CUBAN ARTISTS' BOOKS AND PRINTS
Exhibitions

  For over twenty years, the 13 acclaimed artists represented in this exhibition have ingeniously expressed their experiences of life in Cuba. They have survived cultural politics, difficult living conditions, and resource shortages that limited their access to the most basic materials, like paper. Their creative responses range from romantic reverie and nostalgia to humor and irony.
The exhibition gathers over 120 books, maquettes for unpublished projects, related prints, and printed objects. The books were designed for Ediciones Vigía, a collaborative artists’ press founded in 1985 in Matanzas. The only press of its kind in Cuba or perhaps anywhere, it began with a mimeograph machine and a borrowed typewriter. Its limited editions of works by leading Cuban authors as well as García Lorca and Rimbaud are designed and illustrated primarily by Rolando Estévez. Many are collaged with cloth, leaves, or wood scraps, making them unique; some are made as scrolls for hanging.
The opening of “Cuban Artists Books and Prints:1985-2009” will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, but the intense independence of the works reveals the artists’ creative resilience and imaginative power to negotiate the political, social, and cultural difficulties and paradoxical privileges ruling their careers over the past two decades. ... (more)