A new exhibition at NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale returns the spotlight to a pioneering group of Cuban-American artists.
Juan González, Double Portrait of Jimmy, N.Y.C., 1984.
“At that time, the art market was close to zero,” recalls César Trasobares of the seminal 1983 exhibition “The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban-American Artists.” Staged at the now-defunct Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, the show featured artwork by Trasobares as well as fellow Cuban exiles Mario Bencomo, María Brito, Humberto Calzada, Pablo Cano, Emilio Falero, Fernando García, Juan González, and Carlos Macía—all of whom were born in Cuba and subsequently came of age in Miami. “There were no collectors waiting in the wings, expecting to snap up work,” Trasobares adds of that pre-Art Basel era. “What you saw in that exhibition was work of conscience as opposed to work made to be sold.”
The much-heralded show grabbed local headlines and then traveled on to Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Panama, serving as an aesthetic shot across the bow of an art world either transfixed by Havana’s radical chic or simply dismissive of Latin art altogether.
More than three decades later, the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale brings us an update with “The Miami Generation: Revisited,” featuring artwork from the original show as well as pieces completed by the nine artists in the years since. The net effect is bittersweet: García, González, and Macía all died from AIDS at the turn of the ’90s, and their displayed output is a painful reminder of how much talent was cut down in its prime. Yet there is also a spirit of triumph here; the surviving six artists have all produced dazzling bodies of work in sculpture, painting, and conceptualism, continuing to draw upon and ultimately transcend their shared heritage. As the late curator Giulio Blanc concluded in his catalog essay for the 1983 exhibition, “They are Cuban, they are American, and they are something more.” “The Miami Generation: Revisited” is on display through September 21 at the Nova Southeastern University Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, 954-525-5500
Creative Corner at “The Miami Generation: Revisited” exhibition.
Three Works You Must See
Self-Portrait, María Brito
María Brito, Self-Portrait, 1989.
No one was more surprised by the flames crowning María Brito’s Self-Portrait than its creator herself. “I think of my work as an exorcism of sorts, getting out certain states of mind and emotions,” says Brito. “I start with a general idea of what the piece is going to be, but I pay a lot of attention to the process. Things happen. And by ‘things’ I mean everything from my thinking evolving to my using a discarded part of a previous sculpture that I happen to see in my studio.” As for her figure’s caged and immolated head, “I don’t necessarily want viewers to experience that pain,” Brito chuckles, “but if someone is feeling something similar in their life, hopefully there will be some kind of communion.”
The Collapse of an Island, Humberto Calzada
Humberto Calzada, The Collapse of an Island, 1998.
“When my family arrived in Miami in 1960, very soon everyone we knew in Havana was here,” remembers Humberto Calzada. “The food was here in the markets, the music was here on the radio. But the architecture was so very different.” Calzada’s youthful memories of classically styled Cuban buildings have since fueled many of his paintings, including The Collapse of an Island. And the submerged edifice in this piece? “Flooding means total disaster, but it also means purification and rebirth,” he says. “I love that duality as the island is literally sinking.”
La Santa Sebastiana, Pablo Cano
Pablo Cano, La Santa Sebastiana, 1983.
Pablo Cano is best known these days for his inventive marionette and theater work. But at the start of his career, he was a ferocious draftsman, as evidenced by the visceral punch of the six-foot-high, 12-footlong mural La Santa Sebastiana. Having digested Catholic iconography, Russian Constructivism, and Pablo Picasso’s guernica, Cano was determined to create his own social statement. “This mural symbolizes all those feelings—it was a metaphor for the exile experience, using symbols of liberty bound and oppressed,” Cano says. In hindsight, he now admits wryly that the mural’s equine stand-in for the United States owes a lot to the “Marlboro Man” cigarette ads of his teenage years. But La Santa Sebastiana’s overpowering sense of stasis across the Florida Straits is even more personally frustrating than when he first fashioned it. “Now it’s 2014 and we’re still waiting, we’re still in the same limbo,” he says. “Hopefully, in my lifetime, I’ll be able to see a real political change occur.”