Picturing Cuba

Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora

Jorge Duany

• Publisher: University of Florida Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781683402091, 9781683400905
• eBook ISBN: 9781683402435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Picturing Cuba explores the evolution of Cuban visual art and its links to cubanía, or Cuban cultural identity. Featuring artwork from the Spanish colonial, republican, and postrevolutionary periods of Cuban history, as well as the contemporary diaspora, these richly illustrated essays trace the creation of Cuban art through shifting political, social, and cultural circumstances.

Contributors examine colonial-era lithographs of Cuba's landscape, architecture, people, and customs that portrayed the island as an exotic, tropical location. They show how the avant-garde painters of the vanguardia, or Havana School, wrestled with the significance of the island's African and indigenous roots, and they also highlight subversive photography that depicts the harsh realities of life after the Cuban Revolution. They explore art created by the first generation of postrevolutionary exiles, which reflects a new identity—lo cubanoamericano, Cuban-Americanness—and expresses the sense of displacement experienced by Cubans who resettled in another country. A concluding chapter evaluates contemporary attitudes toward collecting and exhibiting post-revolutionary Cuban art in the United States.

Encompassing works by Cubans on the island, in exile, and born in America, this volume delves into defining moments in Cuban art across three centuries, offering a kaleidoscopic view of the island's people, culture, and history.

Contributors: Anelys Alvarez | Lynnette M. F. Bosch | María A. Cabrera Arús | Iliana Cepero | Ramón Cernuda | Emilio Cueto | Carol Damian | Victor Deupi | Jorge Duany | Alison Fraunhar | Andrea O'Reilly Herrera | Jean-François Lejeune | Abigail McEwen | Ricardo Pau-Llosa | E. Carmen Ramos

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Cuba, a Moveable Nation
• 1. Cuban Colonial Prints: Constructing Our National Identity through Seventeen Projects
• 2. Between Civilization and Barbarism: Víctor Patricio de Landaluze’s Paintings during the Ten Years’ War in Cuba (1868–1878)
• 3. Colonial Art and Its Afterlife: Visualizing the Nation Then and Now
• 4. Cuban Painting at the Turn of the Century (1902–1930): The Nexus between Traditional and Vanguard
• 5. The Cuban Avant-Garde and the International Art Community
• 6. Women Not Successful Here: Cuban Women Artists, from San Alejandro to the Vanguardia
• 7. Cuban Architects at Home and in Exile: The Modernist Generation
• 8. Concrete Cuba
• 9. Cuban Photography after 1959: Shifting Paradigms
• 10. Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts
• 11. Theatricality in the Art of the Cuban Diaspora: The Progression of Tropes
• 12. The Cuban-American Exile Vanguardia: Toward a Theory of Collecting Cuban-American Art
• 13. Cuban Art in the Diaspora: The “Chaos of Difference and Repetition”
• 14. From Burning Paintings to Domestic Anxieties: Shifting Cultural Relations between the United States and Cuba and between Cubans on and off the Island
• List of Contributors
• Index