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Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection
Cuban art has been an important force in the arena of international contemporary art for more than two decades. The Havana Biennials, which began in 1984, are renowned for consistently showcasing fresh, exciting, and provocative art from Cuba as well as other developing nations. Contemporary Cuban artists, such as Carlos Garaicoa, Jose Bedia, and Los Carpinteros have since gone on to international acclaim and have regular exhibitions in leading museums around the globe.
Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection, an exhibition organized by the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, provides a rare opportunity to glimpse the extraordinary diversity and quality of Cuban art created from the mid 1980s to the present. The exhibition and its accompanying bi-lingual catalogue illustrate how contemporary Cuban art, while firmly rooted in its own historical and cultural context, transcends the limits of geography and nationality, engaging and enriching a much larger global artistic discourse.
Scope of the Exhibition
Curated by Kerry Oliver-Smith, Cuba Avant-Garde includes 58 works of art created by 42 artists, nearly half of whom still live in Cuba, though others, like Los Carpinteros and Jose Gariacoa, have since left, typically for the U.S. or Mexico. The exhibition encompasses paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and mixed-media installations. Major themes include the history of colonialism, emigration, and exile; political and economic crisis; and social issues of religion, gender and race.
Many works in the exhibit are implicitly political, but Lázaro Saavedra’s 1995 painting, El Sagrado Corazón (The Sacred Heart) is overtly provocative. Modeled on a popular icon still found in many Cuban homes, the painting transforms Jesus into a symbol of the conflict between outward allegiance to the socialist revolution’s ideals and inward aspirations for the capitalist, democratic freedoms of the U.S. The suffering caused by that unresolved tension is conveyed by Jesus’ gaunt, harrowed face and even embodied in the materials of the painting itself, created with the cheap acrylic pigments and cardboard that were often the only supplies available during the austerity of the early to mid 1990s.
Most of the works in the exhibition address broader issues through the lens of distinctly Cuban conditions, but one exception is Abel Barroso’s 2004 sculpture, Se acabó la Guerra Fría. A gozar con la globalización ( World Trade Center) or “The Cold War Has Ended. Let’s Enjoy Globalization,” a direct visual and verbal reference to the September 11 th on the World Trade Center. The title initially seems archly ironic, but its subtitle, “Dedicada a las vidas de las personas que sin esperarlo se convirteron en piezas del juego del terror” (Dedicated to the lives of the people who unexpectedly became playing pieces of the game of terror) shows us the spirit of human compassion that motivated Barroso to memorialize all innocent victims, regardless of national, cultural, or ideological divides.
The Farber Collection
All of the artworks in the exhibition were selected from a more extensive collection of contemporary Cuban art assembled by Howard and Patricia Farber of New York City and Miami Beach. With extensive experience as a major collector of American modernist painting and contemporary Chinese art, Howard Farber began collecting contemporary Cuban art after a visit to the island in 2001. Howard was soon scouring the globe to find the very best Cuban contemporary pieces available, resulting in a collection that truly encapsulates a period of great historic and aesthetic significance.
The Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual 188-page catalogue of the same title. The book features essays by Abelardo G. Mena Chicuri, curator of contemporary international art at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Harn Museum curator Kerry Oliver-Smith, and Magda González-Mora Alfonso, a founder of the Havana Biennial. The book is illustrated with full-color plates depicting 72 works of art, including all of the pieces in the exhibition plus additional works from the Farber collection. The catalogue is distributed by the University of Florida Press and is available nationwide through retail bookstores and online vendors.
