Cuban museum in Miami exhibits art for "a new charge to the machete"

Cuban museum in Miami exhibits art for "a new charge to the machete"

^12/11/2017

^{By Luis Leonel Leon}

The American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, popularly known as El Cubano, transcends as an exhibition center for artistic creativity.

MIAMI .- A striking selection of the most avant-garde of contemporary Cuban-American art comes together in the second exhibition of the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, popularly known as El Cubano, whose headquarters in Miami has become a reference center for creativity in this city, which, transcending the trivial paradigm of the tourist postcard, is increasingly opening up to the natural breathing of the arts.

In this way, creators such as Luis Cruz Azaceta, José Bedia, María Brito, Florencio Gelabert, Jillian Mayer, Ernesto Oroza, César Trasobares and Juana Valdés are responsible for Of / By / For (the diaspora). Eight world-renowned artists who have created works of different styles and genres, from installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, audiovisual pieces and an impressive mural, as part of Miami Art Week, which the city celebrated during the first week of December, and based on their experience as Cuban exiles or children of exiles in this country.

For this exhibition, the board of directors of El Cubano gave each artist the opportunity to take over a space in the museum. The result is a first-class creative show, with pieces where, in most cases, in addition to the dissatisfied spirit fighting to eternally embrace beauty, the adventure that always comes with working with large dimensions is fascinating.

A mural by Bedia welcomes the exhibition. Its neo-figurative and torn poetics, with anthropological, mystical and religious pretensions, its neonatal features, refined, of irreverent perfection, immersed in the discourse of the minimum, of the search for truth, of achieving all possible communication, and a recognizable viscerality, seem to ride with the intention and desire of the title, a cardinal text in this collective exhibition: “Something like a new charge to the machete.” Poetry, illusion, suffering, attempts, memory and hyperrealism of the community for (and for) which this museum exists.

By observing each enabled space, the feelings of visitors will be able to travel in different dimensions, activating new views or reactivating reminiscences and sensations that perhaps they believed were drowned and that simply slept silently in those labyrinthine traps that oblivion sets for us, especially those of us who have been given the destiny of reinventing our lives in the diaspora, which is always to live like trees with our roots in the air.

Those who visit El Cubano these days will walk alongside a fleet of transfigured children's toys, turned into allegories - as perhaps all toys should be - of the contemporary world. They will move among the clouds sitting on illuminated swings. They will discover a small house-laboratory-factory of human beings, of beings imprisoned from birth, suffering, who howl without saying a single word and who can recreate the entire discourse of the escape from pain, suffering purified by art. They will stumble upon the dilemma of seeing only the real, or unreal, meaning of money, or turning it into something more beautiful without ceasing to be evocative. They will see themselves reflected in the overwhelming and empty coexistence of objects, bought by our sometimes compulsive, sometimes invisible sense of the ridiculous. They will feel the links between a destroyed house, a city in ruins like Havana, and a small studio as a home, efficiency , in Hialeah, as well as a tribute to the cultural roots of the famous Ceiba in Little Havana. And they will shudder at what a father tells his daughter about his homeland, at the image of El Morro and the Civic Plaza (still from the revolution) in the Cuban capital.

The Cuban Museum is unique in the world: “It represents a community of refugees and their descendants who came to the United States in search of freedom. They love this country, and although their desire for a free Cuba remains unfulfilled, here in their adopted land, they have this entity dedicated specifically to preserving their history as Cuban exiles and their legacy as Americans. This is their museum, literally the American museum of, by and for the Cuban diaspora,” said Carisa Pérez-Fuentes, director of design and communications for the institution, who added: “It’s very exciting to see a show like this. Museums don’t always get to do this kind of thing. We’ve given these artists control of the entire facility, and now the community can enjoy their wonderful works.”

The title, Of / By / For, invokes Abraham Lincoln’s famous description of what American government should be: “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” recontextualized through art in the phenomenon of the Cuban diaspora.

“In fulfilling our mission to document, interpret and celebrate the culture and history of the Cuban diaspora, it is always a pleasure to showcase the creative spirit of our artists. This is further proof of the tenacity, perseverance, audacity and genius of our diaspora,” said Ileana Fuentes, founding director of El Cubano.

Opening on Sunday 10th December, the Of/By/For exhibition will remain open until 11th March 2018, Monday to Saturday between 12-8pm, and Sundays between 12-4pm.