Cuba on the Verge: An Island in TransitionJune 6- August 31, 2003 |
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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, among others, 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. |
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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. |
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Buy the book at the ICP Museum Store: Cuba on the Verge: An Island in Transition by Terry McCoy (Editor), William Kennedy (Introduction), Arthur Miller (Epilogue) 200 pages; Dimensions 0.97 x 10.92 x 12.12 inches. Publisher: Bulfinch Press |
The
photographers in Cuba on the Verge examine the consequences of
this “climate of uncertainty.” According to Pulitzer Prize winning writer
William Kennedy, who wrote the introduction to the exhibition’s accompanying
publication, 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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 panoramic 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. |
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| 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 the island’s Afro-Cuban
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.” |
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| Cuba
on the Verge is guest curated by Terry McCoy. McCoy is a writer,
arts producer, and filmmaker 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,” published
by Bulfinch Press. 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 organized by ICP Assistant Curator
Cynthia Fredette.
The publication is available from the ICP Museum Store. |
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Support for the exhibition is provided by Bulfinch Press, a division of the AOL Time Warner Book Group. | ||
