In the Mind’s Eye: Landscapes of Cuba

In the Mind’s Eye: Landscapes of Cuba
Curated by Amy Galpin
Presented by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, FL.

This exhibition explores U.S. painters active from 1850 to 1910 whose portrayals of Cuba reflect political, social, and ideological changes in both countries. While some artists depicted a pastoral, serene Cuba, others acknowledged race and slavery and created works that parallel those by Cuban artists, who frequently associated landscape with nationalism. These multilayered readings found in historic landscapes by U.S. artists reflect the complex ways in which Cuba has been viewed and imagined by its northern neighbors. As cultural constructs, the landscapes in this exhibition map desire, imagination, and political and economic developments. Select U.S. artists rendered the atrocities and struggles of the Cuban War of Independence (the last years of which are termed the Spanish-American War in the United States), but many focused on the natural environs from the sheen of the water to the tropical foliage and bucolic mountain tops. Curated by Amy Galpin, Ph.D., Chief Curator of the Frost Art Museum and a scholarly advisory committee, the exhibition presents work by nineteenth and early twentieth-century painters alongside works by contemporary artists from the last twenty years that reflect or counter the approaches expressed in the earlier works. The landscapes, seen in juxtaposition, explore deeper, more substantive perspectives of Cuba.

The Anglo-U.S. image of Cuba has ranged from a hedonistic paradise to a strategic political nation in global political and economic alliances and rivalries. While the dynamics of the revolution in 1959 frame most conversations in Miami about Cuba, this exhibition seeks a longer historical trajectory by focusing on the nineteenth century with twenty-first century interventions. U.S. artists William Glackens, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and Willard Metcalf will be featured alongside contemporary artists such as Juan Carlos Alom, María Magdalena Campos Pons, Juana Valdes, and Sandra Ramos, among others. While works by Emilio Perez and Lilian Garcia Roig respond to historic depictions of landscape, works by Carlos Martiel and Carrie Mae Weems intervene in the historical tropes and ideologies present in the landscapes featured in the exhibition. A selection of nineteenth-century paintings by Cuban artists further contextualizes the project.

In the Mind’s Eye acknowledges the vast and varied transcultural exchanges between the United States and Cuba. For example, Cuban painter Esteban Chartrand exhibited a painting at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, patriot, and poet José Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York in 1892, and an exhibition at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago featured archaeological studies of Cuba alongside Cuban cigars and rum. These relationships will be teased out in the exhibition.