Special Event:
Special Focus on Cuban Art
Organized by Ana Maria Hernandez
CUNY-La Guardia
Cuban Art and Cinema Slideshow
Art is an optimum medium to reconcile opposites, express dissent, and offer a glimpse into the future. Contemporary Cuban art responds to and reflects upon the major events that have shaken the island over the last half century: revolution and the struggle for national development, conflict, isolation, global re-alignment, disillusion and decay. Several sessions in “Changing Cuba/Changing World” focus on Cuba’s plastic arts.
By turns combative, conciliatory, sarcastic, playful and self-referential, Cuban art has enjoyed a freedom of expression often denied to literature and the social sciences. Contemporary artists inherit the traditional themes of earlier Cuban art—the landscape, the carnival, Afro-Cuban folklore, the heroes of independence and revolution—and transform them in ways that often mock the elements of grandiosity, Messianic aspirations or blatant idealism ingrained in the Cuban character. Other artists turn away from tradition and respond to the need to construct a new identity by casting aside the slogans, heroes, and ideals of the past. They thus seek to harmonize or simply highlight the dissonance of the cultural, political, economic, philosophical and artistic concerns of contemporary Cuba.
Three full sessions in “Changing Cuba/Changing World” concentrate on the recent as well as historical evolution of Cuban painting, including the development and transformations of concepts of Cuban identity as discussed in studies by Juan Martínez, Luis Camnitzer, Holly Block, Gerardo Mosquera, Antonio Eligio Fernández, and others. Several papers discuss Cuban art in alternative spaces and museums, the role of international art markets, and the relationship of art to the socialist state.
The Montreal Exhibit
The presentations based on the current Montreal Museum exhibit "¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today" put Cuban art in perspective. Organized and presented by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from January 31 to June 8, 2008, this ambitious exhibit brings together some 400 works of art. It features the art of an island that has witnessed the twentieth-century’s principal historical events—decolonization, the search for a national identity, wars of independence and Revolution, the building of political utopias and ideological clashes. The exhibit is described in www.mbam.qc.ca/en/expositions/exposition_46.html. The CUNY-Bildner conference provides a window to this extraordinary exposition.
As argued by the organizers, Cuba is a rich cultural terrain located at the crossroads of Old Europe and the New World. Its music and literature are well known outside of the country, but the same cannot be said of its visual arts. "¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today" is the first major exhibition to showcase the art of this Caribbean island from the nineteenth century to the present. To accomplish this huge and impressive task, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts obtained the collaboration of Cuba’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Fototeca as well as of several private collections and museums in the United States, including the MoMA. The MMFA is thus able to draw a broad panorama of Cuban art and history. This lively and well-conceived exhibition brings together about one hundred paintings, including a large collective mural produced in 1967 by many artists, two hundred photographs and documents, approximately one hundred works on paper (in particular two collections of posters from the periods before and after the 1959 Revolution), installations and videos, in addition to music and film excerpts.
Stéphane Aquin, who played a major role in organizing this exposition, is curator of contemporary art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he has organized many exhibitions. He was responsible for the section of the current exhibit dealing with Cuban art from 1959 to today. Mr. Aquin teaches at Concordia University and is the author of numerous critical essays on contemporary art, including monographs on Jean-Paul Riopelle, Mark Mullin, Françoise Sullivan, Marc Séguin and others. He is presently working on a retrospective of the works of Andy Warhol.
Link to exhibit review by Mario Cloutier (in French): http://www.cyberpresse.ca/article/20080119/CPARTS/801191238/1042/CPARTS
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