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'Cuba Avant-Garde'
Harn Museum of Art
Gainesville, Florida
Drawn from a wide-ranging contemporary Cuban art collection of Patricia and Howard Farber, this show helped fill out the story of an especially fertile period of recent art history. In all, 42 artists were represented by 58 works, from painting and drawing to photography and installation art.
Al of the pieces were created after a seminal 1981 Havana show knows as “Volumen I,” which artists have cited as the first public exhibition that sought to move beyond the cliché’s of Socialist Realist painting, and most were produced after 1984, when the first Havana Biennial attracted foreign curators and critics to Cuba. Within this environment, artists captured international attention with their often cleverly ambiguous treatment of such themes as identity and migration and their innovative use of inexpensive materials. Jose Bedia, Jose Manuel Fors, Tomas Sanchez, and Ruben Torres Llorca were among the artists who exhibited in “Volumen I” and who had strong work here.
By the early ‘90s, many artists from this ‘80s generation became weary of the repressive regime and left Cuba to live and work in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. One of this show’s strengths was that it brought together work by Cuban-born artists living inside and outside Cuba.
Standout pieces included Fernando Rodriguez Falcon’s Sueno Nupcial (Nuptial Dream, 1994), whose wooden panels, painted in a style both cartoonish and folkloric, recount the imaginary wedding of Fidel Castro and the patron saint of Cuba. Angel Delgado’s untitled 1999 ink drawing on a handkerchief shows three blank faces with entangled tongues – a wry comment on censorship. In Estadistica (Statistic, 1996), one of the most striking works here, Tania Bruguera remakes the Cuban flash with human hair donated by Cuban residents. It effectively evokes the audacity that has energized Cuban art since “Volumen I.”
- Elisa Turner
“Cuba Avant-Garde” in on view at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, through the 30th of this month.
