Cubans Making a Lot Out of a Little
By ANNETTE GRANT
SANTIAGO DE CUBA -- SANDRA LEVINSON, the director of the Center for Cuban Studies in Manhattan, was exhilarated as she stepped into the elevator of her hotel here one afternoon in February. Luis Rodríguez Ricardo, a young naïve artist, had finished the painting he had promised Ms. Levinson to illustrate a brochure for a tour sponsored by the center. She balanced the work, "The Arrival," a jubilant view of the Santiago de Cuba harbor in full fete, on her hip, moving aside as a French group entered.
"What a beautiful painting!" one Frenchman exclaimed. "Where did you get it?"
An address was provided (there is no phone) and that afternoon the party dropped in on Mr. Rodríguez and his wife, Luisa Ramírez, an art historian, at their studio-home to view more of his work. Throughout Cuba, art aficionados and artists connect in such casual ways.
If asked to name a Cuban artist with an international reputation, most people would probably say Wifredo Lam, the great modernist who died in 1982. In the United States, only a handful of contemporary Cuban-born artists (most now expatriates) are known outside art circles: José Bedia (Miami), Manuel Mendive (Havana), Tomás Sánchez (Miami), Ernesto Pujol (Brooklyn) and Alexis Leyva, called Kcho (Havana). Far more are recognized in Mexico, France, Italy, Scandinavia and especially Spain, where many Cuban artists regularly exhibit and travel.
While every year a few more Cuban artists have shows in galleries and museums in New York, only Ms. Levinson's Cuban Art Space on West 23rd Street has continuous exhibitions, as well as an upstairs room packed to the gunwales with paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, collages, papier-mâché, decorated shopping bags and cigar boxes, sculptures and carvings. Even this profusion represents only a fraction of the work in all mediums that is being made in Cuba, in spite of severe shortages of basic materials like paint, brushes, canvas and paper.
Like artists everywhere, Cubans are producing installation and performance pieces, a trend at the 1997 Havana Bienal that will surely continue at the next one in November. Yet most artists throughout the country still make representational paintings and sculptures that investigate subjects like religion (Roman Catholicism, especially Christ figures, and wildly popular Santerían saints and ceremonies), interior monologues akin to magical realism, history and daily island life. Iconic heroes like José Martí, Fidel Castro and the charismatic Che Guevara appear frequently (though not as agitprop), as do depictions of the human heart, the Cuban flag and the shape of the island itself, speaking of both pride and isolation.
The five artists profiled below came of age about a decade ago, around the time the Soviet Union collapsed and pulled out of Cuba, throwing the country into an economic crisis that persists. Yet little art seen in a recent visit protested this condition. Aided by the United States' exempting art from the trade embargo in 1991, many artists can earn a reasonable living while maintaining a studiously neutral political posture.
Luis Rodríguez Ricardo, 31, lives in Santiago de Cuba and the village of Mella, the home of an art collective called Grupo Bayate. The eight artists who form the group include his father, Luis Rodríguez Arias. Banding together in times of crisis makes sense economically and aesthetically, for it helps communities preserve their cultural patrimony. The group's ideal was not to sell their work, but to do it for the soul. Hard times changed that. As a result, the younger Mr. Rodríguez has become a modest commercial success and lives well, though not extravagantly, in a sparsely furnished old house belonging to his wife's parents, with two refrigerators, "one American, one Russian," he explains.
The Grupo paints in a naïve, narrative style and takes rural life as its subject. The work of the Rodríguezes is riotously colorful and stacked like a rush-hour train, with a few ghosts as outriders. Neither father (a baker) nor son (a sometime construction worker) has studied art, and the younger man signs himself "El Estudiante," to distinguish himself from his father, whom he calls "el maestro." FAR from this prelapsarian world, physically and philosophically, is the rarefied universe of Carlos Estévez, who lives and works in old Havana and keeps a motorcycle in his studio entrance (along with a sculpture of Jesus with a hole in his midriff). Just inside the studio is a three-tiered CD-tape deck, the nearly ubiquitous symbol (along with the personal computer) of a connection to a larger cultural universe.
Mr. Estévez, 30, has always known he wanted to be an artist and went to art school at 13. He is the son of an engineer, and it shows in the elegant craftsmanship of his work, which is largely concerned with metaphysical transformation. In drawings and installations, he has recreated the medieval bestiary in a modern anthropological fable, and examined history through figures like Joan of Arc, Isadora Duncan, Karl Marx, José Martí and Abraham Lincoln. He has also produced elaborate metaphors for creativity: the brain represented by coils of music staves, for example. Mr. Estévez is practiced at making statements about art. In one catalog interview he said, "Creating is an act of faith, an attempt to project this world inhabiting us," and, "We are all making our own history while also making reference to every other person."
While Mr. Estévez's work has intellectual roots, it is also highly accessible, which has made him popular at the Havana Bienal (he's working on a piece involving 100 notes in 100 bottles for the forthcoming one) and abroad, where he has had many shows and won several residencies, including one in upstate New York. Currently he is in Norway, where, he says, "I'm getting rich in my soul, and famous in a very small village."
Across town in the Vedado neighborhood, Elsa Mora, 29, pursues her own kind of alchemy, working out of the apartment she shares with her husband, Yamel Alvarez Duran, a specialist in the use of psychology in marketing and his wife's agent. "She works all the time," he says, "without regard to day or night."
Ms. Mora's subject in paintings, drawings and photo-collages is the female body and soul, and she seems to serve her observations directly from her own subconscious. "It interests me to take woman as universal data," she has said. "This way I can talk about a thousand things: life, death, loneliness, sickness." Ms. Mora's mother moved to Miami three years ago, and much of the pain in Ms. Mora's work seems to derive from the sorrow of separation, a common situation in Cuba and one exemplified by the Elián González story.
Ms. Mora had a show of hand-shaped cutouts last year at the Cuban Art Space. She has also shown at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York.
Ms. Kind, who is interested in outsider and self-taught art, is attracted to Ms. Mora's work because, she says, "like a true artist, she doesn't always know where it comes from, so there is no self-consciousness." Ms. Kind goes on to point out that, in her opinion, while Ms. Mora went to art school, "it didn't ruin her."
In a way, Lester Campa, 32, is a political artist, his subject the politics of the environment. Mr. Campa lives in Las Terrazas, a planned town built in the 1960's and 1970's near the ruins of a coffee plantation in the Sierra del Rosario mountains an hour west of Havana. Las Terrazas is part of an environmental center and botanical garden that specializes in nearly extinct indigenous plants. Overlooking the town is a hotel, La Moka, that is one of the leading tourist attractions in the area, not least because it is built in the forest around a tree no one could bear to cut down.
Mr. Campa sometimes travels to Havana, but he doesn't particularly like to leave home or studio, where his windows look out on a paradisiacal landscape. He paints lavishly detailed versions of what he sees, often with coronas of clouds. But a closer look reveals trouble in paradise: the clouds are smoke from burning logs; the forest of palms with their fat fronds is suffocating from pollution; the jutting rocks are upheavals of scorched earth. The message is clearly that man and nature do not cohabit easily, and it is no accident that a series of these works is titled "Life and Death."
Las Terrazas has a store that sells original art on recycled paper and silk-screened T-shirts. Profits support a collective of local artists organized by Mr. Campa.
Environmental elements are used in a nostalgic way by William Pérez, 34, in an interactive installation he is preparing for the Havana Bienal. In it, he harks back to his childhood, when charcoal was prepared in an oven on a beach near his home in Cienfuegos. In the work, he will reproduce the process, using actual workers, who will make the charcoal and then put it in bags to be carried away by visitors to the exhibition. Mr. Pérez will sign the bags. "It's a very large project," he says. "It'll need a lot of space. But I want to make art out of an ordinary pastime and use everyday labor to make a dialogue between art and the public."
Mr. Pérez is mainly a sculptor, and a recent exhibition at the Cuban Art Space mounted 18 of his smaller sculptures and 12 drawings. He takes inspiration from Renaissance art, especially da Vinci's perfect man (sometimes with Guevara's features), and explains that he wants to "transmit the idea of mysticism or religion through images that are concrete and have nothing to do with religion."
When Mr. Pérez and his wife, Dalila López, arrived in New York on a last-minute visa to install his show, he brought his own price list, thumbnail sketches of all of the works on two precious sheets of typing paper. He is accustomed to doing everything himself and to finding ways to make art in a time of shortages. "Wood is easy," he says, "but metal is hard, so the big projects are sometimes made of a lot of little pieces," which are often donated by factories or individuals. Like most Cuban artists, Mr. Pérez gets by with a little help from his friends.
Annette Grant is the art editor of Arts & Leisure.
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/cuban-art.html