New Edited Volume on Cuban Art and Cultural Identity

Image: landaluze.jpg
Víctor Patricio Landaluze, Cutting Sugar Cane, 1874

The editorial board of the University Press of Florida has approved the publication of Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora, edited by CRI Director Jorge Duany. This collection of essays is based on a 2017 conference held at the Frost Art Museum, with the support of the Darlene M. and Jorge M. Pérez Collection of Cuban Art at FIU, the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, and the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The essays have been revised following the recommendations of two external reviewers of the manuscript, and resubmitted for final consideration by the press. The book, dedicated to FIU Professor Emeritus of Art History Juan A. Martínez, is scheduled for publication during the fall of 2019.

Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora delves into several defining moments of Cuba's artistic evolution from a multidisciplinary perspective, including art history, architecture, history, photography, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Situating Cuban art within a wider context of complex references, internal and external influences, and socio-historical connections, fifteen prominent scholars and collectors scrutinize the enduring links between Cuban art and cultural identity. Covering the main periods in Cuban art (the colonial, republican, and postrevolutionary periods, as well as the contemporary diaspora), the contributors identify both the constant and changing elements and symbols in the visual representation of cubanía or cubanidad (Cubanhood).

The following is the table of contents of the edited volume:

  • Introduction: Cuba, a Moveable Nation
    Jorge Duany (Florida International University)
  • Cuban Colonial Prints: Constructing Our National Identity through Seventeen Projects
    Emilio Cueto (independent scholar)
  • Between Civilization and Barbarism: Víctor Patricio de Landaluze's Paintings during the Ten Years War in Cuba (1868–78)
    E. Carmen Ramos (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
  • Colonial Art and Its Afterlife: Visualizing the Nation Then and Now
    Alison Fraunhar (Saint Xavier University, Chicago)
  • Cuban Painting at the Turn of the Century (1902–30): The Nexus between Traditional and Vanguard
    Anelys Alvarez (independent scholar)
  • The Cuban Avant-Garde and the International Art Community
    Ramón Cernuda (Cernuda Arte)
  • Women Not Successful Here: Cuban Women Artists, from San Alejandro to the Vanguardia
    Carol Damian (Florida International University)
  • Cuban Architects at Home and in Exile: The Modernist Generation
    Victor Deupi and Jean-François Lejeune (University of Miami)
  • Concrete Cuba
    Abigail McEwen (University of Maryland, College Park)
  • Cuban Photography after 1959: Shifting Paradigms
    Iliana Cepero (independent scholar)
  • Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts
    María A. Cabrera Arús (New York University)
  • Theatricality in the Art of the Cuban Diaspora: The Progression of Tropes
    Ricardo Pau-Llosa (Miami Dade College)
  • The Cuban-American Exile Vanguardia: Towards a Theory of Collecting Cuban-American Art
    Lynette M. F. Bosch (State University of New York, Geneseo)
  • Cuban Art in the Diaspora: The "Chaos of Difference and Repetition"
    Andrea O'Reilly Herrera (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
  • From Burning Paintings to Domestic Anxieties: Shifting Cultural Relations between the United States and Cuba and between Cubans on and off the Island
    Jorge Duany (Florida International University)