Because of the Increasing Disorder: Cuban Visual Arts During the 1990s

This presentation will address some of the fundamental changes that took place in the Cuban art scene during the last decades of the 20th century. We will explore the societal, cultural and economic changes in and out of Cuba—from the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe to the momentary dollarization of the Cuban economy—that visibly affected the art produced in this Caribbean country. The world of the visual arts, embodying a variety of aesthetic and ideological standpoints, sheds light on Cuba’s transition from the 1980s to a period of national crisis—officially known as the “Special Period”—in the 1990s. New topics that became increasingly important included the conflicted relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union, the final implosion of the utopia and the ensuing ideological crisis, emigration and the Rafter Crisis of 1994, changes in material culture, rising racism and poverty, the enhanced visibility of religions in general and of Afro-Cuban religions in particular, and a focus on the body with a gaze that zeroed in on the grotesque. Critics have identified a “culture of cynicism” and a level of hedonism in the art of the Special Period that seem to be inseparable from the rising importance of the art market in Cuba.

Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández) is an artist, critic, curator and educator. He has exhibited extensively including at the Havana, Sao Paulo, Berlin, and Venice biennials. He is currently working on his solo exhibition Ajústate al tema, opening in December, 2018 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba. Since 2006 he has taught as an adjunct professor and a sessional lecturer at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He was a visiting artist and lecturer at the Center for Latin American Studies and at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University (2002 -03). He was associated with the Facultad de Artes Plásticas, Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, Cuba as a Tutor, working with individual students as an adviser for painting and sculpture thesis (1987 -97). He co-curated, with Jürgen Harten, Kuba o.k: Aktuelle Kunst aus Kuba (1990), Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, and with Keith Wallace, The Spaces Between. Contemporary Art from Havana, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2014) and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2015). In 2016 he co-curated, with Denise Ryner, Harbour / Heaven. thirstDays No. 3, at VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, Canada. More recently he published “From the Genius in the Mountain to the Party in the Dark: Art, Cinema, and Cultural Politics at the Beginning of the Cuban Revolution”, in Breathless Days, 1959 – 1960, edited by Serge Guilbaut and John O’Brian (Duke University Press, 2017). He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities (1997-98) with residency at The University of Texas, Austin, and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for painting and installation art (1995). He received the prize for art criticism by the Cuban Section of the International Art Critics Association (AICA) in 1988, and was awarded the Rafael Blanco Honorary Mention in Drawing at the First Havana Biennial, Cuba (1984). He will be teaching “ARTHIST 162: Visual Arts Cuba (1959 - 2015)” in Spring 2019.