La Jornada: More than 100 works by Afro-descendant Cuban artists gathered in Miami

Two simultaneous exhibitions: My Own Past y Afrocubanismwhich are presented at the Lowe Museum of Art, in Miami, United States, bring together more than a hundred works by Cuban creators of African descent and review two centuries of their production. The exhibitions seek to vindicate Afro-descendant artists who have been overlooked, forgotten or excluded from the historical record.

“Havana sources from the late 18th century speak of Afro-descendant artistic communities and ‘primitive works’ that are unknown today. Where are they? Those pieces and their authors were erased from history. The exhibition seeks to make these omissions visible,” he told The Day Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Harvard Afro-Latin American Research Institute and curator of the exhibition.

For De la Fuente, the samples are part of a broader process of rewriting the artistic canon and he mentioned that they are inspired by a Brazilian curatorial project from the 1980s.

“Until the massive European migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed the region, there was little ‘Latin’ in our territory. Ours were always Afro-indigenous lands and our stories must reflect those founding realities,” he stressed.

My Own Past: Contributions of Afro-descendants to Cuban Art y Afrocubanism: Selections from the collection of Ramón and Nercys Cernuda They bring together 100 works of art spanning 200 years, from 1822 to 2022, and feature 58 Cuban artists.

Among the works, nine paintings by Wifredo Lam stand out, considered one of the innovators of Cuban art for fusing modern art from Europe with the culture and roots of Africa and the Caribbean. Rarely seen pieces by him are included from the beginning of his career, from 1926, 1931 and 1937.

In the case of My Own Pastwhich was previously presented in Cambridge, the organizers incorporated works from collections in Miami, doubling the number of historical pieces created before 1959. Highlighting the creative works of 11 women who are exhibited together for the first time.

“Bringing them together is not only to contextualize those voices that were excluded from the canon of history, but to put them in dialogue with contemporary artists and the Cuban avant-garde,” said Jill Deupi, executive director of Fine Arts and main curator of the Lowe.

On Afrocubanism, Deupi explained that it explores the complexities and contradictions of the Afro-Cuban cultural movement of the Cuban avant-garde, which played a vital and persistent role in Cuban Modernism.

My Own Past proposes a different genealogy for Cuban art, because it rescues Afro-descendant figures that history left aside, presenting them along with some of the best-known Cuban artists who are also of African descent. “We always wanted after Harvard, this exhibition to be presented in Miami and especially at the Lowe Art Museum.”

De la Fuente mentioned that both exhibitions complement and dialogue with each other: “Afrocubanism includes some of Cuba’s best-known painters (Víctor Manuel, Abela, Carlos Enríquez, Mariano, Portocarrero, Carreño). Artists who shared the same intellectual and exhibition spaces as the creators included in my pastwhich in many cases are less known.”

He stated that by presenting them together, “they help highlight the omissions of the history of national art, but at the same time they also highlight that towards the 1930s it was impossible to talk about Cuba without the founding contributions of Africa and its cultures.”

De la Fuente considered that this type of project should be replicated in other Latin American countries, where there are also contributions from Afro-descendant artists who have been left out of the traditional narratives of art history.

“With the important exception of Brazil, where these studies have made great progress, there is still much to do,” he noted.

Afro-Cubanism was a cultural movement that encompassed visual arts, literature and music during the 1930s and 1940s. Its main exponents claimed the African presence as an essential component of Cuban identity, although numerous Afro-descendant creators remained outside the canon.

“If a visitor leaves the Lowe Museum with a single idea, I hope it is the need to rethink Cuba and Latin America in an African key. That will only be possible if we transform the teaching and research plans,” concluded De la Fuente.