The brand new Pompano Beach Cultural Center has opened an exhibition of work by 20 Cuban artists, curated by Isabel María Pérez-Pérez.
A series of introductions during the last three years led by Maria A. Napoles, a Cuban-born entrepreneur who has devoted the last 50 years of her life to the contemporary art of Latin America and Cuba, made this exhibit possible. Here’s how: The Cultural Center’s curator, Byron Swart, introduced Napoles to Alyona Ushe, the center’s President and CEO, to bring in international artists. Napoles met Nadal Antelmo (a Cuban-born artist in this exhibit), when he exhibited in Red Dot Fair during Art Basel week in 2014. Antelmo then introduced Napoles to Pérez-Pérez, who was the editor of a notable Cuban art magazine, “ArteCubano.” In 2015, Napoles published a bilingual version of the magazine for the US, the first time ever in “ArteCubano’s” 55-year-history. (It had not been permitted in the US until relations between the two countries were relaxed.)
The show, “Shipwrecked of Reason: Half a Century in Cuban Art,” had an official at the Cultural Center celebrating Cuba’s culture of Cuba with music and food. “It was fantastic for the people of Pompano, an international event,” Napoles said.
In talking with Pérez-Pérez about the show while she was in the US, with Napoles translating, we learned that the exhibition was conceived to encompass the conceptual perspectives of Cuban artwork in an international framework. Representing the last 50 years of Cuban art from a contemporary point of view, it features artists from the 1970s, such as Favelo and Mendive; the 1980s, such as Robert Diago; the 1990s, such as Abel Barroso and the duo Liudmila & Nelson; and the 2000s, such as Humberto Díaz.
The exhibition explores several themes, such as territory and landscape (“because Cuba is an Island; and more of our ideas about identity are a condition of the island”) and body and portrait, seen in a silent digital installation by Humberto Díaz, called “Secret Love.” For Díaz’s piece, which is very conceptual, Pérez-Pérez says, the artist invited people emotionally connected with him to lie hidden under sheets on beds, where he filmed them.
Antelmo’s photograph called “Surco,” (“Furrow” in English) depicts seven people of different backgrounds standing in a ditch; we see them from an overhead view. Antelmo said he photographed the people from a rooftop, and digitally inserted them into a hole he dug in the ground in Miami, where he lives part time. Some people see the work as expressing a dark vision, perhaps a grave or bomb shelter. But Antelmo sees the people in the ground as seeds, ready to sprout and blossom. The people in the ditch might also be viewed like peas in a unified pod; although they are black, white, and of various ages and backgrounds, they are all human, all the same deep down.
Several of the artists in the exhibition focus on status or race, Pérez-Pérez said. Roberto Diago does this as a black man, showing in his artwork the notion of how different races heal when they cut their skin. The small pieces of fabric in his work represent the damage that slave masters did to the skin of their slaves. [As in] “part of the fabric of the person’s being,” said Pérez-Pérez. Another artist who explores status and race is René Peña, a photographer in Cuba who works with his own image. In an untitled color print, the viewer sees a black man in profile whose skin is so dark it almost blends in with the dark background. The spout of a fine china white teapot is inserted in his mouth as it sits on a surface. Pérez-Pérez says the teapot raises the man’s status, but he feels invisible because he is unaccustomed to higher status.
Asked how the political climate on Cuba has affected its artists, Pérez-Pérez replied: “Cuban art is the sweetest harvest of the revolution.”
Pompano Beach Cultural Center curator Byron Swart (who also runs Magnetic Pompano, a space that helps launch emerging artists) said: “This sets the bar very high for us. I hope the local artists see the importance of bringing an exhibit of this caliber to their doorstep.” The exhibit runs through July 31. For more information visit ccpompano.org.
