Cuban Art Research Articles

Corpo (Auto)Biografado em Facial Hair Transplant (1972) e Rape Scene (1973): configurações de sentidos para uma pedagogia performativa feminista

ABSTRACT This article presents a discussion about gender based on the notions of performance and performativity, seeking to weave relationships between these terms with art and the educational field. It pursues the idea of a performative feminist pedagogy, performed by the (auto)biographed body, in artistic performances developed by women, involving the issue of gender, more specifically the performances Facial Hair Transplants (1972) and Rape Scene (1973), by the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Supported by researchers from multiple areas, this study aims to critically contribute to the area of education, redefining educational practice from an aesthetic and gender principle, offering reflections on the production of difference.

The didactic treatment of Carlos Enriquez's work in art education and his aesthetic vision

The article addresses some of the characteristics linked to the significance of "what is Cuban" in the visual arts, as part of the aesthetic problems and the existence of a Cuban art that has been a subject widely discussed. From these keys we recognize the figure of Carlos Enríquez to characterize his personality and work from a vision of his criollismo as part of the Cuban nationality and identity, and the dynamics of some of these elements to be taken into account in a didactics by arts professionals in defense of cultural identity.

Spectator as Witness: Trauma and Testimonio in Contemporary Cuban Art

The current scholarship on testimonio largely focusses on its application in literature, failing to address the genre’s possibilities beyond written and spoken narratives. However, voices that exist outside of the literary realm have employed testimonio-driven strategies to produce witness accounts of events and experiences that were previously ignored by or erased from the collective consciousness. Broadening the genre’s scope, this article examines visual manifestations of testimonio in contemporary Cuban and diasporic art, focusing on works by Coco Fusco, Felix González-Torres, and Ana Mendieta that speak to personal and collective experiences of trauma. Experiences associated with exile, displacement, and erasure are particularly relevant to this article, as the artists in focus identify as dissident, immigrant, Latinx, queer, woman, and/or Other. Given the growing interest in accessible approaches to reworking trauma, this article contributes towards the current scholarship on nuanced understandings of healing, ultimately participating in uncovering the complexities of living through and with trauma. The works discussed offer critical reflections related to the AIDS crisis, colonization, and violence against female and Latinx bodies, which have produced personal, collective, and generational traumas that are rarely acknowledged by Western societies. Therefore, by employing a framework centered on testimonio, this article reveals possibilities for marginalized and minoritized spectators to partake in the reworking of trauma through witnessing, while also illuminating, the limitations of art’s healing capabilities for victims.

Making Mermen in Matanzas, Cuba: Anthropomorphomania, A/r/tography, and Posthuman Queer Aquapelagic Imaginaries

Abstract: By examining Cuban art through instances of posthumanism and wildness, while in conversation with queer theory, mythology, religion, and ocean-based perspectives, we develop new ways of understanding and resolving untellable tales of everyday life. Through collaborative artmaking with Matanzas artist Gíorge Míchel Mílíán Maura, I attempt to understand and reveal vernacular perspectives of Cuban masculinities while defining and engaging with a posthuman queer aquapelagic imaginary. This is an ethnographic study of the subaltern (relating to undocumented interprovincial and international migration, underground economies, and sex work), using art and artmaking to address issues of affect, queerness, and everyday life.

Making Mermen in Matanzas, Cuba: Anthropomorphomania, A/r/tography, and Posthuman Queer Aquapelagic Imaginaries

Abstract: By examining Cuban art through instances of posthumanism and wildness, while in conversation with queer theory, mythology, religion, and ocean-based perspectives, we develop new ways of understanding and resolving untellable tales of everyday life. Through collaborative artmaking with Matanzas artist Gíorge Míchel Mílíán Maura, I attempt to understand and reveal vernacular perspectives of Cuban masculinities while defining and engaging with a posthuman queer aquapelagic imaginary. This is an ethnographic study of the subaltern (relating to undocumented interprovincial and international migration, underground economies, and sex work), using art and artmaking to address issues of affect, queerness, and everyday life.

Out of Sync in Havana: Two Socialist Visions of Global Contemporary Art

On 1 November 1989, when the third edition of la Bienal de la Habana opened its doors, the show included ink paintings from North Korea called chosŏnhwa (literally ‘Korean paintings’). By that time, the Korean–Cuban friendship had lasted for more than three decades, following its formation after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and based on the principle of Third World solidarity. But this encounter in 1989 illustrates that their contemporary art was out of sync with one another. The Korean presentation contrasted with the more installation‐oriented, inter‐media works submitted by Cuban artists who were part of the ‘New Cuban art’ wave. As an archeological study on these two starkly different visions of ‘contemporary art’, this essay sustains a bifurcated view onto Pyongyang and Havana as a method with which to reassess the culture of Third World politics and post‐coloniality at the Cold War's end, and to propose a translocational, South‐to‐South method of art history.

Cuba: An American History

Cuba: An American History

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.

‘Exchanging Cuba for 1 Million YouTube Views’: Technological Precarity, Offline Virality, and ‘Patria y vida’

AbstractFor many Cubans, the internet remains an inaccessible destination. The residents of repartimiento districts – Black Cuban residents from outlying districts across Havana – manage the situation through custom solutions that bridge gaps of technological precarity. Utilizing USB drives to share content with one another, artists and music fans have constructed a complex, alternative internet that allows for the peer-to-peer trade of movies, music, and other media. Pirate digital networks such as el paquete semanal and Zapya, for instance, circulate music across the island without the need to rely on costly and unreliable internet infrastructure. Utilizing interviews, physical and digital ethnographies, and theories of viral musicking, I argue that Black Cuban artists and music fans, despite internet scarcity, use alternative networks to generate viral events. In particular, Cubans in 2021 joined in a transnational expression of sonic protest through the popularity of the politically subversive song ‘Patria y vida’, a song that circulated widely through underground, USB-based networks. In this article, I discuss the song's construction, circulation, and role in sounding the J-11 Cuban protests to demonstrate how Black Cuban artists and fans share music through USB-based networks not only to solve gaps in technologically precarious situations, but also to generate powerful moments of viral musicking.

Ernest Hemingway and the Faded Fame of Antonio Gattorno

The second instalment in "Hemingway as a Caribbean Writer" examines Hemingway's day-to-day life at the Finca Vigía and his influence on the development of a budding Cuban artist. The final article in this series, Enrique Cirules's "Ernest Hemingway and the Faded Fame of Antonio Gattorno" considers Hemingway's role in the life of a Antonio Gattorno, an artist from Havana who, in part from Hemingway's advice, relocated to the U.S.

Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba

Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

When Doves Cry

Through bold political performance acts, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera accesses an untimely variant of utopia whose surplus exceeds Cold War binaries of revolution and exile. Bruguera’s democratic action works build collective self-esteem and challenge the official utopianism of the communist state. In free-speech performances that confront the Cuban state’s censorship apparatus, Bruguera models for her fellow Cuban citizens an inimitable practice of democratic dissensus.

Surrealizing Wifredo Lam?

Abstract In their writings on the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, Surrealists and the related avant-garde forge a fictional construct, ‘Wifredo Lam.’ Their texts are explored in relation to what André Breton identified as the two approaches to the artwork: a subjective approach expressed through poetic language; and an interpretation based on objective knowledge expressed through rational language. An overview of Lam’s artistic activities focuses on his participation in Surrealist activities and his affinities with its principles. Breton goes further, appropriating the artist for Surrealism, attributing poetic, mythical and primitivizing qualities to the paintings. His interpretation contrasts with Leiris’s ethnographic approach to Lam as ‘un homme métis’ [a man of mixed ethnicity], corresponding to the second ‘temptation’ proposed by Breton. Finally, it will be argued that the two discourses often cohabit and merge, notably in texts on the artist by Aimé Césaire, for whom Lam was a political companion in their shared commitment to political liberation and the recognition of a Caribbean identity.

The Rumor of the Earth: Anti-nuclear Ecologies in Lam and Char’s Contre une maison sèche

This essay considers the collaborative projects of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and French poet René Char as thematizing an imbrication between two different ends of the world: the end of the colonial world through decolonization and the end of terrestrial life in nuclear war. This connection, I argue, is pursued by Lam and Char through a set of socio-ecological commitments in which the relation between humanity and the earth heralds an apocalyptic vision of planetary crisis. I proceed to my argument by reconstructing Char and Lam’s investments in a political aesthetics of inter-species and earthly habitation, beginning in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, the threat of nuclear destruction transforms the meaning of the earth, especially in Char’s poetics. At the center of my analysis is their collaborative book, Contre une maison sèche, which I read in continuity with late 1960s anti-nuclear struggles. Finally, I suggest that we think formal decolonization and anti-nuclear ecology together as a point of historical reference for the current ecological crisis. What I call “the rumor of the Earth,” after Lam’s 1950 painting, names the possible but as-yet undiscovered forms of inhabiting the Earth and of making new relations at all levels of the general ecology.

To Whom It Belongs: The Aftermaths of Afrocubanismo and the Power overLo Negroin Cuban Arts, 1938–1958

AbstractThis article explores the impact of Afrocubanismo on the development of Cuba’s arts during the 1940s and 1950s. The article follows the discursive output of artists, intellectuals, and cultural policymakers of different racial backgrounds over the deployment oflo negroto constructcubanidad. It argues that, if the 1920s and 1930s experienced a movement towards the construction of a homogeneous mestizo Cuba, the following decades reveal an effort by some artists to desyncretizelo cubano. While some intellectuals constructed notions of authenticity that circumscribed black art to black artists, many white Cuban artists in turn embraced elite Hispanic heritage as their main creative language while valorizing some Afro-Cuban artists’ recreations oflo negro. The article also demonstrates that the scholarly debates about cultural appropriation in recent decades have a long history within the Afro-Cuban community. It shows how Afro-Cuban artists and intellectuals pioneered arguments about the exploitative use oflo negroto make national art and the central role of culture in shaping racial inequality.

Fathering Under the Influence: Hemingway's Representation of His Sons in "Bimini"

The collection revisits Hemingway's experiences in Cuba through critical views from scholars in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Carlos Peón Casas's "Hemingway in Cuban Contexts" reflects on Hemingway's popular image in Cuba and on how work has influenced Cuban writers. Enrique Cirules's "Ernest Hemingway and the Faded Fame of Antonio Gattorno" examines Hemingway's role in the life of Cuban artist Antonio Gattorno. "El Picador and the Prisoner," by Raúl Villarreal and Michael Curry, delivers new context to Hemingway's relationship with the people of San Francisco de Paula, including two previously unpublished incidents that occurred at the Finca Vigía. The final piece, "Fathering Under the Influence" by Gregory Stephens, delves into how alcoholism and loss of parental custody, in a specifically Cuban context, shaped Hemingway's approach to fatherhood.

Art Communities at Risk: On Cuba

Abstract The article discusses the political actions of Cuban artist group 27N, including a conversation with some of its members and one of its manifestoes.

“None of the Art Stuff Makes Sense Anymore”: An Interview with Luis Camnitzer

Abstract Weiss and Camnitzer discuss his ideas about the transformative potential of art in education; his experiences in and thoughts about Cuba and Cuban art; his “Uruguayan Torture” series of prints, and his thoughts about productive anarchy.

Corpo-caleidoscópio: as siluetas de Mendieta

The article is developed based on the hypothesis that the Silueta’s series (1973-1979) of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) can be thought through the relation with the kaleidoscope. On the one hand, as a paradigm of thinking about the dialectical image present in Walter Benjamin's thesis, and on the other, as a metaphor for sensible understanding the series created by the Cuban artist. The text is grounded in the thought of four of these works and relates them with reflections presented in the writings, mainly of Georges Didi-Huberman and Walter Benjamin.