During my sabbatical fellowship, I conducted research to develop an exhibition featuring contemporary artists born and trained in Cuba. The proposal grew out of my nearly 20-year engagement with Cuban artists and curators, and an invitation to be part of the curatorial team for an exhibition conceived by artist Reynier Leyva Novo and entitled Viewer Discretion Advised. Centered around the relationship between censorship and freedom of expression, the exhibition was presented in December 2023 during Miami Art Week. 

Novo’s interrogation of the tension created by the differing agendas of the artist and the state seemed to be a direct inheritance from the generations preceding him, but there was something new in both his approach to and execution of the ideas that informed the work. I spent the past two decades in close contact with the artists who I met while living in Havana from 2004 to 2006—a critical juncture in the history of the island marked by the last years of Fidel Castro and the final dismantling of the ideological facade built under his leadership, exacerbated by a dire economic situation. Born in the early days of the revolution, trained in the National Art Schools system established in 1961, these artists reached artistic maturity at the height of the crisis. No strangers to censorship, they often mined their country’s political and social systems to expose their effects on the lives of citizens. These artists now known as “Special Period Artists” (from the “Special Period in the Time of Peace,” an economic, social, and spiritual crisis brought on by the fall of the Soviet Union) developed artistic strategies for producing art in a fluctuating and often hostile environment. Dissension and repression were among the common themes associated with their work, eventually leading to clichéd readings. Whereas much of the discourse centered on the island itself, the critical account of the story is more nuanced than the literature reflects. With this project, I am proposing a formalist redirection away from the island and toward the artist, the artistic process, and choices made in that pursuit.

As many of the artists have left Cuba, I traveled to ask them the following questions: What is Cuban art that is not produced in Cuba? How, if at all, has your artistic process changed since departing the island? What aspects of your formal training in Cuba’s National Art Schools system do you continue to carry forth? Does censorship—official or self-imposed—factor into what you produce? How much autonomy do you have in deciding what you create?

In early May, I traveled to Madrid to meet with Cuban artists now residing there, along with a younger generation of artists working in paint, a medium I rarely encountered while living in Havana. I realized that the way to tell the story was in connecting them across generations via the fact that they were born and trained on the island and were using similar strategies to conceive and execute their work. 

Studio visits and in-depth conversations were conducted with Alexandre Arrechea; Yoan Capote; René Francisco and Eduardo Ponjuán (both as artists and professors at the Instituto Superior de Arte [ISA]); Carlos Garaicoa, Lorena Gutierrez Camejo, Kadir López, Sandra Ramos, and Dagoberto Rodríguez, all of whom I’ve known since my time living in Havana; along with artists I just met, including Alejandro Campins, Gabriel Cisneros, Osvaldo González, Michel Peréz Pollo, Victor Piverno, José Yaque, and Ariel Cabrera (currently in New Jersey) and Alejandro Pineiro Bello (currently in Florida). I will continue my research by traveling to Mexico City to meet with Flavio Garciandía, a Cuban artist of the generation before the Special Period, a professor at ISA, and the mentor and professor who instructed almost all the artists mentioned here. 

What emerged from my discussions is the idea for an exhibition that takes as its framework (and title) the philosophical concept of Albedrío / Free Will. It will highlight the continuation of an artistic strategy embedded in the training in the Cuban art schools that runs through the work produced by the artists of the Special Period and beyond to the present generation. Situated between the binaries of determinism and indeterminism lies a galaxy of possibilities. For some, the concept presents itself as freedom from external influences and past events. For others, the idea creates an opening for the expansion of worlds yet to be imagined. In between everything and nothing is the space where the artist has free will to create. It is within this more nuanced narrative that I would like to reconsider the artistic production of those born and trained in Cuba during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Department of French Paintings, National Gallery of Art
Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Fellow, 2024–2025

Michelle Bird is the curatorial associate in the National Gallery’s Department of French Paintings. She will continue her independent research for the proposed exhibition Albedrío / Free Will.