/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/EXHIBITION-CUBA: Havana Biennial Opens Doors to the Diaspora

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Dec 19 2000 (IPS) - An extensive collection of Cuban art from the last four decades, including works by artists in exile, can be seen for the first time in this country among the more than 20 expositions that make up the Seventh Biennial of Havana.

‘La gente en casa’ (People at Home) is the title of the show organised by the National Museum of Fine Arts, aimed at displaying the most representative pieces of its contemporary Cuban art collection “through the key artists and works” of this country.

Alongside artworks by the late Wifredo Lam and Antonia Eiriz, there are paintings by Tomás Sánchez, José Bedia, Arturo Cuenca, Gustavo Acosta – all exiles in the United States – and by José Franco and Carlos García, living in Argentina and Mexico, respectively.

Also present are pieces by Zayda del Río, Nelson Domínguez, Manuel Mendive and Roberto Fabelo, who, in the middle of the exodus prompted by the island’s economic crisis in the 1990s, decided to stay, though with sights set on markets abroad.

A total of 62 works by nearly 50 artists who reside in Paris, New York or Havana, are part of the museum exhibit “Gente en casa,” which, say experts and artists alike, is unprecedented in the more than 40 years of Fidel Castro’s socialist government.

“It is a selection based on the artistic criteria of the more renovating impacts that have guided our most recent art,” affirmed Corina Matamoros, curator of the National Museum’s biennial exhibit.

The event, scarcely mentioned in the Cuban press, which is run by the governing Communist Party, takes place amid a process of opening, promoted by the Culture Ministry since the 1990s – with its subsequent defenders and detractors.

The representatives of the most orthodox artistic tendencies have refused for decades to recognise any artist born on the island but who decided to emigrate, as Cuban, despite the fact that Cuban law stipulates that citizenship cannot be denied, nor can it be renounced.

Censorship decreed officially or exercised spontaneously by government officials banished musicians, novelists, filmmakers and creators in general from the national scene, pushing them, and their works, into exile.

But the controversy about considering art made in exile as Cuban heated up as authorities encouraged a policy of seeking closer ties with those artists who had emigrated.

In the case of the plastic arts, the debate has a special resonance because the economic crisis triggered the exodus of nearly all representatives of the 1980s generation.

The departure involved a group of Cuban art school graduates who spearheaded a total break with the art of prior decades, and an opening towards more diverse stylistic and formal trends.

Painter Roberto Fabelo commented that the period marked “an earthquake of great intensity,” while art critic Gerardo Mosquera said that the plastic arts were able to transform at the time “into one of the most potent manifestations of culture”.

“The impact on art of the departure of a whole generation still remains to be studied,” poet and essayist Roberto Méndez told IPS, “because they took with them the entire cultural panorama.”

For her part, university student Yolaines Gómez, 22, thinks it is a positive that “the defence of culture and of ‘Cuban-ness’ is beginning to take precedence over considerations of a political stripe.”

“Cuban art is Cuban art, wherever it is made,” she stated.

Works by Bedia and Cuenca also form part of an exhibition of “Cuban-American art,” organised by the US Special Interests Section in Havana, including artists born in the United States to Cuban parents or naturalised citizens.

The show coincided with the opening in mid-November of the Seventh Biennial, which, under the slogan “one closer to the other”, runs until Jan. 5, 2001, with some 800 works by artists from 43 countries included in its various exhibits.

In addition to the biennial, the programme includes some 20 exhibits of Cuban artists, an exposition by Cuban Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), and the US painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), who was known as “the king of graffiti”.

The first Havana Biennial was in 1984, and the event served as a competition only through its third edition. On some occasions the biennial has been postponed due to economic problems.

Initially limited to art coming from the developing South, it has begun opening its doors to artists from Europe, Japan and the United States. According to its director, Nelson Herrera Isla, some 800 people – including gallery operators, critics and artists – have come from the United States alone.

In recognition of the plural nature of the Havana Biennial, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) chose this year’s event as the stage for awarding its 20,000-dollar arts promotion prize.

The award was shared by Brazilian Diana Domingues, France’s Jean Pierre Raynaud and the Cuban artist groups ‘Los Carpinteros’ and ‘Galería Dupp,’ representing the newest generation of young artists on the island.