At the Museum

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Seeing Afro-Cuban Art and Afrocubanismo Anew

By Jill Deupi

“I’ve been considered a painter of the School of Paris, a surrealist painter, or whatever other movement, but never as a representative of the painting I truly do, in which I believe I largely reflect the poetry of the Africans who arrived in Cuba, a poetry that still holds much pain hidden in its songs.” — Wifredo Lam, 1982

Right: “Woman at Piano” by Roberto Diago
Left: “Elegua Proyecto de Cabeza” by Roberto Diago Both From the Cernuda Collection

Memorable exhibitions do more than challenge received ideas; they prompt us to reconsider what we think we know – and to linger over questions that resist easy solutions. El Pasado Mío/My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art and Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection, both on view at the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum through September 12, do precisely that. These landmark exhibitions recover, illuminate, and reframe the identities of Afro-Cuban artists working on the island and abroad between the early nineteenth century and the present. 

Taken together, El Pasado Mío and Afrocubanismo make clear that Cuban art cannot be fully understood without engaging with the histories of displacement, inheritance, and racial imagination that have defined it. Nor can those histories be grasped without attending to the visual languages and cultural forms that gave rise to Afrocubanismo, which historian Cary Garcia Yero describes as “a complex and radical movement that encompassed diverse conceptualizations of what contemporary intellectuals and artists called lo negro and the role of Afro-Cubans within the nation’s culture during the 1920s–1930s.” 

At the Lowe – which serves both the University and the City of Coral Gables, as well as greater Miami-Dade County, as a vital resource for education and engagement through art and culture – Cuban and Caribbean diasporic histories are not remote subjects but, rather, part of the texture of everyday life. This institutional commitment is made manifest in El Pasado Mío and Afrocubanismo, which do not just make culture visible; they ask us to see it anew. 

El Pasado Mío/My Own Past was originally presented between September 16, 2022, and June 9, 2023, at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University. There it was curated by a team led by Alejandro de la Fuente, Ph.D., the director of Harvard’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute. The Lowe’s iteration of this show has been modified by Dr. de la Fuente to include critical works of art from local collections. 

Jill Johnson Deupi, J.D., Ph.D., is the Beaux Arts Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Lowe Art Museum