Nearly 2,000 miles from its namesake, Artes de Cuba gallery crafts a complex image of the island nation’s globalized art scene in the group show La Habana Hoy.
SANTA FE, NM—A moment is a doorway—a passage that connects the past to the future. In the current exhibition La Habana Hoy: Contemporary Art from Havana, at Artes de Cuba in Santa Fe, gallerist Stuart Ashman is the metaphorical doorway. Ashman, an American of Jewish and Cuban descent, and his wife Peggy Gaustad opened Artes de Cuba in 2022. The gallery exhibits internationally renowned Cuban artists, whose works surpass expectations of an island nation ravaged for decades by political turmoil and economic sanctions.
La Habana Hoy assembles sixteen Cuban artists who engage in printmaking, sculpture, painting, and photography. The exhibition is a visual megaphone announcing the joys of being a working Cuban artist despite the harsh realities they face under authoritarian rule. It simultaneously challenges antiquated American notions of the country’s cultural isolation, offering a globally informed, critical perspective on contemporary Cuban art.
“I am pleasantly surprised when visitors realize that artists in Cuba are creating works that can be considered akin to art being made globally—that Cuban contemporary art is truly innovative and full of intellectual and aesthetic content,” Ashman says.
Americans may only think of Cuba in its past tense… [its] contemporary art community tells a different story.
American media often frames Cuba in a fixed moment. On a domestic level, it’s seen as burdened by American trade embargoes that have been in place since 1958. On the international stage, its socialist regime is viewed as a threat to peace. This portrayal contrasts with an earlier image, exemplified by Cabaret Quarterly’s 1956 description of Havana as “a mistress of pleasure, the lush and opulent goddess of delights.”
Such descriptors of the pre-Fidel Castro nation conjure visions of a Cuban golden age—of the island as a place of adventure, opportunity, and congenial inhabitants. Americans may only think of Cuba in a romanticized past tense, or as a threatening autocratic outpost just 90 miles from our shores. Cuba’s globally enmeshed contemporary art community tells a different story. This year the fifteenth Havana Biennial, which opens November 15, expects roughly a million visitors, matching its visitor numbers in 2021–22. Its evocative theme is “Shared Horizons.”
The artists represented by Artes de Cuba range from emerging to established. Abel Barroso exhibited in the 2012 Havana Biennial, and José Manuel Fors in 2019. Works by Esterio Segura are in the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami, and Manuel Mendive presented a multimedia exhibition at the Kennedy Center in 2019.
In La Habana Hoy, the artists blend the then and the now, deconstructing old conceptions of Cuba and offering complex portraits of its present moment. José Angel Toirac’s works feature imagery of Castro alongside distinctively American products such as Coca-Cola, harnessing the visual language of advertising in an institutional critique of both socialism and capitalism. “I’m very interested in the way that history has been manipulated to reinforce a given idea,” Toirac writes in an artist statement.
Esterio Segura arrives in the complicated now through a bilingual process, mischievously playing with words and imagery. He tells me in a written interview, “I reflect with myself in English and in Spanish… I explain [my art] to myself in both languages with the gaps of interpretation… offer[ing] the difference.” Goodbye My Love, which previously appeared in New York City’s Times Square, is a flying red heart centered between airplane wings. The monochromatic work is an homage to those who have migrated from Cuba to destinations far afield. It also satirizes how the world sees Cuba: flight takes us the furthest, but Cubans are commonly stereotyped as boat refugees. Elián González serves as an iconic example. In 1999, at six years old, González singularly survived a capsized boat and set off an international custody battle.
The works in La Habana Hoy do not explicitly reference political events, and the viewer may conclude that this is because the artists are living under government censorship. However, this would belie the ingenuity and creative acumen of each artist.
Political commentary is inevitable in a country that considers itself an experiment in a new social order.
Ashman notes that “several of the artists make strong political statements deliberately. Toirac talks about how governments use marketing as a way to deliver their message… and how capitalists do it to sell you a product [or] ideology. … Barroso comments on migration issues with his airport series. Nelson Ramirez uses the monument of the revolution [the José Martí Memorial] as the centerpiece of his commentary. Other artists deal with more personal or spiritual imagery, but the political commentary is inevitable in a country that considers itself an experiment in a new social order.”
The joy of this exhibition is the hunt for tiny moments of revolution. Barroso abstracts printmaking tools in his wooden sculptural works. In Home Sweet Home, he riffs on a box of chocolates, displaying basic house-shaped wooden blocks inside crinkled hollow holders. In place of a label listing ingredients, the interior panel of the sculpture provides a list of locations. The artist has visited many of these places—recently he was in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Each block in Barroso’s box could create a permanent mark, if it were inked and used in a relief print. Each block is also adrift, searching for a home. The multifaceted sculpture tugs at our sense of curiosity, as Barroso conjures the untethered feeling of hovering one’s hand over candy, trying to make a selection. The sculpture subtly communicates themes of belonging and individual agency.
Just as a moment is never a standalone measurement of time, the artists in La Habana Hoy engage themes of politics, aesthetics, culture, space, materiality, memory, and presence to relate universal subject matter while denying the viewer an opportunity to lean on old prejudices in interpreting contemporary Cuban circumstances. Segura explains, “In that consciousness of the diversity of the public, lies the assembly of the work[s].”
