Cuban-American Artist Research Articles

Earth-Bodies as Re-Existence: Ana Mendieta's Siluetas Beyond the Limits of Ecofeminism

This article engages the earth-body, or Silueta (Silhouette) (1973–80), works of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta to signal the Western limits of ecofeminist discourses and imagine a human-earthly relation beyond them. Ecofeminist thought has gained traction in feminist studies, especially given new materialist interventions which mark its ability to think a non-anthropocentric feminism in a time of environmental crisis. I recognize the potential of ecofeminism, and explore the ways it informed Mendieta's practice. Yet, drawing on decolonial feminist theory, I argue that a global South context and the "coloniality of [her] being" (Maldonaldo-Torres 2007) shifted Mendieta's engagement with the ecofeminist project. I read Mendieta as enacting an "aesthetics of re-existence" (Alban Achinte 2013) in response to a dehumanizing colonial context, using her art to "re-member" (Anzaldúa 2015) the negated dimensions of her existence in the Americas. Doing so reveals a persistent Western humanist lens that underwrites mainstream ecofeminist understandings of human-earthly relation, and also thinks with the African and Indigenous cosmologies Mendieta incorporated into her Siluetas about alternative modes of human relation to the earth. As Mendieta re-membered her own colonized being through her art, she helps us re-member ecofeminism's relation to the earth.

Editorial Introduction: Toward Care, Healing, and Justice

Editorial Introduction:Toward Care, Healing, and Justice Patti Duncan As we near the end of 2022, I'm delighted to introduce this latest issue of Feminist Formations. A special highlight of this issue is a Dossier featuring writings about Hil Malatino's influential text, Trans Care, curated by Jack Jen Gieseking and David A. Rubin. This exciting body of work features essays by Jules Gill-Peterson, Andrea J. Pitts, Jack Jen Gieseking, Rox Samer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, David A. Rubin, Davy Knittle, and Elliott Fukui and Christoph Hanssmann. In their introduction to the Dossier, Gieseking and Rubin describe Trans Care as a central text in the emerging field of trans studies, describing the way the book engages trans care webs, and the writers of the dossier essays respond to the text expressing their own forms of trans care. About the pieces in the dossier, Gieseking and Rubin write: "Each reading offers manifold insights for trans scholarship, trans teaching, trans collegiality, and even everyday trans lives. We structure the dossier to begin from our own geography: the academy. Then we wander across positions and disciplinary boundaries, fuzzy and otherwise, which Malatino perspicuously deems a form of 'sprawl' in his reply . . . [until we] finally arrive where so many us inevitably wind up for our survival: community-engaged activism." This movement and relation between the academy and community-engaged activism animates the dossier in important ways that help bring the ideas of trans care to life, and illuminate the many generative possibilities of theorizing and practicing trans care. Preceding the Dossier are five articles highlighting feminist themes including contemporary attacks on feminist and anti-racist research in higher education, decolonial practices in art and literature, responses to collective grief and trauma, and the gendered effects of the US-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. We begin with Liz Montegary's "Anti-Gender, Anti-University: 'Gender Ideology' and the Future of US Higher Education," in which Montegary critically examines the figure of Robert Oscar Lopez, a conservative "pro-family" former professor at a California public university. Through an analysis of the ways far right discourses such as those disseminated by Lopez increasingly attack feminist, queer, and anti-racist knowledge production in higher education, Montegary is attentive to both the "form and function" of conservative hostility toward the US academy. "To fully apprehend contemporary rightwing hostility toward the [End Page vii] academy," she writes, "we need to situate attacks on gender/sexuality and race/ ethnic studies with respect to the broader offensive on university-based research, particularly around migration, climate science, vaccinations, stem cells, and evolutionary theory." Needless to say, Montegary's article offers a timely response to current attacks on justice-based knowledge production, reminding us that such assaults—occurring in more and more places around the world—are both systemic and interconnected. Then, in "Earth Bodies as Re-Existence: Ana Mendieta's Siluetas Beyond the Limits of Ecofeminism," Jessica E. Jones considers Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta's relationship to ecofeminism through an analysis of her self-portraits in her 1973–1980 series, Siluetas. In the series Mendieta explored nonwestern cosmologies, centering Indigenous and African figures in her work. Jones draws on decolonial and postcolonial theories as well as critical race feminisms to give what she refers to as ontological weight to Mendieta's divergence from and interventions into white, mainstream feminisms. Relying on Adolfo Albán Achinte's notion of "re-existence," a concept underscoring the ways art can function as "a re-humanizing practice for the colonized," Jones reads Mendieta as "enacting an aesthetics of re-existence, working to decolonize her own being through art by 're-member[ing]' the negated—female, Black, Indigenous, and earthly—dimensions of her existence in the Americas through her Siluetas." In "Communicating Felt Knowledge to Decolonize #MeToo: A Native Feminist Approach to the Sherman Alexie Allegations," Cortney Smith intervenes into dominant narratives of the #MeToo movement by delving into the sexual harassment allegations leveled against Sherman Alexie through a close textual reading of two essays by Indigenous feminist authors. Through an analysis of Deborah A. Miranda's "Inmate #A-93223: In the San Quentin of My Mind" and Tracy Rector's "Best of 2018: Female Native Authors...

Editor’s Note

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NoteTanya SheehanTanya Sheehan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs more Americans come to terms with racial inequities and injustice in the United States, I have been asking more urgently, What can a journal devoted to interpreting archives of the past contribute to a critical reevaluation of the present? How might publishing histories of the visual arts in the US, built upon primary sources, effect change in a society defined and divided by race?New research in this issue offers ways into these questions by addressing topics as disparate as an elite nineteenth-century circle of white writers and painters, a collective of Black artists founded in the tumultuous year of 1968, and the feminist iconography of a Cuban-American artist. Peter Betjemann introduces us to the New York Sketch Club, whose work he argues was shaped by racial violence. Reflections on the American landscape by its famous members associated with the Hudson River School promoted ideas deeply invested in Indian removal and African slavery. Chris Dingwall takes us inside AfriCOBRA’s commitment to forging an autonomous community of Black artists in a racist, capitalist society. Members of this group not only created a unique aesthetic to express Black experiences, but they also deftly navigated the boundaries between art and economics, seeking to control their work’s commercial value. Finally, Xuxa Rodríguez hears in Ana Mendieta’s interview with critic Judith Wilson the specific experiences of a feminist, exiled, and bilingual woman of color—not reflections of white desires. Rodríguez reinterprets Mendieta’s oeuvre as speaking to the peculiar condition of displacement and unbelonging that comes with living as both a Cuban in exile and a racialized American citizen.These essays uncover the racial politics that engulf, and often directly motivate, art-making in the US. While Betjemann points to the long history of such politics, which white aesthetics has worked to deny, Dingwall and Rodríguez underscore the cruciality of centering archives of BIPOC artists and listening attentively to the stories they tell, especially if those stories challenge dominant narratives about American art and racist assumptions about non-white others. Such archives include the papers of Nela Arias-Misson and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, both profiled in this issue.We are also pleased to share two commissions: a curatorial intervention by Kevin M. Murphy, who asks what researchers can do when they encounter seemingly indecipherable sources, and an insightful analysis by Jennifer Liese of the artist talk, an enduring genre that has received surprisingly little critical attention. We look forward to focusing on the interpretation of oral archives in a special issue planned for 2023. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 60, Number 2Fall 2021 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717523 Views: 748 © 2021 The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Cuban Music, Global Screen: Hypervisibility, Identity Politics, and Resistance in Seidy ‘La Niña’ Carrera’s Tumbao

ABSTRACT Music can serve as an important vehicle for making political statements, cohering community and forming solidarity at the intersections of identity, and exposing structures of inequality linked to (post)colonially informed power hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. However, intensified global flows of images and capital in a time of digital dominance have reconfigured existing notions of musical ‘protest’. Through a systemic functional-multimodal approach to the music video for Cuban American artist Seidy ‘La Niña’ Carrera’s Tumbao, this article argues that the politics of identity in music video are often rather compromised to offer certain kinds of precarious resistance. The tensions between the political and the creative-commercial in Seidy’s interpellation as a foreign-but-familiar, national/diasporic-but-exotic mulata cubana evince the ambivalence of claims to protest when they become hypervisible on a ‘global screen.’ A hypervisible figure must market themselves in certain ways; any kind of political intervention must be carefully balanced and constantly negotiated. Ultimately, this article highlights a new identity politics of hypervisibility that is inextricably tied to music as a form of resistance in an age of streaming and video-sharing.

How do you say “Bocour” in French? The work of Carmen Herrera and acrylic paints in post-war Europe

The Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera (born 1915) was the subject of a partial retrospective, titled Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in the fall of 2016. On this occasion, it was noted that the artist had listed the binding media for all the paintings in the exhibit as acrylic even though the earliest works date from the late 1940s to early 1950s, when Herrera was in Paris and acrylics were not yet known to be commercially available in Europe. Questioned about the unexpected media assignments, Herrera recalled buying early acrylic paints in an art supply store near her studio in the French capital. Thus, for this study, a selection of five paintings by Carmen Herrera dated from 1948 to 1952, for which there was no sign or record of previous conservation treatments, were analyzed with a variety of non-invasive and micro-invasive instrumental techniques to characterize the painting materials in order to ascertain whether early experimental acrylic formulations might have been used. A preliminary investigation of the elemental composition of the paints entailed non-invasive analysis of the artworks with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Twenty-one paint samples were then removed from selected areas for micro-invasive examination. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and pyrolysis–gas chromatography/mass spectrometry with and without sample derivatization with tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide were employed to gather detailed information on the chemical composition of the binding media. In addition, complementary analyses by Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were conducted to shed light on the pigments, colorants, and extenders present. Results revealed that the paints are composed of a range of both traditional and modern materials, including: calcite, gypsum, barite, and titanium white (in the form of rutile and anatase); cadmium yellows, oranges, and reds; Pigment Red 83 – the synthetic counterpart of natural dye alizarin (1,2-dihydroxyanthraquinone) – precipitated onto an aluminum-rich substrate; viridian and emerald green; cerulean blue, cobalt blue, as well as Prussian blue; iron-containing earths and umber-based pigments; as well as bone and/or ivory black. More remarkably, a complex progression of organic binders was uncovered: mixtures of modified oils, detected in paintings dated to 1948 and 1949, were gradually replaced or combined with other binding media, such as acrylics (mostly n-butyl methacrylate), polyvinyl acetate, and oil-based alkyds based on ortho-phthalic acid, in works painted during the following three years. Remarkably, the first occurrence of acrylic binders was observed in a painting dated to 1949, well before the date of introduction to the European market of the first acrylic-based paints by George Rowney & Sons in 1963. In addition to offering insight into Herrera's materials and techniques, this study represents a major advancement in the current scholarship regarding the availability and use of acrylic-based artists’ paints in Europe.

Editorial Introduction: Feminist Teaching for Social Justice

Editorial Introduction:Feminist Teaching for Social Justice Patti Duncan 2018 marks the thirtieth year of Feminist Formations. As we celebrate this milestone and reflect on a history of publishing cutting-edge feminist writing, poetry, and art, we also consider the futures of feminist intellectual projects within the current political climate. How might Feminist Formations continue to engage in solidarity with movements for social justice, imagining a different world in these difficult and precarious times? In terms of envisioning the politics and stakes of feminist knowledge production within and beyond the academy, what kinds of work can and should we engage in, and what are the epistemological, political, and coalitional labors that could best inform such collective imaginings and actions? Conventional forms of knowledge production within the neoliberal university have failed many of our communities—especially those marginalized by multiple systems of oppression. In fact, as scholars including Sara Ahmed and Roderick Ferguson remind us, they were never intended to support our struggles. Along with the increasing privatization and professionalization of the university comes greater policing of scholarly work that challenges the status quo, contributing to a sense of precarity for many of us working within the academy in today's political climate. To reflect on these questions in this special issue commemorating our thirtieth year, we invited feminist scholars, artists, leaders, and movement builders to share their thoughts on feminist teaching for social justice in order to initiate conversations and share skills and resources that will broaden the scope and impact of feminist knowledge production. Many of these writers have a history with Feminist Formations as published authors, reviewers, and members of our Editorial Board. Some of them will also be participating in a special panel discussion at this year's National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss these, and related questions. We engage this year's NWSA conference theme, Just Imagine: Imagining Justice, as a way to remember and honor the history of Feminist Formations, which began thirty years ago as the NWSA Journal. We compiled what follows as our collective engagement with what it means to teach now—in the current political and [End Page vii] social climate—and to consider what strategies might help us move forward in ways that resist pressures for increased institutionalization, opting instead for new ways of knowing, insurgent practices, and radical futures. Authors in this special issue also consider how our collective project of publishing intersectional feminist scholarship can function as a kind of "resistant imaginary," to use Vivian May's words, that unsettles dominant imaginaries and imagines justice. Fittingly, our cover features a piece by artist Cristy C. Road entitled "Justice," from Road's self-published 2017 Next World Tarot, in ink, marker, and acrylic paint. Road, a Cuban-American artist, writer, and musician, created the Next World Tarot as a deck of cards focused on resilience and resistance. This striking piece, "Justice," unsettles dominant imaginaries and brings together images of collective resistance, activism, revolutionary love, and joy in the struggle. The image centers representations of people of color, queer and trans resistance, and in Road's words, features "body outlaws, endangered cultures, and anti-colonial belief systems." "Justice" is the ideal art for the cover of this special issue, which brings together writings on various strategies for seeking justice within and beyond the academy, particularly through the application of feminist pedagogies, broadly imagined. We begin this special collection with Qwo-Li Driskill's powerful short prose piece, "Boneset," in which they consider what it means to break, and how we navigate our way through trauma within the academy, and within the larger world around us. Radical teaching, Driskill reminds readers, "is vital activist work. As radical scholars, we shouldn't dismiss the academy as a space from which to create radical change." Reflecting on the way that the limits of the neoliberal academy are frequently taken to mean that real social justice work occurs only outside of academic spaces, Driskill urges us to realize the potential of our teaching and scholarship for social justice. "We can create new spaces," they write. "We, after all, create institutions." Carrie N. Baker, in her article, "Teaching to Empower...

“Neither here nor there”: traces of the feminine in the photoperformances of Ana Mendieta

This article addresses the questions triggered by the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who has a large part of her work composed exclusively of camera performances and what she termed earth-body-works. Through her strategies of representation based on the disappearance of the female body, Mendieta draws our attention to the legitimized violence and erasures through the establishment of fixed identities – ethnic and gender – within the hegemonic discourses of power. The notions of performance as an instrument for transmission of knowledge and cultural memory, of performativity as a constitutive factor of the categories of identity, as well as of archive, repertory and live event will be explored in the effort to problematize as the themes of exile and feminine, regular in the art of Mendieta, reach a deeply political dimension based on their artistic propositions that integrate photography with performance art.

“Seeing in the Dark”: The Aesthetics of Disappearance and Remembrance in the Work of Alberto Rey

This article examines how contemporary Cuban American artists have experimented with visual languages of trauma to construct an intergenerational memory about the losses of exile and migration. It considers the work of artist Alberto Rey, and his layering of individual loss onto other, traumatic episodes in the history of the Cuban diaspora. In the series Las Balsas (The Rafts, 1995–99), Rey explores the impact of the balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994 by transforming objects left behind by Cuban rafters on their sometimes ill-fated journeys to the United States into commemorative relics. By playing on a memory of absence and the misplacement of objects found along the migration route of the Florida Straits, Rey's visual language transmits the memory of grief across time, space and generational divides. Rey's visual strategies are part of an “extended memory” tied to the aesthetics of disappearance and remembrance in contemporary Cuban American art. His use of objects as powerful memory texts that serve to bring fragmented autobiographical, family and intergenerational testimonies of loss together suggests how visual artists can provide us with more collective, participatory and redemptive models of memory work.

Neoliberalism, Historiography, Identity Politics

This article argues that the history of Latino Theater is coemergent with the rise of neoliberalism in the United States and suggests that many of the major shifts in Latino theater production must be viewed within the development of artistic practices impacted by privatization, the development of transnational labor markets, and the incursion of market-based practices in arts funding. In doing so, it breaks with the decade-by-decade historiography of most Latino theater histories and with traditional understandings of identity-based art movements that posit a revolution-and-retrenchment argument from the 1960s to the present. The authors consider the funding records of major Latino theaters, their conditions of production, and the historiography embedded in the plays of Chicano, Nuyorican, and Cuban American artists.

Identity, memory and diaspora, voices of Cuban-American artists, writers and philosophers

Identity, memory and diaspora, voices of Cuban-American artists, writers and philosophers

Playing Dead in Cuba: Coco Fusco's Stagings of Dissensus

This article examines how the Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco reframes Cuban exile politics through her negation of the policing of movement within and across the island nation's borders. Fusco's rejection of the nationalist politics that have traditionally limited the discourse of the Cuban exile community enables her to explore previously disarticulated dimensions of the exile experience. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's notion of dissensus as the performance of a wrong, I discuss Fusco's stagings of the exclusions of exile in two clandestine performances, executed in Havana in 1997 and 2000, in which she examines the exile's impossible desire for repatriation. Employing an uncanny blurring of fantasy and reality in her re-enactment of a wake and staging of a burial, Fusco, in her site-specific performances, offers new possibilities for imagining Cuban identity and exilic mobility in the neoliberal era.

Cultural Erotics in Cuban America , and: Cuba Transnational (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, and: Cuba Transnational David William Foster Ricardo L. Ortiz , Cultural Erotics in Cuban America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 328 pp. Damián J. Fernández , ed., Cuba Transnational. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 216 pp. Ortiz's principal scholarly activity involves the intersection of Caribbean writing and queer theory; he is especially interested in Cuba, he has also concerned himself with the Caribbean as a historical and cultural block. Cultural Erotics in Cuban America is unquestionably a major scholarly accomplishment. This is certainly an original undertaking, since little has been written about erotic issues as they relate to Cuban American cultural production. True, there are some well-known Cuban American artists whose works are marked by queer issues, such as Elías Miguel Muñoz and Achy Obejas; Obejas in particular has received excellent critical attention. And the lesbian performance artist Carmelita Tropicana has been especially noted in theater circles. But the idea of dealing with erotics in a larger frame is a new approach, and it is one that allows Ortiz to range over a wide array of Cuban American cultural production. He does include traditional literature (e.g., the remarkable physician-poet Rafael Campo), the fiction of Roberto Fernández and Cristina García, and the sociocultural essays of Gustavo Pérez-Firmat. However, in the spirit of a broad definition of cultural studies, Ortiz also examines the song lyrics of Gloria Estefan and Albita Rodríguez. Perhaps the study would have been even more inclusive if filmmaking were to also have figured in (I can think immediately of documentaries like Havana Nagila and Adio Kerida), but the decision to limit the examination to print culture (including song lyrics) is a reasonable one. However, it is evident that this study possesses, at least in terms of its basic premises, the qualities of an original contribution. As for the quality of the actual interpretive text, it is solid. Ortiz works with a number of fundamental propositions: the fact of "writing in Cuban"—that is, the way in which a Cuban mentality, shaped by complex sociolinguistic and [End Page 113] cultural factors determines a Cuban "way" that has transferred to the United States; the emphasis on the body, which is certainly essentially modern/post-modern, but here relates to the way in which physical dislocation, coupled with the abuse of the body (particularly in the case of women and queers) in Cuba before exile, brings with it a particular emphasis on corporal boundaries and configurations (concomitantly, there is an interest in the extensions of island homophobia, both before and after Castro, and its projections on Cuban American society; the added dislocation of dispersal from the closed Miami community, which is both Cuba in exile and a nostalgia factory for a Cuba that barely exists anymore—such dispersal brings with it a double engagement with a founding Cuban anchor; and the interaction of English and Spanish, which means both the acquisition of English as a literary language (as is the case of the U.S. Latino community in general; the current generation writes almost exclusively in English) and the diglossia, on one axis of academic Spanish and Cuban (colloquial) Spanish, and on another of "real" Cuban Spanish (once again the nostalgia factor comes into play here) and Miami Spanish (which, I might add, hardly retains as close ties to Spanish back home as ideological positions pretend). These parameters unquestionably provide some intriguing primes for the organization of Ortiz's study, and it is significant that, rather than a conventional organization in terms of authors and works, he works essentially in terms of conceptual clusters that allow him to propose a comprehensive cultural geography. One of his major tropes in that of "perplexed erotics," which is what makes his previous interest in queer studies particularly useful for this monograph, where a sense of the queer refers not only to sexuality but also to cultural practices as a whole. Finally, Ortiz's use of theory is very judicious and circumspect. In this, his study stands in stark contrast to fellow Cuban American José Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the...

THE SERIAL SPACES OF ANA MENDIETA

The work of the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta has often been criticized for embracing the traditional alignment of woman and nature, an alignment which is generally perceived as reliant upon essentialist ideas about female identity. Recent commentators have defended Mendieta's work against the charge of essentialism by interpreting her work through the lens of Judith Butler's idea of gender as performance. Mendieta's work, it is argued, destabilizes identity by emphasizing the repeated performances of this alignment. In other words, the emphasis falls on the ‘deed’ rather than the ‘doer’, to use Butler's terms. While the capacity of Mendieta's work to sustain these different readings points to its richness, essentialism still remains a scare term, despite feminist literature from the 1980s and 1990s. This article considers Mendieta's Silueta series in the light of this reconsideration of essentialism.

American Idols with Caribbean Soul: Cubanidad and the Latin Grammys

The televised broadcasts of the Latin Grammy ceremonies attempt to create an inter-Latino space through scripted dialogue that identifies the country of origin of featured artists. Such markers of identification highlight diversity, while the absence of more nuanced discussions of the political and ideological differences that exist between and among these countries ensures a market-friendly construction of a presumably non-politicized Latino panethnic group of musicians and fans. This paper focuses on the participation of Cuban-American artists in the 2000, 2002, and 2003 Latin Grammy ceremonies. While other artists are introduced through scripted dialogue that situates them in relation to a specific country of origin, Celia Cruz and Gloria Estefan are identified as “American” and “Caribbean,” respectively. These creative titles of identification mark the women as anything-but-Cuban. In doing so, the scripted dialogue inadvertently draws attention to the limitations of the Latin Grammy's project of promoting a non-politicized image of their award nominees and Latino music fan base. Most of the dialogue on the award show upholds the popular culture industry definitions of Latinidad that presume a natural affinity for one's home country. However, a closer examination reveals that the home country preference is coded differently for Cuban-Americans than for other Latino artists.