Life Streams

Alberto Rey's Cuban and American Art

Lynette M. F. Bosch, Mark Denaci, Lynette M. F. Bosch, Mark Denaci

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438450568, 9781438450575
• eBook ISBN: 9781438450582
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

Life Streams explores the paintings, videos, sculptures, and installations of Alberto Rey, an artist whose work addresses issues of identity, cultural diversity, environmental studies, and global sustainability. As a Cuban-born artist living in western New York State, Rey's current work emphasizes his involvement with his community and its local landscape, especially its trout streams and their surrounding environment. Through Rey's travels from his home in the upstate New York village of Fredonia to the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and to almost every state in the United States, he has gained an understanding of people, places, flora, and fauna. This book provides biographical information about Rey and a contextual study of his work. The contributors have written about Rey's work from perspectives based on cultural studies, identity studies, literary studies, and philosophical studies. Interest in his Cuban and American identities are linked to his interest in global culture and his recent study of fish species and environmental issues. As such, this book reflects current approaches that focus attention on connected cultural issues and contemporary concerns about the environment, conservation, restoration, and preservation. Rey's work provides a new perspective on these topics as he combines art with activism on a local, regional, national, and international level.

1

Alberto Rey

Intersections

LYNETTE M. F. BOSCH

Alberto Rey is a Distinguished Professor of Painting at SUNY Fredonia.¹ He is also an internationally recognized Cuban-born American artist who works in a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, installation, and video. In the middle of his life, and after decades of searching for personal and cultural identity, Rey has found the nexus where the diverse facets of his personal and professional life come together. This center is located in the quiet, Western New York State town of Fredonia, where Rey lives with his wife, Janeil Strong, and their two children, Graciela and Diego. This convergence of his personal and professional lives is the catalyst for Rey’s current artistic expression, linked to his outreach work for the community in which he lives.² At this stage of his life, Rey’s art has brought him through a series of transformations that have altered the works he creates and the philosophy whereby he lives, and this process of change and discovery is a central theme of this book about his life and work.

Alberto Rey was born in Havana, Cuba, on August 7, 1960.³ His mother, Olga Guerra Rey, had traveled there from the family’s home in Agramonte, three hours from Havana. Enrique Rey, Alberto’s father, was a principal of high school and a teacher of mathematics, with a PhD in education, whose lack of sympathy with Fidel Castro’s revolution was known in his hometown. On April 18, 1961, the day after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed to remove Castro from power, Enrique Rey was jailed on a chicken farm for ten days. Olga Rey’s two brothers and her father were also jailed.

In March 1963, Enrique Rey obtained political asylum in Mexico, where he worked for Monsanto, saving enough money by August, to bring his wife, daughter Mayda, and son Alberto, to Mexico. The family settled in Tlalnepantla, a suburb of Mexico City. A year later, Rey’s immediate family immigrated to the Unites States and settled in Miami, where they joined other members of their extended family. In Miami, Rey’s father and mother worked a series of jobs: his father worked in a sugar refinery, as an airplane mechanic, and for a fiberglass boat manufacturer. He cut aluminum sheets for a window manufacturer, and he also worked at Ancel, the makers of Hispanic food products, in the packaging department and as representative for the company. Rey’s mother worked at home, as a seamstress doing piecework, as an Avon salesperson, and as a builder of fishing rods. Rey’s early childhood was spent in Miami’s Cuban American enclave, and as other members of the family joined the original exiles, they settled into a community that kept their Cuban culture alive, though transplanted to the United States.

When Rey was seven years old, his father accepted a job teaching Spanish at Northern Cambria High School and moved the family to Barnesboro, Pennsylvania (population 2,500). Adjusting to this new life wasn’t easy, as the family’s English wasn’t yet fluent, and they were the only Cuban family in town. Rey endured some harassment from town locals because he spoke English haltingly and didn’t look as though he could fit into the white, American mainstream that defined Barnesboro. Barnesboro lacked a Latin American community; hence, the Rey family was alone in an American culture they barely understood. The closest and only Cubans the family knew in this area were the friends who had helped them to settle in Barnesboro, who taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and lived an hour away. Rey assimilated to American culture as quickly as he could, and he describes growing up in Barnesboro as living in a small, rural, coal-mining town of 5,000 residents and two traffic lights” by the time he was an adolescent. He remembers that “in front of the house was a large mound of leftover dirt from an old coal mine, and behind the house was a forested hill, where we hunted, slept out, and ran up and over on the way to the town swimming pool.” As he recalls it, it was like “a scene right out of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, which was filmed in 1978.”

It was in 1978 that Rey received an appointment to West Point Military Academy, which he left with an honorable discharge to study biology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Rey had joined West Point after being invited as a result of his accomplishments as a scholar and as a football player, but oceanography appealed to him more than a military career, and he sought and received the honorable discharge that enabled him to pursue his interest in science. Although he had always been interested in drawing and copying images, Rey had not considered a career as an artist until he took some art courses and was encouraged by Professor Paul Ben-Zvi and Professor Vaughn Clay to pursue art as a course of study. While in college, Rey took different jobs each summer along the Jersey Shore. With hindsight, Rey’s current series is the natural outgrowth of his diverse interests in marine biology, oceanography, landscape, fishing, and art.

In 1980–1981, Rey moved to the Pittsburgh area, where after attending classes for a year at the Visual Communication Program at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, he eventually received a BFA in drawing and painting from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. During this period, he worked as a darkroom technician and messenger for Focal Point Photography, while he studied the Carnegie Museum of Art and Natural History’s collection. After graduation, Rey moved to Boston, where he worked briefly doing cutting and pasting for a design firm and created illustrations for the Christian Science Monitor.

Soon thereafter, Rey moved to Miami, where he lived with his aunt and uncle and where he worked for Christo on the “Surrounded Islands Project.” Rey became involved with this project after he observed some of the work that had been started by Christo’s group, while drawing from hotel rooftops. After doing a little research, he found that the head-quarters for the project was located on Pelican Island, and, after interviewing, he was hired. He worked full time with Christo and Jeanne Claude in an international community of artists and nonartists that made him realize the potential for working as an artist. On a personal level, living in Miami connected Rey once more to his Cuban culture, with which he had only sporadic contact during summer visits, after his family moved to Barnesboro.

In 1984, Rey moved to Rochester, New York, in what was his first move to the general area of Western New York State, where he now lives. In Rochester, he lived on South Goodman Street and worked for Light Impressions and for Lichtenstein Marketing Communications. A year later, he began graduate study at the University of Buffalo and received his MFA in 1987.

Soon after he completed his studies, Rey traveled throughout Spain and Morocco before returning to Buffalo, where he taught Spanish at an inner-city school. Travel in Spain meant that he was able to see many of the works he had studied as he explored the home culture for Cuba’s Hispanic population. The trip was professional and personal, as Rey’s ancestors had come from Spain to Cuba from Santander, Escalante (near Santander), and the Canary Islands, hence, this trip enabled him to return to his family’s home country and to explore his family’s primary culture, so closely linked to Spain. On this trip, Rey visited Escalante (near Santander), in 2007, but not the Canary Islands, places to which he could trace his family’s origin and which were especially meaningful to him.

By 1985, Rey had moved twenty times, each time making new connections and friends and adapting to the local culture of each place that became a temporary home. His frequent moves and trips in between relocations created increasing numbers of memories that he felt needed organization so that he could begin to understand the trajectory of his life. From his desire to map his life in a way that could produce order out of seeming chaos, Rey began his first two significant, coterminous, distinct, yet connected series: Autogeographical and Floating, on which he worked from 1985 to 1987. The Autogeographical Series, which incorporated drawings of experiences Rey had while in graduate school, focused on places the artist had known and lived in, one example being Holy Angels Church and Chair (fig. 1), a record of a church in the Lower West Side of Buffalo on Porter Avenue. The Floating series connects to a series of dreams that Rey had for a number of years, where he floated over the rooftops and landscapes of locations where he had lived: “The higher I floated, the easier it was to make sense of all the locations where I had lived—over these floating images, I incorporated the drawing and painting of other memories.” Rey tried to capture the ephemeral and transcendent evanescence of these dreams in works such as Transitions (fig. 2). The floating and suggestive forms of this work create a visual effect comparable to changes in dream sequences, and are evocative of how memories of events past pass through our minds.

Boston was once again Rey’s home when he moved there, in 1988, to teach at Lincoln Sudbury High School, the Education Department of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Boston, and the New England School of Art and Design. Simultaneously, Rey started taking art history classes at Harvard University, and he traveled to Mexico: Isla de Mujéres, Valladolid, and Chichen Itza. This year also marked Rey’s first solo exhibition at the New York City Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MOCHA).

At this point, he began work on the Black Lace and Nuptial series, which began in1987 and continued until 1989.⁵ These two intertwined series were early explorations of spirituality, eroticism, and marriage. Rey initiated the Black Lace series with the goal of capturing the fascination that Catholic ritual and the lives of the saints exerted on his imagination. Intermixed with the imagery of Roman Catholicism were references to the “Orishas,” or deities, of Santería, Cuba’s version of the syncretism that exists in Latin America between African religions and Catholicism. Santería is a syncretic religion, in which the gods and goddesses of Africa were given new names and identities by the slaves brought to work Cuba’s plantations. The new names were protective, as slaves were forbidden to practice their own religious traditions and were forced to accept Catholicism. Gender slippage was also a factor in the concealment of the Orisha’s identities when they later were renamed after Catholic saints. Thus did Chango, a chief and male deity, become St. Barbara, as Chango’s warrior aspect was represented by St. Barbara’s attribute—the sword. Hidden within the matrix of the Catholic cult of the Saints, the Orishas continued to be worshiped by Cubans, whose families preserved the African traditions within European Christianity. Santería is a cultural marker for Cubans, who know that both traditions coexist in Cuba and among exiled Cubans, and its blend of African and Cuban resonates especially with Cuban Americans, whose families were considered to be of the same mixed ancestry. For Rey, Santería is another marker of his Cuban and family identity.

Rey’s interest in ritual and in the use of veils, worn by women in churches as a sign of ritual dress and, in intimate settings, for the purpose of seduction, caused him to employ the shapes and forms of black lace in the Black Lace series, seen in Black Lace Series: Fertility (fig. 3). Gold was equally important, as the precious metal of which liturgical vestments are made and with which statues of saints were gilded. In Post-Nuptial Gold: Time, gold is used to indicate the precious quality of this metal and its association to church ritual and to marriage as a rite of the Catholic Church.

These two series flowed into another, Binary Forms (1988–1992), which addressed the same issues as the previous series while becoming more focused on personal themes after Rey married Janeil Cam Strong in 1989.⁶ Rey had met Janeil, who grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, while he was living in Boston. Binary Forms was intended to incorporate references to a number of concepts and motifs: Rey’s marriage to Janeil; the religious context of marriage; the juncture of spirituality and eroticism; the overlap of present and past found in memory; and the links between memory and spirituality that Rey sought to clarify through the abstract forms he employed in this series.

Rey and Janeil married in the same year that Rey accepted a position as an assistant professor of art at the State University of New York at Fredonia. With Janeil, Rey made a home in Western New York State and they explored the region to which they had moved, even as they traveled to Isle de Sainte, St. Kitts, Antigua, and Guadalupe in1989, and then to Italy in 1990 to see Rome, Florence, Capri, Sorrento, Venice, and Ferrara. In 1991, Rey worked with Christo again, as a crew captain on the Umbrellas project in Tejón Pass, California, after which he returned to Mexico. These early trips, the local and the international, began a pattern of life and travel for Rey that continues, as he is always in motion, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

The exploration of the region around Fredonia in which Rey and Janeil engaged after their arrival in the area led to two series of interlocking significance for Rey: Madonnas of Western New York (1991–1993)⁷ and Madonnas in Time (1993–1995).⁸ In the first series, Rey built small, open-backed wooden boxes, on the front of which he painted small images of buildings, statues, monuments, or markers that represented cultural icons for Western New York State, an example of which is the Niagara Mohawk plant (fig. 5). Rey’s intention in this series was straightforward: he wanted to create a record of the sights and places that grounded communal identity in the area where he had made his home. Because he connected culture to spirituality, he rendered the selected regional sites into the equivalent of votive images. The painted scenes are reminiscent of ex-voto offerings, where recipients of miracles rendered an image of gratitude to either a saint or God as an offering. Such images are part of Mediterranean and Latin American culture, and they were a means for Rey to link his Cuban cultural identity with his new home.

The Madonnas of Western New York series brought about an important stylistic change for Rey, as he moved from a predominantly abstract style to one of realism. He so changed because he wanted the content of his images to be clear and accessible to the spectator. His abstract paintings emphasized emotion and spirituality, but by being abstract, they sacrificed clarity to personal expression. In this new series, Rey wanted to make sure that the content and symbols were defined and recognizable. Because the exploration of his new identity, as someone who lived in Western New York State, was based on visual markers that needed to be recognized, Rey’s choice of realism was necessary to convey the intention of this sequence of works. To this end, he developed an iconographic and symbolic system that incorporated local monuments with evocative relocations of these objects into the sites of his past life.

Paradoxically, the more that Rey and Janeil explored their locale, the more Rey’s thoughts turned toward Cuba, and by 1993, he was working on his next series, Madonnas in Time (1993–1995). In this group of works, Rey continued to create the same type of boxes he had employed in the previous series, but the images now combined the abstract shapes from Binary Forms with painted scenes the backgrounds of which were copied from old landscape photographs of Cuba from the 1910s and 1920s. The old photographs were copied in paint and painted in black-and-white; in circles or ovals in the skies of these landscape views, Rey painted, in color, images of various monuments and buildings of Western New York State, as seen in Madonnas in Time: Viñales (fig. 6). Some of these monuments were iconic, while others were meant to be more reflective of the everyday, even mundane life of the area: according to Rey, “I wanted to bring spirituality to everyday experiences and, by so doing, to bring spirituality into my own life.” The black-and-white represented the unreal—that which Rey had not experienced—and these were images in which nostalgia played an important role. The combination of visual registers was also Rey’s way of connecting to both Western New York and Cuba; thus, the series combined his actual and his inaccessible homes. With the Madonnas in Time, Rey began a graphic and focused exploration of his Cuban identity that would continue until the year 2000, when he would completely change his thematic concerns to those he now pursues.

The images of Cuba’s landscape, chosen because they were apolitical and free of the controversies that are part of Cuban twentieth-century history, caused Rey to actively question what it meant to be Cuban and what it meant to him that he did not have any memories of his birth country. Cuba, for Rey, was Miami, and the years he had spent in Miami with his Cuban relatives—the only place in his life where he was surrounded by Cubans and where he could become part of a Latino community. His knowledge of Cuba was filtered through the family stories th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Life Streams: The Cuban and American Art of Alberto Rey
• Chapter 1: Alberto Rey: Intersections
• Chapter 2: The Construction of Identity in Art: Alberto Rey’s Journey
• Chapter 3: Alberto Rey’s Balsas Series in the Cuban American Imagination
• Chapter 4: Absent Presences and the Living Dead: Alberto Rey’s Haunted Aesthetics
• Chapter 5: Trout as Form and Symbol
• Color Photo Gallery
• Chapter 6: Reading the Waters: Early Works of Influence on the Literature of Fly-Fishing
• Chapter 7: Biological Regionalism: Scajaquada Creek, Erie County, New York, USA
• Chapter 8: Time Submersion: A Portrait of Two Creeks
• Chapter 9: Alberto Rey: Beneath the Surface
• Chapter 10: Conclusion: Bioregionalism and Animal Studies
• Biographical Timeline
• Locations Investigated by Alberto Rey
• Selected Curriculum Vitae
• Index
• Back Cover