New Cuban Art Exhibit Research Guide

The Library has partnered once again with the Fairfield University Art Museum to offer a research guide on the newest FUAM exhibition: Archives of Consciousness: Six Cuban Artists. The guide will be useful for faculty and students across disciplines, providing ebook/book and database resources and information on the themes of the exhibit. https://librarybestbets.fairfield.edu/cubanart

Featuring works by internationally renowned artists, this exhibit explores the mythologies of liberation and fulfillment promised by modern life, as well as the peculiar challenges they represent for island Cubans who must navigate Cuba’s contradictory system of combining capitalism with Communist rule, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through sculpture, painting, photography and mixed media, artists Roberto Diago, Manuel Mendive, Eduardo (“Choco”) Roca, Abel Barroso, Mabel Poblet and Luis Enrique Camejo interrogate the ways that consumerism, migration, patriarchy and the legacies of slavery shape the definitions and differential experiences of freedom that 21st- century technology affords all of us. Yet these works anchor the viewer in deeply Cuban locations of consciousness, revealing how austerity and sacrifice, self-reliance and dependence, fear and valor, joy and anguish reflect central principles of survival in a society where egalitarian dreams have long clashed with scarcity, poverty and painful political realities.

Fairfield University Art Museum website: https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/cuba/

Archives of Consciousness: Six Cuban Artists opened on January 24th and will run through May 15th 2020, on view at the Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts. Curated by Dr. Lillian Guerra, University of Florida, Gainesville, and Dr. Arianne Faber Kolb. Drawn from the collection of Terry and Steven Certilman, the works of these six artists open up a living archive of thoughts and aspirations, enabling us to reflect on the essences and emotions that make up the paradoxes of life, and the strength that comes from their exploration. The faculty liaison and exhibition programming collaborator for this exhibition was Dr. Michelle Farrell.