EYE 95: The Interstate as Access to Visual Delight: The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum / Rutgers / New Brunswick

When I flew from Detroit to Havana ten years ago on the first legal flight to Cuba since the Bay of Pigs (the DC-8 listed to port with all those UAW lefties looking for a Socialist Heaven), I found a narrow but thriving art community. The cinema and public health posters were as good as the Polish ones, and billboards were not bad if boringly repetitive. And the prints artists had donated to raise money for foreign students to come to the Youth Festival were the best art bargain I had ever found before visiting the PRC where the cheap wood cut is the genre of the Long March.

So I was eager to see “Outside of Cuba / Fuera de Cuba,” which is on view until May 26 when it begins a tour to New York City; Oxford, Ohio; Ponce, PR; and Miami. It is well worth seeing. Some of the surreal works remind one of the magic realism that has made Latin American literature so fascinating since World War II.

Because the exhibit of the 1959 diaspora is part of a university research project to document the phenomenon, the ninety-one works are only part of the package which includes a symposium on literature next October. You learn that the one million refugees already constitute 14% of the Cuban population, and that of 49 artists displayed, 35% reside in New York, 38% in Miami, with the rest scattered throughout the U.S., Latin America and Western Europe.

There will eventually be a catalog but even the brochure is helpful in establishing that “modern art” in Cuba did not start with the fall of Batista, but was a continuing trend begun much earlier in the century.

From Art Matters, July 1987