|
Wednesday, June 25, 2003.
Art Museum Network.
International Center of Photography
Friday, June 6,
2003 — Sunday, August 31, 2003
NEW YORK CITY, (amnnews.com) — The International Center of Photography
is pleased to announce a major exhibition focusing on life in Cuba today. Over
seventy works by more than a dozen American, Cuban, and Cuban-American
photographers, including Virginia Beahan, Carlos Garaicoa, Abelardo Morell,
Manuel Piña, and Carrie Mae Weems, will be presented for the first time. "The
goal of the exhibition," says guest curator Terry McCoy, "is to convey
Cuba present, and to do so with a sense of accuracy and humanity." The
exhibition will be on view from June 6 through August 31, 2003 at the
International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street.
Cuba is currently experiencing the most dramatic and turbulent upheaval
since Fidel Castro's revolution of 1958. Following the revolution, cultural and
economic exchange between the United States and Cuba was terminated, and this
embargo has affected the evolution of the country dramatically. Some of the
recent changes have been driven by the country's continuing experiments in
socialism, but the most profound adjustments reflect the impact of the so-called
"Special Period" of the early 1990s, the worst economic crisis in
Cuban history. Only a sharp increase in foreign tourism in the late 1990s saved
the country from total economic disaster. But this sudden influx of foreigners
also had a profound effect on the nation, determining the flow of its money, the
people's sense of national identity, and even the ecological status of Cuba's
physical terrain. These major economic and cultural shifts have produced a
society that contends daily with flux and lack of resolution, produced by its
continual struggle to reconcile actual experience with revolutionary ideals, and
by the pressures of global capitalism on its tightly controlled economy.
The photographers in Cuba on the Verge examine the consequences of this "climate
of uncertainty." According to Pulitzer Prize winning writer William
Kennedy, these images reflect "the perpetuity of the socialist revolution
under Fidel Castro, the ineradicable poverty that plagues it; [and] the flood of
American tourists and Cuban exiles with dollars who are creating a new middle
class." In particular they reveal startling transformations in the social,
political, cultural, and personal landscapes of present-day Cuba. Each
photographer's series in the exhibition is linked to a specific theme, such as
architecture, sexuality, Santería, rural life, exile, the role of women,
history, music, landscape, and Afro-Cuban culture.
Several series of work focus on the relationships between history, memory,
and the physical environment in contemporary Cuban experience. Virginia Beahan's
large-format landscape pictures, for example, reflect upon the persistent
mythology of the revolution's historical sites, including the beach where, in
1956, Fidel Castro and eighty-one of his comrades landed the boat "Granma"
to begin a guerrilla war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Carlos
Garaicoa calls the architectural ruins that he photographs "an abandoned
past." The subjects of his series of lightbox images are the remains of
demolished Havana buildings that the photographer considers the ground upon
which a new, utopic "Cuban Garden" will emerge. In contrast, the
richly detailed color photographs of Andrew Moore show dilapidated mansions and
mills, once the heart of the nation's sugar industry, as symbols of what can and
cannot be salvaged of the pre-socialist past. Lastly, Manuel Piña's
sumptuous color photographs of crumbling walls are, in the artist's words, "a
portrait of all the eras of that wall," which has witnessed not only the
drama of public history, but the everyday lives of ordinary Cubans.
Other artists in the exhibition offer diverse views of Cuba's current social
and economic conditions, both within the capital of Havana and in the
countryside. Sylvia Plachy's wide-angle street photographs capture such
spontaneous moments as schoolgirls walking along Havana's coastal highway (the
Malecon) at dusk or the solitary dance of an elderly woman on a sidewalk, "remembering
her whole life in the sway of her body," as the artist writes. The emerging
middle class is the focus of photojournalist Niurka Barroso's work, including an
image of a young woman with a degree in city planning who has achieved a
comfortable, but precariously maintained lifestyle by renting rooms to tourists.
Kattia García Fayat illuminates the struggle of survival for some women
in the new Cuban economy in a series of documentary photographs. One provocative
image shows a married woman applying make-up in preparation for her work as a
prostitute while her family looks on. More gradual economic changes in the
countryside are treated in Ernesto Bazan's color reportage, which shows how new
influences are gradually being integrated into the rural way of life. This
confrontation between old and new is also explored in Adalberto Roque's
portraits of two key figures in Cuban music, the legendary jazz musician Chucho
Valdés and José Luis "El Tosco" Cortés, founder
of "timba," the new sound of Cuba.
More personal, and often private, experiences are referred to in the work of
other artists. Using close-up photographs of handwritten letters, René Peña
amplifies the poignant traces of connection between Cubans and their exile
relatives. Shared intimacies are the subject of Abigail Gonzáles'
black-and-white interior scenes, which are carefully constructed to create the
illusion of voyeurism into a world of erotic freedom and lack of inhibition.
Abelardo Morell's large black-and-white prints, made during his first trip back
to Cuba since he was a young boy, use the glowing projection of inverted urban
and coastal landscapes on the walls of darkened near-empty rooms (or camera
obscuras). The images serve as a metaphor of Cuba, which Morell experienced as a
place where past and present intimately coexist. Likewise, Carrie Mae Weems
focuses on her experience of Cuba with images of ritual-like performances in
which the artist re-imagines herself as part of Cuba's landscape, history, and
people. Finally, Fazal Sheikh's work, a photo-text installation, deals with the
ways in which the rituals of Santería, an important Afro-Cuban religion,
may reveal a spirituality that "provides solace to the Cuban people as they
embark on an uncertain future."
"Cuba on the Verge" is guest curated by Terry McCoy. McCoy is a
writer/producer whose film credits include documentaries on Harlem's Apollo
Theatre, the Guerrilla Girls, and "Words In Your Face," a spoken word
anthology produced for PBS. She is currently working on a documentary project
with filmmaker Albert Maysles. McCoy is also the editor of "Cuba on the
Verge: An Island In Transition," to be published by Bulfinch Press, March
2003. The publication, which stems from McCoy's collaborations over a two-year
period with a number of internationally acclaimed writers and photographers
based in the U.S. and Cuba, is the basis for this exhibition. The book includes
an introduction by William Kennedy, an epilogue by Arthur Miller, and essays
about the contemporary Cuban experience by writers including Russell Banks,
Susan Orlean, Abilio Estévez, and Ana Menéndez. The exhibition is
being organized by ICP Assistant Curator Cynthia Fredette.
Support for the exhibition is provided in part by the AOL Time Warner Book
Group and the AOL Time Warner Foundation. |
