IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 42
frontation. Any other topic with some other orientation was not considered to be important, or
was simply privileged by established curators or
critics.
This exhibit provoked a great many questions and
concerns about racial prejudice in Cuba; the art
world began to make good use of the subject. The
first version of Queloides included artists such as
Douglas Pérez, René Peña, Elio Rodríguez, Gertrudis Rivalta, Roberto Diago, Manuel Arenas,
José Ángel Vincench, Álvaro Almaguer, Omar
Pascual Castillo and Alexis Esquivel. In the first
place, the collection wanted to show those artists
who had dealt with the subject of race before,
with works in which there was a spontaneous defense of the socio-cultural and religious life of
blacks and mestizos. These works displayed contemporary and innovative artistic styles.
Some of the works were insistent in their somewhat critical and analytical representations of another realm of the everyday existence of blacks,
his social and political history, and even his concrete reality as part of a subaltern culture among
the most disadvantaged people of Cuba’s contemporary society. They focused on blacks as marginalized subjects with economic disadvantages,
traumas, and their own denunciations, which was
Rene Peña
De las urgencias del retrato
[Of the image's urgency]
Manipulated photo
in clear counterpoint with the
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tive with which the original and even fundamental producers of those Afro-Cuban cultural expressions were reduced in importance.
The show was realized by black and white artists,
which ended up finally refuting “very old excuses” like those that defended the idea that any
claim blacks made concerned only a group of “resentful blacks,” which meant that it was their
strategy only, and no one else’s. Queloides
demonstrated the sincere interest there was in this
topic on the part of a group of artists who, regardless their color, felt the need to dialog about it. It’s
important to note that any initiative of this sort
was not well received or understood by those who
were dominant in local art at that time. There was
an attempt to ignore all efforts: there was suspicion and jealousy even among the well intentioned whose advice for artists to leave aside
those issues so they could better develop their individual careers.
A month later, Ariel Ribeaux, a young writer who
graduated with a degree in Art History from the
University of Havana, and was a specialist at the
Provincial Center for Plastic Arts and Design in
Old Havana, organized a second exhibit: Ni músicos, Ni deportistas [Not Musicians, Not Athletes], which are the professional stereotypes that
Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal
José Ángel Toirac 1997
Permanecer en la tierra
La coronación de Ochún
[Remain on the Earth]
[The coronation of Oshun]
Installation
Oil on cloth and yellow ribbons
folkloric perspecwere generated by the changes in social mobility
that the island’s political transformation brought