Porter was the recipient of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1945. He took a leave of absence from teaching and spent a year in Cuba from 1945 to 1946, studying art and culture in Cuba and Haiti. In Haiti, Porter's subjects included the peasant class and landscapes of the country. While his work in Haiti focused on similar subjects as other Black artists who turned to Haiti for inspiration, such as William E. Scott and Aaron Douglas, his approach to the subject matter differed. He did not paint his Haitian subjects as simply picturesque and created monumental figures of the "market women" he saw. Porter's paintings and writing encouraged Americans to resist the urge upon traveling to Haiti and getting lost in the picturesque quality it holds on the surface. In an essay Porter wrote in 1946 for entitled "Picturesque Haiti" he wrote, "It is altogether too easy to make the aesthetic blunder so easily made in the presence of the new and the strange, that is, to say of Haitian life or landscape, 'Oh, how picturesque!' " While his paintings made in Haiti showcased the same characters as other artists at the time he surrounded this figures not with the bounty of an imagined tropical island but with urban debris. The representation of economic pressures and struggles that shaped the world of the Haitians he painted separates his work from other artists inspired by Haiti before him. His thorough research Haiti, Cuba, and West Africa, stimulated his creating courses at Howard in "Latin American Art" and "African Art and Architecture". In 1955, he was awarded a fellowship by the Belgium-American Art Seminar and studied Flemish and Dutch Art of the sixteenth thru the eighteenth century while in Belgium. With a grant from the newspaper, the Evening Star, Porter traveled to South Africa in 1963 to study West African architecture. He completed twenty-five paintings with South African themes during his time in the country.