<p>Amid cultural, economic, and political complexities, the country continues to develop as a global epicenter of talent</p>

Jacoba Urist

Understanding Cuba’s complex art market

<p>Cuban artists are certainly no stranger to the art history spotlight – from the surrealist terrain of Afro-Caribbean expressionist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/24055/Wilfredo-Lam" target="_blank">Wilfredo Lam</a> to the striking, planar vision of <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10656/Carmen-Herrera" target="_blank">Carmen Herrera</a> to the poetic minimalism of <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8552/Felix-Gonzalez-Torres" target="_blank">Felix Gonzalez-Torres</a>. Still, contemporary Cuban and Cuban diaspora artists remain relatively unsung despite their potent breadth of practice and geographic reach.<br></p>
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<p>‘For being an island in the Caribbean, the artistic production has historically been extraordinary, yet Cuban art is still extremely undervalued,’ says Jorge Pérez, an Argentine American philanthropist. Pérez’s first collection, donated in 2012 to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, included Cuban modernists like <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8364/Amelia-Peláez" target="_blank">Amelia Peláez</a>, Domingo Ramos, and Carlos Enríquez Gómez; last year, his Miami art space El Espacio 23 presented ‘You Know Who You Are: Recent Acquisitions of Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection’.&nbsp;</p>
<p>‘Over the years, we have been very intentional about supporting artists who settled in Miami when there was less support from the international market,’ Pérez continues, ‘artists who left Cuba in the 1980s or earlier, for example, and faced the consequences of living in exile.’&nbsp;</p>

<p>In the 18 years since, Akashi has come to think of her artistic trajectory as a spiral rather than a straight line, tethered in orbit around the themes of lineage, memory, and accumulation, but perpetually expanding in terms of forms and techniques. She regularly brings new materials into her practice, engaging in a dialogue with each new medium; a meditation on what images the material might elicit in her mind or what forms its inherent structural properties are best suited for.</p>
<p>‘Forcing materials to have a premeditated form leaves more room for accidents, chaos, and entropy to enter the work,’ she says. ‘My authorship is contingent on the material’s ability to do its own thing, and my allowing it to speak its own language.’</p>
<p>The softness of alabaster, for example, carves nicely into doughy amorphous shapes, and for <em>Triple Helix</em> (2020), she blew clear, crystal quartz into the shape of a bell because of the material’s ‘amazing resonance.’ ‘It’s so structurally stable that when you strike it,’ she explains, ‘it vibrates at a consistent rate, which is why it’s used in timekeeping devices.’ The bell, suspended over an accompanying table supporting eight small-scale, voluptuous glass vessels that represent a family of women, presents lineage as a reverberation – a temporal echo that resounds through generations.</p>

<p>At the same time, a government crackdown on dissent and supply shortages of daily goods holding the country back are inseparable from the aesthetics of Cuba’s iconic voices. Celebrated Cuban artist Tania Bruguera mounts provocative performances, such as the recent restaging of <em>Where Your Ideas Become Civic Action</em>, a 100-hour reading of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, inviting fellow artists, historians, and political activists to join her. The original work, performed in May 2015 in Cuba, led to her detention by the Cuban authorities.<br></p>
<p>Using a deceptively ethereal lexicon, Cuban artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17958/Glenda-León" target="_blank">Glenda León </a>creates works she describes as ‘symbolic healings’. At SITE Santa Fe, León glued artificial leaves to natural tree branches, indistinguishable from real foliage, an intervention only discernible as seasons change when her leaves are evergreen. ‘I’m interested in listening with the eyes as with the ears,’ she says. ‘One of the main problems we currently face is that we don’t listen to the earth or to ourselves.’<br></p>
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<p>Meanwhile, at Art Omi in Ghent, New York, Cuban-born artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13959/Alexandre-Arrechea" target="_blank">Alexandre Arrechea</a>’s&nbsp;<em>Orange Functional</em>&nbsp;(2022) finds bright orange branches blossoming into basketball hoops (his public art has also graced Park Avenue and Coachella music festival). For others, physical materials come literally from Cuba’s landscape. Sculptor <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8624/Yoan-Capote" target="_blank">Yoan Capote</a>, who had his first solo exhibition last spring at <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1342/Ben-Brown-Fine-Arts" target="_blank">Ben Brown Fine Arts</a>’ Palm Beach location, describes his series ‘Litoral’ (2022): ‘I’m working with stone I have been extracting from the coast of Cuba –&nbsp;<em>diente de perro</em>,’ he explains. ‘This kind of rock receives a constant impact from the sea. Their texture is very beautiful and aggressive.’</p>
<p>‘There are collectors who collect because of their relationship to the material. They love it, think it’s beautiful, and are interested in its cultural history. And then there are collectors who collect based on investment and the possibility of future gain,’ says Shelley Rubin, founder of the Rubin Museum of Art as well as The 8th Floor, an exhibition space dedicated to social change. She is also a prominent collector of Cuban artists, such as Manuel Mendive, Clara Morera, and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8689/José-Bedia" target="_blank">José Bedia</a>. But, Rubin continues, ‘to create a sustained market for the art from a particular region like Cuba, there needs to be a sympathetic relationship between these two aspects of collecting.’</p>
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<p><br>This article was originally published in the <em>Art Basel Miami Beach</em> magazine 2023.</p>
<p>Published on November 15, 2023.</p>
<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Installation view of a work by Carmen Herrera presented by Lisson Gallery in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel's 2018&nbsp;show in Basel. 2. Carlos Garaicoa, <em>Counterweight (Ciudad Plomada)</em>, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. 3. Carlos Garaicoa, <em>Partitura/ Score</em>, 2017. Courtesy of the artist. 4. Installation view of a work by&nbsp;Felix Gonzalez-Torres presented by David Zwirner at Art Basel's 2022 show in Basel.</p>

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