Legend has it you can see the lights of Havana from Key West, Fla. While untrue, Cuba is one of the United States' closest neighbors, though the countries are separated by more than just 90 miles of ocean. A trade embargo — Cubans call it el bloqueo ("the blockade") — does not allow American businesses to work with Cuban ones.
That hasn't stopped Americans from bringing Cuban art here, though. A photo/video exhibit at Carleton College in Northfield, a print show at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis and ongoing showings at the Cubano Gallery in Golden Valley offer contemporary art from the tropics in the midst of Minnesota snow and ice.
'Site Specific' at Carleton
A vintage Victrola rests in a beige box, belting out Afro-Cuban tunes from a living-room setting at Carleton's Perlman Teaching Museum. This record player is the liveliest element of a show that offers a glimpse of how different life is in Cuba, where food and gasoline shortages are common, vintage cars are abundant, and the pace of life is slower.
The exhibition, featuring more than 25 contemporary Cuban photographers and filmmakers whose work was culled from the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection of Contemporary Cuban Photography, creates a sense of time standing still.
Alfredo Ramos' 2007 "Buena Vista" series includes a video of teenage boys grabbing the backs of vintage cars and "skating" down the street, riding the waves during an aguacero (downpour). An untitled digital print from Donis Dayán Llago's Facades series shows colorful Legos inserted into a decaying cement corner of the Malecón, the 7-kilometer sea wall that borders Havana and is nicknamed "the sofa of the city."
In the museum's darkened cinema, filmmaker Marcel Beltrán's "Swan, Black Neck, White Neck" is a 14-minute portrait of Sergio Abel, who leads viewers through various phases of hopefulness and ambiguity. He visits his elderly mother, stops to get a meal of rice and eggs, and trudges through a decaying building. At the end of the film, Sergio arrives at a school, where kids share wishes for the future of Cuba. One says: "I wish the U.S. government would lift the genocide embargo on our country."
A photo by Lissette Solórzano captures a boy diving off the Malecón and into the sea. Time stops mid-dive. This world seems far away, a sentiment that sums up the show's aesthetic.
Cubano Gallery
Gallery founder Michael Avron Appleman began visiting Cuba 15 years ago for Jewish humanitarian work, but kept discovering Cuban artwork.
Hoping to do more than just help the Jewish community in Havana, in 2008 he opened Cubano Gallery, a ground-level office space in Golden Valley that represents 15 Cuban artists (and one Israeli artist) including José Fuster, whom he calls "the Picasso of Cuba," and representational painter Agustin García. Proceeds benefit humanitarian missions and the Cuban artists directly.
Raised Orthodox Jewish in north Minneapolis, Appleman grew up poor, putting himself through college by teaching Hebrew. He eventually founded a medical imaging business and became a real estate agent.
Appleman has been to Cuban more than 20 times (he has a brother-in-law who is a "Jewban," or Cuban Jew) and acquired a license to import Cuban art. Exhibitions at Cubano Gallery are sporadic (it bills itself as an online gallery, and visitors must schedule private viewings). Because it is not possible to mail anything from Cuba to the United States, Appleman does it all by hand.
"Bringing back artwork is one of the exceptions of the embargo," he said. "Every time I go down there I have a black tube and I bring the artwork back in it."
Appleman likes to stay in contact with artists, but that's not always possible. A large portrait of a femme fatale, entitled "Seduction," by an artist he knows only as Curbelo, hangs near the front window.
"I bought it five years ago," he said. "I never heard from her again. Maybe she's in prison."
'20/20' at Highpoint
"In Cuba, if you ask somebody how they're doing, the phrase on the street is 'La lucha,' ('The fight') or 'Aquí en la lucha' ('Here in the fight')," said Steve Daiber, director of Red Trillium Press, a print workshop and cultural organization that works with Cuban artists. He's been visiting and living in Cuba on and off for the past 20 years.
Lithographs, silk-screens and woodcuts by 22 of Daiber's colleagues are featured in the exhibition "20/20: Contemporary Cuban Printmaking" which opened Friday.
There's a lot to see here, from Yainiel Marínez's print of cows floating through the sky on parachutes to Luis Lamothe Duribe's lively woodcuts of people socializing on the Malecón.
Jessica Vásquez Quintana's silk-screens have a nostalgic feel, incorporating old photos and handwritten letters. The show also features three lithographs depicting angry surrealistic characters bending in unimaginable ways. They're by Eduardo Hernández Santos, whom Daiber calls "perhaps the most important gay artist in Cuba."
Daiber and his family keep returning to Cuba. "We fell in love with Cuba," he said. Their daughter was 7 when they first went to Cuba; now she is 26, and speaks Spanish with a Cuban accent. Her first boyfriend, Aaron R. Moreno, is one of the artists in the show.
"I think Cubans put a real value on art as part of the well-being of the human person," said Daiber. "That's just something that isn't strengthened here in our culture."
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