Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822962551 ISBN 13: 9780822962557

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

Synopsis

This bilingual (English and Spanish) volume offers the first comprehensive study of Grupo Antillano, an Afro-Cuban visual arts and cultural movement that thrived between 1978 and 1983 and has been virtually erased from Cuban cultural and artistic history. Grupo Antillano articulated a vision of Cuban culture that underscored the importance of Africa and of Afro-Caribbean influences in the formation of the Cuban nation. In contrast to the official characterisation of Santeria and other African religious and cultural practices as primitive and outdated during the 1970s, Grupo Antillano valiantly proclaimed the centrality of African practices in national culture. They viewed Africa and the surrounding Caribbean as a vibrant, ongoing, and vital influence that continued to define what it meant to be Cuban. Some Afro-Cuban intellectuals proclaimed that a “new,” authentic Cuban art (radical, popular, black) had been born. This book seeks to recover and to honor that art.

Grupo Antillano is divided into five sections. The first offers testimonials by artists and intellectuals linked to Grupo Antillano, including its creator, Rafael Queneditt. The second section contains essays by Cuban and American art critics and historians. The third uses documents, catalogues, photographs, and press notes to reconstruct the exhibits of Grupo Antillano between 1978 and 1983. A fourth section examines the work of each of the artists in the group, including Cuba’s most famous painter Wifredo Lam, who worked with Grupo Antillano between 1979 and 1982, the year of his death. The final section follows contemporary artists who participate in an exhibit that pays tribute to the work of Grupo Antillano.

About this title

Review:

"Highly recommended as an introduction to Afro-Cuban motifs in revolutionary art, and to Grupo Antillano's impact on the art scene. Although geared toward a reader interested in the arts, the multidisciplinary aspects and activities of Grupo Antillano, such as its association with writers (Nicolas Guillen, for example), will make this book also an important source of information for scholars tracing the influence of Afro-Cuban religious motifs in revolutionary Cuban literature. It is highly recommended for a collection of Cuban Revolutionary art."

"--The Americas"

"In this age of e-books and mobile media, of pages on screens and images in malleable pixels, this book is the antithesis of all that. A gorgeous, weighty volume with gleaming reproductions and bilingual columns of text, it is a reminder of the sensory pleasures books can inspire. But this book appeals beyond the aesthetic. As a history, archive, and catalogue of Cuba's forgotten Grupo Antillano, it is also a necessary intervention in the political and cultural histories of race in the Americas. . . . The political and aesthetic roots of the evaluation and subsequent demise of Grupo Antillano remain entangled, and de la Fuente's deft presentation invites further inquiry. The volume does not resolve the debates surrounding the representation of slavery, race, spirituality, and belonging, but it recovers the visual and textual contexts, both in the late 1970s and the early twenty-first century, in which those debates took place and persist."

"--Hispanic American Historical Review"

Highly recommended as an introduction to Afro-Cuban motifs in revolutionary art, and to Grupo Antillano s impact on the art scene. Although geared toward a reader interested in the arts, the multidisciplinary aspects and activities of Grupo Antillano, such as its association with writers (Nicolas Guillen, for example), will make this book also an important source of information for scholars tracing the influence of Afro-Cuban religious motifs in revolutionary Cuban literature. It is highly recommended for a collection of Cuban Revolutionary art.

"The Americas""

In this age of e-books and mobile media, of pages on screens and images in malleable pixels, this book is the antithesis of all that. A gorgeous, weighty volume with gleaming reproductions and bilingual columns of text, it is a reminder of the sensory pleasures books can inspire. But this book appeals beyond the aesthetic. As a history, archive, and catalogue of Cuba's forgotten Grupo Antillano, it is also a necessary intervention in the political and cultural histories of race in the Americas. . . . The political and aesthetic roots of the evaluation and subsequent demise of Grupo Antillano remain entangled, and de la Fuente's deft presentation invites further inquiry. The volume does not resolve the debates surrounding the representation of slavery, race, spirituality, and belonging, but it recovers the visual and textual contexts, both in the late 1970s and the early twenty-first century, in which those debates took place and persist.

"--Hispanic American Historical Review""

About the Author:

Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University and director of the Institute of Afro-Latin American Studies in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the author of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century and A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba, and he is the editor of Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art. De la Fuente is also cocurator of the art exhibit Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art, which was presented in Havana, Pittsburgh, New York City, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0822962551
• ISBN 13: 9780822962557
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348
• Editor: Alejandro De La Fuente