Presented by the University of Maryland as part of their “Intersections” series of contemporary art projects, an installation by Cuban collective Los Carpinteros—“¡Cuba Va!”—will be on view from October 10, 2019, to January 12, 2020, at The Phillips Collection (located at 1600 21st Street NW, Washington DC). On October 10 at 6:30pm, the Cuban artist collective (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) will discuss their Intersections installation Cuba Va! with senior curator of modern and contemporary art Vesela Sretenović.

Description: Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) is an internationally acclaimed Cuban artist collective best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing. From the outset in the early 1990s, Los Carpinteros’s work has reflected on social transformations in post-revolutionary Cuba, offering critical commentary of dominant ideologies and power structures with humor and artistry. Los Carpinteros’s Intersections project will feature two videos from 2018—Comodato and Retráctil—and a group of LED sculptural portraits rendered as heroic revolutionaries. The films and portraits produce a social landscape of Cuba’s modern history that has been at once utopian and dystopian, idealist and brutalist, promising and devastating. Cuba Va! will be Los Carpinteros’s first museum project as a collective since their separation in summer 2018, continuing the Phillips’s tradition of “firsts” by staging a new beginning of the long celebrated Cuban collective.

In 1992 in Havana, Marco Castillo (b. 1971), Dagoberto Rodríguez (b. 1969), and Alexandre Arrechea (b. 1970) formed a trio, and became Los Carpinteros in 1994. Arrechea left the group in 2003. Los Carpinteros’s works are in the permanent collections of the Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation, Vienna, Austria; the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

[Shown above: “It’s Not Che, It’s Simón” 2017.]

[Source: https://www.phillipscollection.org/events/2019-10-10-intersections-los-carpinteros; first seen via https://cubanartnews.org/.]