Search results for ""Author Carol Damian""

An examination of the balance between modernity and tradition in Cuba’s turn-of-the-century artistic evolution.The Lost Generation | La generación perdida accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. The modern artistic ceramic movement in Cuba, almost exclusively comprised of women artists (including Amelia Peláez, Mirta García Buch, and María Elena Jubrías), emerged toward the end of the 1940s and continued into the next decade. The ceramicists invited Cuba’s modernist protagonists, including René Portocarrero, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Wifredo Lam, to participate in designing ceramics at the Taller de Santiago de Las Vegas. The workshop thus became a locus for the fermentation of Cuban modernist expression. Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz, the workshop's proprietor, recognized the artistic value of the ceramicists’ production and he, along with the women he hired, encouraged collaboration with their male contemporaries. A symbiotic artistic practice grew in which the ceramicists introduced ideas and designs to the painters, whose fledgling attempts in ceramics took eventual flight. As the painters’ familiarity with the new medium grew, similar forms appeared in their two-dimensional renderings, which are now synonymous with Cuban modernism. During the post-Revolutionary period of 1959–85, the Taller became part of Cuba’s National Patrimony, continuing the tradition of producing serial and artistic pieces. As the Revolutionary regime wore on, the Taller’s importance waned, artists left Cuba, and independent workshops flourished. While the Taller de Santiago no longer boasts importance in artistic production today, it left an indelible mark on Cuban modernism. With essays by Cuban, American, and Cuban-American scholars, The Lost Generation | La generación perdida provides a background on the twentieth-century avant-garde movements in Cuba; delves into the narrative of an overlooked group of Cuban women ceramicists, assessing the implications of their work on modernism; and, finally, explores in depth the women artists of the third avant-garde generation (1949–58).

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Carlos Luna, one of the foremost contemporary Cuban award-winning painters is part of a generation of Cuban artists who embrace their strong heritage and traditions but have reinvented themselves along the way. Thrumming with the spirit of Afro-Cuban tradition, Luna's works range from jacquard tapestries, works on metal sheets, and Talavera ceramic plates to mixed media on wood and largescale oil paintings. This monograph illustrates Luna's blend of influences from living and working in Cuba until 1991, then in Mexico for thirteen years, and now in Miami, since 2002. This book, lavishly illustrated, will take the reader through the artist's amazing world of bright colours and will show, by a selection of plates and details, some unpublished works as well as his renowned masterpieces. Carlos makes visible the invisible, conveying messages and lessons from his past to offer to the present and future. His work is not on the surface, it is filled with subtle embedded messages. One must know the issues to decode. Often these messages are hidden in plain sight, lessons to be learned through reflection. His towering centerpiece, El Gran Mambo, a massive six-panel painting, which stood on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in 2008, serves as a focal point for 2015's Green Machine: The Art of Carlos Luna at The Frost Art Museum in Carlos's adopted home of Miami. Text in English and French.

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Art meets today’s political debate over immigration in this beautifully illustrated exploration of Nicario Jiménez Quispe’s retablos. This beautifully illustrated full-color book offers a unique depiction of the current immigration debate through the lens of renowned Peruvian artist Nicario Jiménez Quispe, a recent immigrant to the United States. An internationally recognized maker of retablos, Jiménez has begun creating work that powerfully encapsulates the struggles, possibilities, and tragedies of immigration from the Global South to North America. A decorative box with figures in the interior, a retablo traditionally was used to pay homage to certain saints in Peru. In Spain, they were used as portable altars for itinerant priests who carried them to perform mass in remote areas. In the Andes, the retablo became a sort of magical-religious box designed to increase fertility among animals that served as a means of exchange in a cash-free, rural environment. The authors, leading historians of Latin America, contextualize Jiménez’s compelling art, to offer creative new insights on the bitter immigration disputes that are dividing our nation.

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