The publication of Mirada de Curador (A Curator´s Look), a new book on contemporary Cuban art, will be celebrated at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 4:00 in the afternoon. Released by the Letras Cubanas Publishing House, Mirada de Curador gathers texts written over the past six years by Corina Matamoros, chief curator of the museum. The book includes 20 essays on renowned artists as well as art trends. The first text, written in 1995, analyzes the relationship between José Bedia and Wifredo Lam, which Matamoros examined in the exhibition Resistencia y Libertad (Resistance and Freedom), shown at the museum in April 2009. Other essays consider individual works curated by Matamoros, or pieces by artists such as Sandra Ceballos, Juan José Diago,…

Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, one of the most popular and successful European filmmakers, will arrive in Havana on January 7, 2010 for a four-day visit. The director of the 1987 hit "Cinema Paradiso" was invited by the Cuban Institute of Film Production, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Tornatore will bring a selection of his creations such as “Baaria" (2008), starring Monica Belluci. Born in Palermo in 1956, Tornatore has been at the helm of productions starring renowned actors as Marcello Mastroianni and Gerard Depardieu. Tornatore’s visit to Cuba strengthens the traditional ties between Italian and Cuban cinema, established in the last century. The Cuban cinema, which emerged after Fidel Castro´s triumph in 1959, found inspiration in the Italian Neorealism of Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini,…

Factoría Habana, a new cultural center in the Old Havana section of the Cuban capital, opened on December 18 with Antecomienzo (Before Beginning), a group show that will run through April 2010. The show features artists who emerged in the 1990s and have since gained international reputations, including Lázaro Saavedra, Fernando Rodríguez, Abel Barroso, Ibrahim Miranda, Carlos Montes de Oca, Luis Gómez, Sandra Ramos, Osvaldo Yero, Aimée García and René Francisco. Though the works in Antecomienzo draw on a variety of creative approaches, they reflect a trend toward social conscience shared by many artists of their generation. Factoria Habana is located at 308 O’Reilly Street, between Habana and Aguiar. Conceived as a project of urban and artistic recovery, the center is sponsored by the Havana Historian´s Office and Spanish curator Concha Fontenla. Factoría Habana’s goals include promoting the latest Cuban art as well as fostering the interaction of contemporary art with new technologies, sound and sensorial experimentation, industrial design, performance, and urban art.

"He has never allowed himself to be tied to one medium or another. He can be a color-crazy abstract painter, a wildly inventive junk sculptor, or a master collage maker who specializes in grids of snapshots,”wrote Doug MacCash, art critic for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, of Luis Cruz Azaceta. The 67-year-old artist’s latest work is on view in New Orleans, where he has lived for many years. At the New Orleans Museum of Art, Swmming to Havana presents a suite of new paintings that explores the idea of "crossing over" between cultures, artistic styles, and the historically linked cities of New Orleans and Havana. The show runs through March 28, 2010. On January 9, a second exhibition, Exile Fifty, opens at the Arthur Roger Gallery. This exhibition depicts Azaceta's life…

The latest works by Cuban artist Eduardo Abela Torrás (born Havana 1963) are currently on view in Popular Mechanics, an exhibition at Villa Manuela, a nonprofit art gallery hosted by the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers. Abela Torrás is the grandson of Eduardo Abela, one of the most important Cuban avant-garde painters of the 1930s. Trained as an engraver, Abela Torrás has published graphic humor pieces in Cuban magazines, and his work irreverently appropriates many iconic images from art history. The exhibition includes twelve works made in the manner of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, but without Cornell’s surrealist tone. The handmade wooden boxes—belonging to a pre-industrial culture—incorporate objects found or purchased on the street, which the artist has mixed with fragments of engravings, caricatures, and old photos. The result is…

The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami will host Cuba Avant-Garde, Contemporary Art from the Farber Collection, February 6 - April 4, 2010. Cuba Avant-Garde presents paintings, sculptures, installations, engravings, and drawings by forty Cuban artists, curated from the extensive collection assembled by Patty and Howard Farber of New York, also known for collecting modern American and contemporary Chinese art. The works in Cuba Avant-Garde are viewable online on the Farber Collection website. Cuba Avant-Garde reflects an unbiased and open vision of Cuban art created since the 1980s, showcasing works by artists living not only in Cuba, but throughout the world, presented as members of an active conceptual and transnational community. Although works by Cuban artists address such topics as religious and political mythologies, emigration, and Cuban history,…

The 95-year old Cuban painter Carmen Herrera has been awarded the 2010 Cintas Foundation Prize. Herrera, who has lived in New York since the mid-1950s, has recently seen her geometric abstraction works exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Born in Havana, Herrera studied painting and art history at Marymount College in Paris, where she lived from 1929 to the mid-1930s. Nine years later, she married Jesse Loewenthal, who a literature professor in New York City, where she has lived since the mid-1950s. The Cintas Foundation Prize is the latest in a string of recent successes. In September, the IKON gallery in Birmingham, England, presented a restrospective of her work, which open at the Phalzgallerie Museum, Germany, in January. The Tate Modern in London and the Hirshhorn Museum and…

Carlos Garaicoa, one of the heavyweights of contemporary Cuban art, took part in El Patio de mi Casa (The Yard of My House), a site-specific project directed by Cuban critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera in the Spanish city of Córdoba. Garaicoa's work, Principios básicos para destruir (Basic Principles to be Destroyed), was a city made of sugar, destined to be eaten by ants, which was built in the second yard of the School of Philosophy and Letters. During the exhibition, which ran through the end of November, Garaicoa´s work was one of several installations placed in public and private courtyards and patios in the historical section of the city. Sixteen artists participated in the project, including Mona Hatoum (United Kingdom), Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica), Mounira al-Solh (Lebanon/Holland), Magdalena Atria (Chile),…

The first exhibition of graphic art by Cuban artist José Bedia (born 1959) was recently presented at the Caja Granada Cultural Center in Andalusia, Spain. On view through December 2, Graphologies was presented as part of the ArtJaén 2009 International Art Fair, held yearly in this Iberian community. Graphologies presented large graphic works, which Bedia started in the 1980s, when he took part in Volumen I, the group show that was a turning point for the visual arts in Cuba. The works featured photocopies mixed with Bedia's fingerprints, line drawings inspired by Native American peoples of the US, and graphic works interpreting the Afro-Cuban Palo Monte religion. The exhibition included collages, silk screen prints, and posters, including a large collection assembled in Miami, where the artist has lived since 1993. During…

Obiní Batá is a group of six Cuban female Batá drummers. Headed by Eva Despaigne, who had been a member of the prestigious National Folklore Group for 20 years, Obiní Batá is the only Afro-Cuban percussion group comprised solely of women. All six of the drummers are graduates of the National Art School. In the Yoruba language, "Obiní Batá" means "female drummers." By the longstanding traditions of Afro-Cuban religions, bata drumming has been regarded as taboo for women. A documentary about the group, entitled Una Sonrisa para el Tambor, recently premiered at the 21st International New Latin American Film Festival. Directed by Damián Francisco Pérez Téllez, the documentary features interviews and performances by Obiní Batá.