Art In Cuba Research Articles

The Construction Mystique: The Revolution as Building Site in Contemporary Art from Cuba

ABSTRACT Cuban artists have been politically engaged since the 1959 revolution. Although many scholars have since studied how Cuban artists have responded to the notions of utopia and dystopia on the Marxist-Leninist island, no one has examined how, for decades, artists have turned to the topic of construction as a metaphor for the creation of a socialist society. I examine the changing relationship between cultural creators and the state by analyzing artists’ inclusion of images of masons, cement, bricks, and hard hats in their works. Through their involvement with building-site imagery—from erecting actual apartment towers to imagining fantastical forms of housing—Cuban artists have long reflected on their conflicted feelings toward the role of art in Cuba and toward their commitment, as both citizens and art workers, to the revolutionary project.

Contributors

Luis Camnitzer is a Uruguayan artist and the author of New Art of Cuba (1994) and, more recently, One Number Is Worth One Word (2020). He co-organized the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s, with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, at the Queens Museum in New York in 1999. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid exhibited a retrospective of his work in 2018–19.Irmgard Emmelhainz is a writer and researcher based in Mexico City. Her work on film, the Palestine Question, art, culture, and neoliberalism has been translated into many languages, and she has presented it in an array of international settings. Recent publications include The Sky Is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine (2017) and Jean-Luc Godard's Political Filmmaking (2019).Raino Isto is currently a fellow at the Educational Video Center in New York City and is editor-in-chief of ARTMargins Online. His practice focuses on integrating social justice with arts education for youth in both urban and rural contexts. His work has been published in Third Text, Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, International Labor and Working-Class History, and The Getty Research Journal.Karolina Majewska-Güde teaches in the Department of Art History at the Catholic Private University Linz. She is the author of Ewa Partum's Artistic Practice: An Atlas of Continuity in Different Locations (2020). She recently curated two exhibitions—Ewa Partum: My Gallery Is an Idea. Galeria Adres Archive, in collaboration with Berenika Partum, at Galeria Studio in Warsaw (2018), and Irena Lagator: For the Common Good (2019), at KU Linz.Mohammadreza Mirzaei is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Mirzaei's articles have appeared in such journals as Herfeh: Honarmand, Kaarnamaa, and Tandis. He is a coeditor of issue 51 of Herfeh: Honarmand, devoted to Italian photography, and the translator of Stefano Benni's Grammatica di Dio from Italian into Persian (2014).Bruno Moreschi is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of São Paulo and a multidisciplinary artist with a PhD in Arts at the State University of Campinas. Christopher Bratton is a professor in the School of Art, Design, and Architecture at Aalto University (Finland) and a cofounder of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR). Dalida Maria Benfield is an artist, film-maker, writer, and researcher. She is the research and program director of the CAD+SR. Gabriel Pereira is a PhD Fellow at Aarhus University (Denmark), where he uses creative methods to blend science and tech nology research with artistic practice. Guilherme Falcão is an art director working with and researching print and digital media. He has a BA in Graphic Design from Senac University Center (Brazil) and studied art history and curating at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Brought together through the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, these artists are collaborating on the Global _rt Stories project, a rewriting of normative of art history, its ideologies and erasures.Catherine Spencer teaches in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (2020) and the coeditor, with Jo Applin and Amy Tobin, of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (2018).Rachel Weiss is a writer and curator. She is the author of Now What? Quandaries of Art and the Radical Past (2021) and To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (2011) and co-author and editor of Por América: La Obra de Juan Francisco Elso (2000) and Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial (2011). She edited the 2010 book On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias by Luis Camnitzer.

Acercamientos históricos, antropológicos e iconológicos a La Gemelidad o Lo Jimagua en las artes visuales cubanas.

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar un recorrido histórico, antropológico y visual de la representaciónde “gemelos”. De esta manera, revelar los elementos coincidentes que permitan la comprensión delpensamiento africano y sus consecuencias en la creación de iconos, arquetipos y motivos en las artesvisuales cubanas. Para ello se indaga en culturas africanas y sus influencias trasatlánticas desde diversosinvestigadores, entre los que podrían mencionarse: Iván Bargna, Lázara Menéndez y Angelina Pollack-Eltz. El resultado será un resumen con la descripción de dichas nociones, a partir de la cronología deobras y autores que han tratado con La Gemelidad o Lo Jimagua dentro de la temática “afrocubana” enel ámbito de la plástica en Cuba con énfasis en la obra de José Bedia.

Susanna Temkin. Review of "Adiós Utopia: Art in Cuba Since 1950" by Eugenio Valdés Figueroa and Ana Clara Silva.

Susanna Temkin. Review of "Adiós Utopia: Art in Cuba Since 1950" by Eugenio Valdés Figueroa and Ana Clara Silva.

La ensayística cultural de Jorge Mañach desde la teoría del arte y los estudios culturales latinoamericanos

Jorge Manach (1898-1961) was one of the most important Cuban intellectuals in the first half of the XXth century and his cultural essays reached continental fame. Although, numerous authors agree in identify him for these elements, the certain thing is that he doesn’t still integrate the index of authors from Latin America that are recognized inside the tradition of the Latin American Cultural Studies. On the other hand, their contribution has neither been recognized to the development of the theory of the art, because it persists the idea that this discipline still has limitations in its epistemic development in our region. This paper pretends to meditate on Jorge Manach’s cultural essays, starting from its relationship with the Latin American Cultural Studies and its contribution to the theory of the art in Cuba.

Relics and Erotics: Cuban Art after the Revolution

Relics and Erotics:Cuban Art after the Revolution Abigail McEwen Rolando Pérez. Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2012. 318 pp. Rachel Weiss. To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 322 pp. Tropes of both the “Baroque” and the “utopian” have long persisted in readings of twentieth-century Latin American art and literature. Two new books, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts by Rolando Pérez and To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art by Rachel Weiss, draw upon these interpretive metaphors in considering aspects of Cuban visual culture in the decades following the Revolution. Their subjects are separated by time and space: Sarduy left Cuba in 1960, remaining in exile for the duration of his life, and Weiss’s narrative unfolds almost exclusively in Havana during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet their exegeses of opposing impulses—toward the imperfect (likely from the Portuguese barroco, or “rough pearl”), on the one hand, and on the other toward the impossible ideal—speak analogously to the historical conditions that have shaped the past half-century of Cuban arts and letters. These books contribute to a body of scholarship around contemporary Cuban art that has swelled in recent years, sparked by reconsiderations of post-Revolutionary culture at large and, with respect to the visual arts, seemingly insatiable market interest. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera’s recent book, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora (2011), describes the connective tissue between Weiss and Pérez’s contributions, chronicling the amorphous landscape of Cuban art in exile. Lynette M.F. Bosch, in Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque (2004), focused on a very specific Cuban community (her Neo-Baroque does not engage Sarduy’s). Luis Camnitzer (New Art of Cuba [rev. ed., 2003]) and Holly Block (Art Cuba: The New Generation [2001]) provided authoritative, early accounts of the “New Cuban Art,” defining the movement in generational and historical terms and relating key documentary and encyclopedic information. A holistic history of contemporary Cuban art, one attempting to [End Page 109] relate work by artists who stayed on the island and those who left, remains to be written. Despite the proliferation of these targeted histories and of monographic studies, Cuba and the Caribbean tend to be dissociated from surveys of contemporary Latin American art. Differences in postwar developments need not preclude conceptual homologies, however, and hemispheric constructions of the Baroque and the utopian may yet prove instructive in this regard. Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor thoughtfully engaged the leitmotif of the Baroque in their exhibition, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000), although they referenced Cuba at only a theoretical level. By and large, scholars in literary fields have taken the lead in considering these aesthetic questions in relation to hemispheric topoi. Recently published books by Lois Parkinson Zamora (The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction [2006]) and Monika Kaup (Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film [2012]) are particularly notable; Rafael Rojas (Las repúblicas de aire: utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica [2009]) and Antoni Kapcia (Cuba: Island of Dreams [2000]), among others, have critically explored utopian discourse. The recuperation of Sarduy as a bridge figure between literature and aesthetics may serve not only to better illuminate his own work, as Pérez’s book begins to do, but also to more fully integrate the Cuban philosophical tradition within the fields of Latin American art history and criticism. Read together, these books by Pérez and Weiss offer new meditations on the conjunction between Baroque and utopian praxis in post-Revolutionary Cuban visual culture. They manifest two discrete approaches to the field—academic monograph; eyewitness historical survey—and yet each seeks in a basic way to excavate an ideational provenance for creative work across Cuba’s cultural field. Before further consideration of common interests, each book is here discussed separately and within the scope of its given intentions. Reimagining the Neobaroque Body A...

Visual Rhetoric and Oppositional Consciousness: Poster Art in Cuba and the United States

Visual Rhetoric and Oppositional Consciousness: Poster Art in Cuba and the United States

Os Filhos de Guilherme Tell: Breve ensaio sobre as gerações artísticas cubanas

Este ensaio é um breve resumo de parte da dissertação do Mestrado em Ciência da Arte, defendida na Universidade Federal Fluminense em 2001. O trabalho faz uma introdução ao estudo das gerações artísticas cubanas, focalizando sua atenção na chamada “Generación de los Ochenta”, que marcou presença no panorama da arte contemporânea nas duas últimas décadas do século XX e se atreveu a questionar os dogmas de um estado projetado até esse momento ante a opinião nacional como perfeito, sem renunciar à identidade com os princípios políticos e sociais defendidos por esse mesmo estado; uma geração que se propôs abrir portas e derrubar muros, e só conseguiu abrir janelas - amplas o suficiente como para focalizar a atenção do povo cubano e do resto do mundo, na ocorrência de um fenômeno artístico que focalizou entre suas principais propostas a discussão aberta de problemas extra-artísticos vinculados à questões sociais e políticas, tendo especial cuidado de não cair nos extremos panfletários ou propagandísticos das obras - entendidos como banalização e corrupção - de suas idéias. Esta Geração teve o perfil do momento histórico que lhe deu origem e sustento, e que ao mesmo tempo, conseguiu conquistar com sua própria voz, a atenção sobre uma outra face da política cubana, partindo dos mitos sobre a formação do “homem novo”, e trouxe à tona, desde novos pontos de vista, a discussão aberta sobre os direitos das novas gerações, nascidas sob o significante da Revolução Cubana

The Lumpen and the Popular: Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Julio García Espinosa

This article deals with the post‐1959 re‐definitions of the concept of ‘popular culture’ and its relation to the cultural legacy of Havana's nightlife during the 1950s. After the 1959 Revolution, many Euro‐Cuban cultural producers saw and represented the cultural expressions of the Afro‐Cuban poor in the capital as being central to Cuban ‘popular culture’. This article focuses mainly on two Euro‐Cuban authors, writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante and filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, whose works during the first years of the 1960s were highly influenced by Havana's nightlife culture. What both authors shared was a view of the nocturnal in Havana as the heterotopical space and time—following Foucault's concept of ‘heterotopia’ (1998: 175‐185)—where the divisions between high and low art in Cuba could be transcended through the encounters of the different cultural traditions then cohabiting in the city.

?Growing the Size of the Black Woman?: Feminist Activism in Havana Hip Hop

- less, Black Cubans do face all manners of discrimination in contemporary Cuba. With few formal political outlets open to young Black Cubans (Fernandes 2003), hip hop has emerged on the island as a powerful form of political expression: a kind of theater of the oppressed that addresses the racial and economic problems encountered by Black Cubans (Boal 1985). The all-female group Las Krudas stands out as particularly courageous within this hip-hop scene. In 2003, I spent four months studying at the University of Havana. While in Cuba, my research partner and I recorded interviews with 23 women of African descent. The members of Las Krudas were among this group. I draw upon these interviews to sketch a portrait of a striking phenomenon: the emergence of a strongly oppositional, Black, feminist activist art in Cuba. I first saw Las Krudas perform at a concert of women rappers; I was struck by their positive message, and they were kind enough to invite me to their home for an interview. We chatted like old friends before we began tape recording the interview. One of the first topics we addressed was how they see their intersecting identities. Olivia tells me:

New Art of Cuba

New Art of Cuba

New Art of Cuba.

New Art of Cuba.

Information systems of the Ministry of Culture: a first enquiry into the present state of the Latin American and Caribbean arts collections in the city of Havana

Art libraries have a vital role to play in documenting and disseminating the dynamic cultural identities of Latin American and Caribbean peoples. In Havana, some eight libraries and information centres share the task of documenting the art of Cuba itself, and of other Latin American and Caribbean countries. However, their collections are under-resourced and, in most cases, out-of-date; automation is overdue, and there is an urgent need to create a union catalogue and to develop a network of cooperation. (The text of a paper presented to the IFLA Section of Art Libraries at the IFLA General Conference at Havana, August 1994).

New art of Cuba

New art of Cuba

Women and Art in Cuba: "Feminism Is Not Our Issue"

Women and Art in Cuba: "Feminism Is Not Our Issue"