In 1985, Cuban artist José Bedia was a rising star in his homeland. He had recently completed a Ford Foundation artist’s residency in the United States when the notification arrived. “I was 26 and had just returned to Havana from New York. The Cuban military called me up for mandatory service in Angola at a time when my wife had just given birth to my son. Now, three short months later, I was being shipped to Africa and couldn’t say no for fear of retaliation against my family,” Bedia recollects in this article by Carlos Suáarez de Jesús for The Miemia Herald.

That unexpected journey to Angola was the catalyst for his decision to leave Cuba. It was also a rare opportunity to venture into the African hinterland to discover the fountainhead of his faith — the Afro-Caribbean religion Palo Monte.

Those experiences and others are the inspiration behind “Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia,” a new exhibit at the Miami Art Museum featuring 35 works, including large-scale figurative paintings, drawings, and installations marking a major career retrospective. Bedia’s work explores his Afro-Caribbean roots, ancient African and Native American religions and symbols, and the myths of indigenous cultures across the globe.

The traveling exhibit was organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where it opened last year. It is the first conclusive survey of his work shown in Miami since Bedia permanently relocated here in 1993.

A member of Cuba’s vaunted generation of the ’80s, when young artists experimented with new forms of expression often critical of the government, Bedia won international recognition in the first and second Havana Biennials.

During the early ’80s, he was also initiated into the Regla de Congo, part of a religion that arrived on the island with West African slaves. His faith is the foundation of his art, and a trio of 1984 drawings on view at MAM shows that the nganga — or cauldron, the central icon of his religion — is a recurring theme in his work.

The drawings depict the nganga as a powerful receptacle of divine and natural forces that acts as a microcosm for elements linking the spiritual and physical worlds. For Palo practitioners, the nganga provides security and stability. It is unique to each initiate.

Typically the cauldrons contain items such as cemetery dirt, herbs, sticks, and human and animal bones. They are mixed with blood offerings.

Wall text at MAM informs that when Bedia was initiated, he received Sarabanda, the spirit guardian of iron implements. So the artist’s cauldron bristles with items such as magnets, knives, nails, razor blades, an anvil, a horseshoe, scissors, a hammer, a tortoise shell, and animal antlers — all of which are shown descending into his nganga from the heavens in a drawing here.

But even the nganga couldn’t save Bedia in Angola. “People don’t realize how terrible that was,” he explains. “We were sent there without training, and most of the Cuban combatants were like me, civilians plucked from the jobs to go and fight. With the exception of pilots and [some] others, none of us were soldiers. Even the tanks were operated by former bus and truck drivers.”

Bedia sought opportunities to venture into villages to meet locals who shared his beliefs. He also tried to collect sacred implements called matari to take home with him, but found it difficult. He says he was there for six months in 1985 and 1986, and once found himself pointing a rifle at fellow soldiers after they dragged a villager into their truck and attempted to rape her in front of her three children.

“It was like Cuba’s Vietnam. We left Luanda in a convoy of 200 trucks and had to cross through mined territory. Along the way, a bridge in front of our caravan was blown up, and we got bogged down in the mud for three days,” he recollects.

“We stopped to trade with villagers, and some of the men in my unit pulled a woman carrying a basket of potatoes into the truck and started stripping her naked while her kids watched. I grabbed my rifle and stopped them. Later, one of the commanders pulled me aside and told me to be careful during combat because I might end up a victim of friendly fire. It was traumatic. That’s when I decided that if I made it out of there alive, with my limbs and sanity intact, I would leave Cuba,” says Bedia, whose works often offer a scathing commentary on colonialism.

A sprawling ink-on-amate-paper piece from 1991 captures the moment Bedia left his homeland.

Titled Si en Mi Tierra No Hay Sol, Yo Brinco al Lado Allá (If There Is No Sun in My Country, I Jump to the Other Side), it depicts the artist straddling two worlds like the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on a seaside city to the right of the composition and the other on a busy highway filled with automobiles to the left. On his back he carries his nganga, which ties him to his ancestors and is the only possession too valuable to leave behind, reflecting that his cultural roots are linked more to religion than nationality.

The exhibit is organized in sections that include his travels to Mexico, his studies with the Lakota peoples in North America, and his visits with shamans in the Peruvian Amazon.

Other sections feature Bedia’s later travels to Zambia. There is also the artist’s tribute to Caribbean revolutionary figures who were Palo practitioners and combined their faith with social justice and activism.

Works such as Intipi (Sweat Lodge), created in 1995, reflect Bedia’s experiences during his initial visit to the United States, before he was shipped to Angola. It records his first powerful spiritual experience with Native American traditions. “I visited the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota where I met Leonard Crow Dog, a Lakota medicine man and spiritual leader who was involved in the Wounded Knee incident at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during the 1970s,” he says. “The experience in the sweat lodge was very powerful and complicated to explain but dealt with summoning the Great Spirit.”

“Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia”: Through September 2 at Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; 305-375-3000; miamiartmuseum.org. Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday noon to 5 p.m.

Bedia says indigenous religions, with traditions rooted in prehistory, are the oldest on the planet. “I have seen Crow Dog summon eagles under a cloudless sky until several of the birds appeared from nowhere and began circling overhead. All life force is impregnated with what some call wakan and others call mana. This power endures even after something is dead.”

While visiting South American shamans and ingesting ayahuasca, a brew made with psychotropic herbs, the artist found himself in the presence of the Otorongo Jaguar and Great Anaconda spirits. “It was a fundamental experience for me,” says Bedia, who painted his encounter with the black jaguar. “Anyone interested in visual arts should have such an experience. You see a great many things during these experiences, which I later try to interpret in my work.”

As much an anthropologist of the soul as a gifted artist, Bedia peels back the veil on the sacred and unknown with an undeniable force all his own.

Miami Art Museum

101 W. Flagler St.
Miami, FL 33130

For the original report go to http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2012-05-31/culture/José-bedia-transcultural-pilgrim-at-mam/

For the original report go to http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/18719621/article-%E2%80%98Baudelaire-in-a-Box%E2%80%99

For Cuban artists, U.S. collectors are providing a new source of much-appreciated cash, the Associated Press reports.

Ruben Alpizar never met the American collector who fell in love with his painting of a plummeting Icarus against a starry background, hanging on the wall of a Spanish colonial-era fortress across the bay from Havana. Nor did he get a name or a hometown, or even learn whether the buyer was a man or a woman.

It all happened quickly, starting with a phone call from a broker. “How much for the painting? Look, I think somebody wants it. I’ll call you right back.” Soon after, the phone rang again: “Sold.”

“We need more people coming from Gringoland,” Alpizar said with a smile, not a hint of derision in his voice as he employed a term that can be either affectionate or pejorative depending on the context. “They pay the price you ask.”

The streets of the Cuban capital are, in fact, awash with American art pilgrims during the monthlong Biennial, a showcase connecting local contemporary artists with well-heeled foreign collectors – key clients in a country whose citizens have little real purchasing power.

Alpizar, for one, would not say how much his painting sold for, but offered that his work normally goes for between $3,000 and $15,000, a windfall in a country where most people earn the equivalent of $20 a month.

The Americans are arriving in larger numbers because of the Obama administration’s relaxation of U.S. embargo travel rules. They say they see a chance to explore the unknown and look for the ultimate conversation piece to hang on the living room wall.

“I think there is a mystique and the association with the ‘time-capsule island’ and all that’s inaccessible,” said Rachel Weingeist, an adviser to Shelley and Donald Rubin on their Cuban art collection. The couple’s New York-based Rubin Foundation promotes the arts and humanitarian causes.

“Frankly we haven’t had much access until recently,” Weingeist said.

The Americans say they’re impressed by the island’s sophisticated fine arts scene compared to those in other countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Auctions by Christie’s and Sotheby’s have firmly cemented Cuban art in the U.S. consciousness, such as this week’s sale of a painting by the late surrealist Wilfredo Lam for $4.56 million.

“There’s so much heart. It’s very intense. It’s about a sense of place,” said Jennifer Jacobs of Portland, Oregon, who led a private group of 15 collectors from Seattle to the Biennial. “It really spoke to me personally.”

Terry Hall, an art collector and accountant from Gurnee, Illinois, just south of the Wisconsin border, said she was surprised by the variety she saw.

Cuban art embraces diverse themes and styles, and even ventures into the political. One piece on display at the Biennial, shaped like a mailbox, has a slot with large, sharp bloody fangs and an invitation for “Complaints and Suggestions.”

“I came down here expecting art that was more colorful, more Caribbean in flavor and what I found is more international, more cutting-edge, more ambitious art,” said Hall. “I’ve really been very excited about it. I think it rivals anything I’ve seen anywhere else as far as the execution, the expertise and the ambitious ideas.”

More than 1,300 American artists, curators, collectors and fans have been accredited for the Biennial, organizers say, an unusually large delegation from what some say is the most important market for Cuban art. Unlike with other island goods, it’s perfectly legal for Americans to buy Cuban art, which is covered under an exemption to the 50-year-old U.S. embargo allowing the purchase of “informational materials.”

“They’re coming by the busload,” said Alpizar, who just two weeks into the Biennial had sold a half-dozen works including the piece featuring Icarus, entitled “Home.” Another painting that was snapped up by an American collector, “My Ark,” was a whimsical cross between a stern of a boat and a religious tableau, with famous historical figures peeking out from the windows: Ernest Hemingway, Karl Marx, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Pope John Paul II.

While Cuban emigrant artists living in Miami sometimes struggle to be noticed, artists who remain on the island enjoy the cachet of providing a kind of forbidden fruit for U.S. collectors. People on both sides of the exchange say the mutual affinity exists not despite but because of the five decades of geographical proximity and political animosity.

Many collectors are Cuban-Americans, perhaps eager to acquire a link to their lost homeland. Others are patrons from big cities such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle that are more open to detente.

“There’s a very easy connection between us. The American public … has a very special sensitivity to Cuban art,” said Carlos Rene Aguilera, who exhibited a dozen paintings inspired by black holes, string theory and other scientific mysteries, hauled all the way from the eastern city of Santiago. “Maybe it’s because of curiosity about each other’s history. Maybe it’s because we are neighbors and there is a messy relationship between our countries, so this creates interest.”

So great is that interest that Americans are often willing to shell out the asking price with little background research, and with a little luck, even junior artists can command eye-popping prices. Tales abound about fourth-year university students selling pieces for $15,000, equal to the prices commanded by Alpizar, an established artist whose work has been shown in dozens of individual and collective exhibitions over a 23-year career.

“It’s what the market will bear, and why not shoot for the moon?” Weingeist said. “All it takes is somebody feeling giddy who’s got the money for something they like.”

The transactions are usually handshake agreements to wire money to bank accounts holding international currencies that many artists prefer to keep in Spain, the Netherlands or Canada, rather than the local bank accounts for Cuban pesos used only on the island. The seller then ships carefully wrapped paintings to overseas addresses.

Galleries are cut out of their traditional middleman role, giving collectors the sense that they’re getting a better deal. The arrangement also brings buyers in direct contact with the artists as they go knocking on the doors of home studios.

Artists say the Biennial is a crucial time to build their names and establish those contacts.

“I’ve collected a ton of business cards,” said artist Tamara Campo, whose ode to the world financial crisis is installed in a bunker of La Cabana fortress. It features a wave of some 650 banknotes fashioned from fragrant cedar cascading from the ceiling into a jumbled pile on the floor.

“A lot of people want to talk to me,” Campo said. “I have to check my email, because it’s been days.”

For the original report go to http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/05/26/cuba-artists-look-to-us-collectors-as-new-source-cash/#ixzz1w2Do0xko

On display are a wide range of sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, photographs, feature films and animated films, both by established artists and young, promising ones. The show comprises works from the south of the Caribbean (the Antilles, Suriname), the north (Cuba, Jamaica), the west (Costa Rica, Panama), the east (Haiti, Dominican Republic) and all the islands in between.

In evidence at the exhibition are the many aspects shared by the region’s inhabitants in terms of history, politics, religion and daily life. But the show also tells the story of a complex, multifaceted region rich in cultural and linguistic diversity, partly the result of their colonial past under Spain, France, Britain and the Netherlands.

The exhibition lasts until 26 August.

For the original report go to http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-museum-stages-first-major-caribbean-art-exhibition

Setting an auction record for Lam, the 1944 Idolo (Oya/Divinit‚ de l’Air et de la mort), fetched $4.56 million from a South American collector, more than doubling the late artist’s previous top market price.

“We were thrilled with the new record price achieved for Wifredo Lam, which was one of nine new artist records set during the Wednesday evening auction,” said Axel Stein, head of Sotheby’s Latin American art department.

Lam fused surrealism with santeria, which like Haiti’s voodoo, borrows from the Yoruba pantheon. Within the painting, at least six of the santeria deities can be discerned, said Stein of the work, populated by human-animal hybrids.

An Afro-Cuban, Lam’s godmother was a santeria priestess. But the artist began to explore the religion in his work after a 1940 trip to Haiti and Cuba with French surrealist leader Andre Breton. Lam died in 1982.

Overall, Sotheby’s Wednesday sale achieved a total of $21,8 million, its highest-ever result for an evening sale of Latin American art.

Demand was brisk for Venezuelan art, with records set for three of its 20th century artists: Jesus Rafael Soto, Armando Reveron, and Gertrudis Goldschmidt, also known as Gego.

Soto’s top-priced work, which sold for $1,02 million, was Sin Titulo (Vibraci¢n Amarilla Y Blanca), consisting of paint and metal wires on masonite, executed in 1960.

Reveron’s record was his 1946 Desnudo detras de la mantilla, a 1946 work of tempera, chalk and charcoal on burlap. It sold for $872 500.

Goldschmidt’s 1985 “Dibujo sin papel,” made of steel rods and threads, set a record for the artist, fetching $602 500.

For Sotheby’s, the auction’s biggest disappointment was the failure to sell of the top lot, Mexican Diego Rivera’s 1939 painting Ni¤a En Azul y Blanco.

Sotheby’s pre-sale price range estimate was between $4 million to $6 million.

But the highest bid Wednesday evening for the painting was $3.7 million, falling short of the minimum, or “reserve,” price set by the seller.

However, soon after the auction ended two Latin American buyers stepped forward to see if they could negotiate to buy the work, an oil on canvas, said Stein.

“We’re working hard on finding a home for (it),” Stein said. He said the work may be sold within the next few days.

For the original report go to http://www.timeslive.co.za/lifestyle/2012/05/24/cuban-surrealist-lam-painting-tops-auction-at-4.5m

A new press relase offers additional detail on Nicholas Emery’s new art exhibit. See also yesterday’s post:

Art Exhibition: Nicholas Emery’s “Glimpse”

Soft box gallery announces a new exhibition ‘GLIMPSE’, by painter Nicholas Emery, from Friday 1 June to Saturday 23 June 2012.

Emery’s work is an exploration of the magical language hidden inside ordinary, everyday reality. He creates characters suspended in liminal spaces – snapshots of subterranean psyches from non-verbal places. The theme of Emery’s current work is universal, and yet distinctly Caribbean.”

Last August, Emery started experimenting with an idea while on a one month residency at the Vermont Studio Center: he began painting figures for the first time earnestly, integrating them with the colors and shapes born of previous work from Trinidad, merging the abstract and non abstract elements of his work to create GLIMPSE.

GLIMPSE captures something quintessentially human and yet mysterious. Many of the paintings give the feeling that the object that is being viewed is actually the subject viewing the audience. “I saw in this encounter (in the paintings) a familiar and personal experience, and something very common to the Caribbean amid a larger human framework” says Emery.

Most of his characters are presented with their backs turned outward in an uncritical counter-observation of a society that flaunts its intimacies in full frontal social media. Emery’s characters, in contrast, emerge as solitary guides giving us a glimpse into an under –Trinidad-world.

This shifting eye defines Emery’s ethos as an artist. Although he feels a deep connection for this place and has lived here for the past eight years, he still feels that he resides on the periphery – an insider/outsider looking inside/outside.

Nicholas Emery was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up internationally. He returned in 2005 and had his first solo show at Soft box in May 2009. He paints in his studio in St Ann’s.

The paintings range in size from 6ft x 4ft to 2ft x 1ft, and are available for a range of prices. The artist will be present for the opening reception, Friday 1 June from 6.30pm – 8.30pm, to discuss his work. Both existing and new collectors are encouraged to attend.

Soft box is located at 9 Alcazar Street in St Clair, POS. For more information, contact softboxgallery@gmail.com or 622.8610 or 740.7109.

The Institute of Caribbean Studies will present a new book by Ana M. Fabián Maldonado—Tras Talleres cuenta su historia (Ediciones Callejón 2012). The launch will take place on Thursday, May 24, 2012, at 6:00pm on Comercio Street in Tras Talleres, Santurce, Puerto Rico.

The launch will be part of the festivities dedicated to the centennial of the founding of the emblematic neighborhood of Tras Talleres. The centennial festivities are dedicated to the musicians Marcos Montañez and DJ Playero (Pedro Torruella). Other events of the evening include a concert by Grupo Atabal and the Luisito Carrión Orchestra.

The centennial celebration will run until Sunday, May 27, and will include live music, crafts, carnival booths, games and other activities for children.

Olga Villa, spokeswoman for the Committee of the Tras Talleres Centennial Celebration recently reiterated the value of the centennial celebration and the importance of “challenging the neglect and marginalization of poor communities, celebrating the neighborhood’s history, development and achievements … and [setting] an example for other communities to rescue their story.”

For more information (in Spanish), see http://www.80grados.net/fiesta-de-pueblo-en-el-centenario-de-tras-talleres/

It may be something she does in her free time but it is her passion. Kathy Ann Chevalier-Joseph held her first art exhibition, “In Full Colour” late last year and is preparing for a second show featuring her own work—Leiselle Maraj reports in this article from Trinidad’s Newsday.

According to the 39 year old’s page on the social networking website, Facebook, she was born into a creative family as both parents were artists.
“As a child my childish games displayed my artistic flair from creating paper dolls to crafting figurines from the clay in our backyard. It seemed as though it was an innate ability to express myself though art,” she stated on her page.
She was taught art in secondary school by the late artist, educator and television personality, Ian Ali and furthered her studies in Graphic Arts at the tertiary level. Although she is currently employed as an executive assistant at Industrial Plant Services Limited, Point Lisas, she continued doing her art during her spare time.
“I always wanted to do an exhibition. It was an aim and an objective. My family and friends always urged me to do it too,” she said in a recent interview with Newsday.
Her first exhibition featured work she produced between 2006 and 2011. “It focused on different aspects of Trinidad and Tobago. You hardly see any art about Trinidad and Tobago. My work depicted the beaches, people, animals, and the flora and fauna of the country,” she said.
The collection was done in different mediums including acrylic, water colour and colour pencil. The exhibition was held at the Media Room of the National Library. More than half of the collection was sold during the show.
Separated into the categories – scenes, portraits and still life, Chevalier-Joseph sought to capture the beauty of Trinidad and Tobago through her eyes, in nature and in the people with the use of vibrant colour. “I do not paint arbitrarily, but I am very sensitive and aware of my emotions and feelings. My paintings are from my heart,” she stated.
Since the exhibition, Chevalier-Joseph joined the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago and she will be working on a new exhibition through the organisation. Although she has no set date or venue, Chevalier-Joseph is already working on pieces focused on dance and movement. She promises that the pieces will be different from her first exhibition as they will be abstract.
She has been visiting different dance groups and recitals to gather inspiration for her artwork. The new exhibition would focus on the different dance forms of Trinidad and Tobago.

For the original report go to http://www.newsday.co.tt/features/0,160494.html

Cuba has expansive areas described as countryside or rural areas, large tracts of land that until very recently were underutilized for agricultural cultivation and cattle breeding.

Campesinos — the men and women who live in rural areas and work the fields — have unique characteristics in their way of behaving, in their tones of speech and customs. “Campechanos” or “guajiros,” as they’re usually called, are known for being hospitable, caring and gentle.

They also tend to be great talkers, sharing their local legends and fables. To those people from any distance away, the people out here “crow like roosters.”

They’re always willing to share a sip of morning coffee, or heat up the coffeepot. The coffee here is made from pure beans picked from nearby plantations; it’s placed in drying decks and later roasted and then ground with wooden mortars in the shade of some tree.

Animals, streams, plains, mountains and modest people make up this this enticing world. Then too, there are its amazing shades of green and the area’s tunes or “controversy-style” singing, always accompanied by a swig of liquor and the arpeggio of an always close-at-hand guitar.

Feeding the population

These days, however, these good people with their sun and weather-beaten skin are carrying on their shoulders the weighty responsibility of providing the largest portion of food for the country. The farmers markets and state-run markets have changed. They began expanding their selections once “certain liberties” were given to farmers to market their own products.

Nonetheless, the prices remain too high for most folks whose wages barely allow them to buy more than a few vegetables. As for the farmers, they have to pay for their transportation and sell their produce to middlemen, who obviously raise the initial price since they too have to make a living and pay for their rental space, which the state provides to them at increasingly higher rates.

The meats, fruits and vegetables that make it onto our tables pass through a long series of transactions at ridiculous amounts. For example, the farmer will go to the state-run company to buy tools and supplies (hoes, machetes, fencing wire, gloves, fertilizers, harnesses, etc.).

Once the crops are harvested they have to rent transport vehicles (which almost none of them own their own). Then they have to pay taxes from out of their sales, though they can’t always fix their own prices themselves since these are established by government agencies.

When it comes to privately run businesses, the maximum sales prices are also fixed for them; therefore these entities are also prohibited from recouping substantial returns on their investments.

The fact is that it’s ultimately us — the consumers — who experience the consequences of so many controls and prohibitions.
Many people now use derogatory terms when describing campesinos, blaming them for all the shortages we’re forced to endure.

Bucolic farm life and the humble campesino have lost that charming image for those who have to worry about feeding their families in the towns and cities. The faces of those working and living in the Cuban countryside no longer seem like the quaint allegory of guajiros in the painting by Abela.*
* Eduardo Abela, a Cuban painter and caricaturist. He was the creator of the created the comic strip character “El Bobo” (“The Fool,” as a protest against the Machado government) and the painter of the “Guajiros (a classic of Cuban work of art).

For the original report go to http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=70833

ARC Magazine in collaboration with Medulla Art Gallery invites you to ‘Interpretations: ‘Gardening in the Tropics’. This event will celebrate the release of ARC’s Issue 5 and the inclusion of the critical works of Jasmine Thomas-Girvan. The event takes place on May 25, 2012, from 7:00pm to 9:30pm at the Medulla Art Gallery. The gallery is located at 37 Fitt Street in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Description: ‘Interpretations’ is an informal gathering which is centered around the work of Jamaican jeweler and metalsmith Thomas-Girvan whose recent solo show at the Y Gallery at the end of 2011 marked a critical point in the artist’s career where she was able to meld design and sculpture while highlighting the crossing currents of literature, storytelling and mysticism that have embedded the Caribbean space for generations.

Speakers for the night include writer and scholar Gabrielle Hezekiah, whose work centers on philosophy, visual art and theories of the moving image, short story writer Sharon Millar, co-editor of Robert & Christopher Publishers and Art Director of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival Melanie Archer, artist and Rhodes Trust Fellow, Marsha Pearce, and Barbadian contemporary artist, educator and cultural activist Annalee Davis.

As the name, “Interpretations’ implies, the gathering will focus on various perspectives of Thomas-Girvan’s work through a critical, exacting and nurturing framework. Personal connections to her studio practice will be explored along with the various seductions of text and object. The presenters will engage with re-readings of Thomas-Girvan’s work from a literary, philosophical, art historical and liminal perspective. The event will also showcase new works by visual artists Jaime Lee Loy and Michelle Isava.

For more information, call (868) 740 7597 or visit https://www.facebook.com/events/357517754308140/

For original post, see https://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2012/05/arc-magazine-presents-interpretations-gardening-in-the-tropics/