue beat
John de Martelly Martelly Benton’s job as head of the Painting Department. De Martelly was furious and quit. De Martelly’s lithographs, sold through the Associated American Artists Galleries in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, captured the essence of the rural American landscape. Eventually, de Martelly took a position as artist-in-residence at Michigan State University in East Lansing. By the late 1940s, de Martelly abandoned Regionalism for Abstract Expressionism and closely studied Daumier. His drawings, paintings, and prints are now in the collections of many museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,