Evening at AMoA

Friday, February 21

6:30pm - Cocktails with Hors d’oeuvres by Ruthie at Black Fig Food

AMoA Members Free, Non-Members $10

Cuba has a rich history of women artists who have made significant contributions to the country’s vibrant and diverse art scene.  The artworks on view in this exhibition were created during the past 30 years and feature a selection of nine contemporary artists: Ariamna Contino, Aimée García Marrero, Rocío García de la Nuez, Alejandra Glez, Elsa Mora, Mabel Poblet Pujol, Sandra Ramos, Adislen Reyes, and Linet Sánchez Gutiérrez.  These women have explored various artistic mediums, styles, and themes, often breaking boundaries and challenging societal and political norms.  Through different strategies and symbolism, they convey their anxieties, dreams, and visions, often quite literally weaving together histories about themselves and their homeland.

Curated by Arianne Faber Kolb, Ph.D

Exhibition by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles CA.

Adislen Reyes (b.1984)

Reyes examines female sexuality and identity with a unique blend of wit and humor. Known for her exceptional skills as a draughtsman and printmaker, she conveys the complexities of young Cuban society, unraveling its inherent tensions and contradictions. While Reyes infuses each of her works with playful humor, she adeptly challenges viewers to look deeper and contemplate the complicated relationships embedded within her art. As a socially conscious artist, Reyes tackles a diverse array of themes, each laden with profound significance. Her textured works offer a poignant reflection on Cuba’s youngest generation’s relationship with its past and their anxieties regarding an uncertain future. Reyes questions the societal conditioning that shapes attitudes towards women, boldly challenging established constructs of gender. With an acute awareness of the power of visual storytelling, she invites viewers to engage critically with her work, offering a nuanced study of pressing social issues intertwined with the complexities of human experience.

Her compositions often incorporate discarded paper waste from previous works and highlight the significance of mundane and minute objects. In the Fortuna series she creates jewelry designs and pendants from paper scraps, transforming them to have the appearance of precious and valuable accessories. “In this way they become a kind of trophy or hymn to resilience — the ability to reinvent oneself in the face of adversity.” In her Grafting series, consisting of tiny paper fragments with botanical drawings, she seeks beauty within imperfection. “I tear, I squeeze, I break to then try to recompose.”

Aimée García Marrero (b. 1972)

García, initially drawn to sculpture but hindered by a lack of materials during the Special Period, shifted her focus to painting during her studies at ISA. Her persistent desire to create mixed media art led her to incorporate diverse materials such as wires, newspapers, lace, lead, hair, and blood into her work. These everyday objects serve as poignant reflections of family life, societal stigmas, and the essence of womanhood. The threads intricately superimposed and woven into her portraits symbolize the silent burdens and barriers experienced by women, highlighting the complex interplay between fragility and resilience in the face of censorship and repression. Through the embroidery and weaving in her paintings, García underscores the fundamental role these traditional crafts played in her upbringing and daily life as a Cuban woman. 

“The self-portrait has been a constant in my work. I'm not interested in talking about my own life, rather about the universal feminine experience. The work is an invitation to reflect on life, history, gender contradictions, memories, and the political and social environment by means of an existential discourse with multiple implications.”

Alejandra Glez (b. 1996)

Through introspection, Glez channels her own experiences of trauma into evocative imagery. Employing a diverse array of mediums including photography, collage, installations, performances, and video art, she challenges the societal norms and conventions that stigmatize femininity within patriarchal contexts.  For Glez, female nudes in various contexts represent a pathway to personal liberation and catharsis. Her surreal and dreamlike photographs of a flotilla of nude women drifting and dissolving into the sea, symbolize themes of female passivity and the erasure of individuality within Cuban society. Passionate about ocean conservation, she draws a parallel between the environmental crisis and the challenges women face. She compares Mother Nature to women “crying out for awareness and action.”

Ariamna Contino (b. 1984)

Contino’s elegantly crafted works consist primarily of monochromatic multi-layered cut paper collages. Contino’s deconstructive and reconstructive approach provides her work with meaning. “In my process, I break and then rebuild, that is why the act of tearing, crushing, squeezing has a symbolic and aesthetic connotation.”

Contino focuses primarily on Latin American history, social phenomena, and environmental issues. At first glance, the Camino al Eden collages appear to be delicate renderings of Latin American landscapes. However, they represent the corridors through which drugs travel from South America to the United States. These seemingly idyllic images camouflage the harsh realities and violent environment in these regions. Similarly, the striking and mesmerizing blue-toned Day Dream series is the artist’s critical response to climate change’s damaging affect on the seas, particularly evident in Cuba. The central prominent gold leaf section symbolizes the precious few remains amidst devastating transformations. For Contino, the ocean is a constant reminder of the elements that simultaneously connect and separate us.

Elsa Mora (b. 1971)

Mora’s early mixed media works serve as autobiographical reflections, delving into themes of the female condition, self-exploration, connectivity, and survival. These assemblages intricately weave together personal artifacts, photographs, and painted elements, juxtaposing them to evoke deeper narratives. In more recent years, her focus has shifted towards painting, drawing, and paper creations, through which she explores her own transformative journey by blending natural and human elements to craft hybrid beings. Embracing the expressive qualities of paper, she employs it as a metaphor for renewal and reinvention, intrigued by its parallels to the mysteries of the brain and mental infirmity.  

Her latest body of work encompasses ceramic sculpture, featured in the series entitled An Inventory of Tools for Coping. Each sculptural object symbolizes a distinct mental condition, serving as a mechanism for navigating personal crises. While some pieces, like the hammer, are utilitarian in nature, others take on a more abstract and dysfunctional form; nevertheless, both types carry intrinsic value and aesthetic beauty, embodying Mora’s profound exploration of coping mechanisms and resilience.

Linet Sánchez Gutiérrez (b. 1989)

Linet Sánchez Gutiérrez investigates the realm of memory through her meticulous construction and photography of miniature models. These sublime and multi-layered architectural interiors are not direct representations of existing locations. Drawing from a rich tapestry of sensory, emotional, and personal experiences, each maquette encapsulates a synthesis of her memories and encounters. Sánchez’s works transcend mere physical replicas, representing the profound ways in which spaces serve as conduits for the evocation and triggering of feelings and recollections. Her theatrical interiors reflect Sánchez’s early training in ballet and invite the viewer to engage as both spectator and performer. These multi-dimensional spaces, absent of color and humans, evoke the overwhelming sense of emptiness and loneliness she experienced throughout her personal and professional voyage.

Mabel Poblet PUJOL (b. 1986)

The powerful and dynamic mixed media works by Mabel Poblet examine female identity within a strict social order. As the protagonist of many of her pieces, Poblet combines her personal experiences and self-evaluation with broader issues of the meaning of feminine beauty. Her images of women wearing wigs and colorful stockings in enclosed box-like places illustrate the disguises women wear to adhere to conventions, the parameters of which Poblet puts into question. These shimmering bold images of women are superimposed with of hundreds of small translucent plastic flowers created by female inmates of the Holguin prison, raising the aesthetic value of such objects of kitsch and validating their meaning. The theme of levitation, embodied by female figures in clouds or floating in water, expresses Poblet’s desire to evade confines and break boundaries.

 In addition to such exercises in introspection, Poblet looks outward in her exploration of aspirations and anxieties associated with migration and mobility. Her circular luminous Travel Diaries are composed of cut-up photographs of places she visits, fragmented memories pieced together to produce a revised world view. Her technical process involves cutting photographs into tiny shards and then reconstructing them and creating a completely new vision and dimensionality. As a young artist, who was trained at San Alejandro and ISA and has had extensive exposure to the international art scene, her preoccupation with freedom in all its forms has evolved from a focus on the containment of the body to the dismantling of barriers and formulaic perceptions.

Rocío García de la nuez (b. 1955)

García de la Nuez received her training at San Alejandro and has since dedicated over three decades to teaching there. Her vibrant paintings, frequently featuring bold nude figures within diverse settings, draw inspiration from cinematography and possess a narrative quality that invites interpretation. With an ambiguous essence, her artworks often leave much to the imagination. The array of characters depicted in her works mirrors her own quest for significance and understanding. In her diptych, The Night of the Tulips, she imagines the life of a woman observed through an apartment window. Contemplating the woman's identity, García de la Nuez crafts a narrative that unfolds with a hint of mystery, culminating in a sinister conclusion after the woman disappears behind closed curtains.

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969)

Throughout her prolific career, Ramos has employed a diverse range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, installation art, and mixed media, to explore the complexities of the human experience within the context of her native Cuba and the broader global landscape. Drawing from her own personal history and the socio-political realities of contemporary Cuba, her work often confronts issues such as censorship, displacement, and the search for individual and collective identity. In her multi-dimensional artworks, Ramos confronts the poignant realities of migration, loss, mourning, and familial separation.

One of Ramos's most iconic series features her alter ego — a schoolgirl character reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland — who serves as a poignant symbol of innocence and vulnerability amidst the tumultuous socio-economic climate of Cuba. Through this recurring motif, Ramos offers incisive commentary on the challenges faced by Cuban people and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.