The exhibition is curated by Marijo Dougherty, Director of the University Art Museum and features work by Belkis Ayón, Abel Barroso, Jacqueline Brito, Yamilys Brito, Alicia Leal, Ibrahim Miranda, Elsa Mora, Cirenaica Moreira, and René Peña. Selected from this year's Havana Bienal, this group represents a new generation of artists, the first since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, who have chosen to remain in Cuba. These artists are committed to pursuing personal responses to the culture in which they have been raised. Despite state restrictions, these artists navigate a remarkable course of individual artistic expression that is at once critical and celebratory of the place they passionately call home.
Casting aside old taboos and forging new artistic directions, the artists in Passionately Cuban remain indebted to the strides made by earlier generations of Cuban artists. Their new hard-won freedoms are related directly to economic and political shifts within the Cuban government. The generation of the 90s remains in Cuba because they are valued in ways previous generations were not. Tourism and the increased influx of foreign capital is beginning to change Havana's landscape, both physically and psychologically. Where once economic ruin and hard-line censorship framed artistic existence, now greater artistic freedom and a new level of international recognition fuels young artists to take risks never possible before.
Passionately Cuban reveals the breadth of influence and free-flow hybridization that is distinctive of the 90s wave of Cuban art. Rudimentary cultural roots merge freely and unexpectedly with the latest contemporary art strategies. Spirituality, sensuality, poetic hyperbole, and dark humor are often explored conceptually through appropriation, installation, and intervention. In search of the perfect metaphor, young Cuban artists toy with irony, double meaning, pastiche, and word play. Long forays into the bowels of street culture, meanders through a rich literary past, and detours to the heights of religious ecstasy are all part of the mix. Gone are strident political critiques, impersonal formalism, and strict adherence to Western art historical traditions. In its place, younger artists are turning to less lofty sources for inspiration. They are investigating the idiosyncrasies and foibles of daily Cuban life and are creating vibrant parodies about the world as they see it.
Yet another integral aspect of new Cuban art is its unabashed celebration of craft. All the artists in Passionately Cuban invest their energies in creating work that is not only challenging, but beautiful to look at. Often created out of materials at hand, this layered and personally mediated work reads like no other work being made today. The detritus of daily Cuban life (fallen tile, wood scraps, fabric remnants, yesterday's paper) is given new life under the emotionally loaded and intellectually focused energies of such artists as Abel Barroso or Jacqueline Brito. Barroso's wood constructions pieced together out of discarded cedar and mahogany and his block prints printed on cheap paper only appear rough-hewn. Close inspection reveals the hand of a sophisticated and highly skilled artist. Barroso's comic linear style spreads across cutout wooden surfaces that include depictions of television sets, video cameras, and computer terminals. His work is a sly homage to Cuba's rich graphic tradition, but it also pokes fun at its outmoded role in the face of encroaching foreign technology.
Brito's work also addresses the gap between Havana's past and present. Her exquisitely painted trompe'loeil mosaics depict dramatic religious and mythological events that reference Havana's past glories and pit them against the current back drop of a city slowly collapsing under its own weight. Deceptively beautiful, densely layered, and easily misread, Brito's paintings provide one of Passionately Cuban's many visual metaphors that illuminate Havana's artistic life at the start of a new century.
In response to the relationship forged with the artists in Passionately Cuban, curator, Marijo Dougherty speaks of their talent, tenacity, and boundless spirit. She says, "The hours spent in the artist's studios during several trips to Havana were among the most rewarding of my professional career. I look forward to sharing the work of these exceptional artists with the residents of our region."
The University Art Museum is particularly pleased that eight of the artists in Passionately Cuban will be traveling to Albany from Havana with their art work and will be on the museum's premises during the exhibition's installation from October 8 through October 11.
Passionately Cuban is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with essays by Holly Block and Antonio Eligio (Tonel). Ms. Block is the Executive Director of Art in General in New York City and the author and editor of ART CUBA: The New Generation published this year by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Tonel is an artist, art historian, and curator living in Havana.