Afro Cuban Art and Grupo Antillano

In a nation as racially diverse as Cuba, it is surprising that, for a lengthy time, Afro Cuban art was not looked upon as desirable. Following the revolution, Santeria and other African religious and cultural practices had been deemed primitive and counter-revolutionary. This was particularly the case in the 70s, throughout a period of serious censorship in all places of artistic and cultural life on the island.

In 1978, a group of artists rebelled against the state censorship and formed an art collective beneath the name Grupo Antillano. Even even though the group was active for only 5 years, it helped establish Afro Cuban art as part of national identity. Most members of the group have been painters - Adelaida Herrera Valdés, Julia Valdés, Manuel Mendive, Leonel Morales, Miguel Lobaina, Ever Fonseca, Clara Morera, Manuel Couceiro Prado, Arnaldo Rodríguez Larrinaga, Pablo Toscano Mora, Miguel Ocejo, and sculptors - Herminio Escalona Gonzales, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, Ramón Haití, Rafael Queneditt Morales, Alberto Lescay Merencio, Oscar Rodríguez Lasseria, with Esteban Ayala Ferrer functioning mostly in graphic design and style. The key driving force of this artist collective was Wilfredo Lam, a planet renowned painter of African and Chinese descent. The 1st exhibit of Grupo Antillano was held in September of 1978 in Galería Centro de Arte Internacional, with seven more to follow in the very same year. In the subsequent 4 years, the group exhibited through Cuba and internationally. Shortly Just after Lam's death in September of 1982, Grupo Antillano ceased to exist as an artist collective and their final group exhibit was an Homage to Wilfredo Lam in September of 1983.

A retrospective exhibit below the name "Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba", curated by Harvard professor Alejandro de la Fuente, very first opened in Santiago de Cuba in April 2013, continued on to Havana in August of the identical year, in the Spring of 2014 will be on show in New York, in the Fall of 2014 in San Francisco and in the Spring of 2015 in Harvard University. Apart from showcasing operates of original members of Grupo Antillano, the exhibit also involves functions by a younger generation of artists who share the exact same issues with the original members - concerns of history, identity and race. The group of modern artists invited to participate in this retrospective contains Belkis Ayón, José Bedia, Eduardo Roca Salazar (Choco), Juan Roberto Diago, Douglas Pérez, Elio Rodríguez Valdés, Alexis Esquivel, Andrés Montalván Cuéllar, Santiago Rodríguez Olazabal, René Peña, Marta María Pérez Bravo and Leandro Soto.

All of these artists - the original members of Grupo Antillano, as effectively as modern Afro Cuban artists, are assisting market this significant element of Cuban national identity, in visual arts and each day life. Through their art, which is drastically influenced by African roots of quite a few Cubans, they display us the essence of the exceptional and regularly evolving Cubanidad*.

* A notion that originated in the 1920s to clarify the multicultural and the multicolored persons of Cuba.

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