Work by seven Afro-descendant Cuban artists whose practices developed far from academic training, commercial markets and the frameworks that typically shape how Cuban art circulates abroad are at the center of “No Seasoning” at the Copperbridge Foundation in North Miami.
Curated by Elvia Rosa Castro, the exhibition, which opens on Friday, Feb. 27, draws entirely from the NAEMI Collection (National Art Exhibitions of the Mentally Ill), a Miami-based body of work by artists living with psychiatric, neurological or cognitive disabilities.
Outsider art generally refers to work created beyond formal art institutions and market systems, often by self-taught artists operating outside academic training or commercial expectations.
Castro, a Cuban art historian and curator with more than 30 years of experience organizing exhibitions in Cuba, Europe and the United States, has long engaged artists working at the margins of visibility. For her, “No Seasoning” is less about classification than about presence — and about questioning how value is assigned in art.
Rather than foregrounding diagnosis, she frames the exhibition through what she describes as an excess of honesty.
“There are no rituals. No poses. No gloss,” says Castro. “The work emerges without mediation.”
That directness takes a distinct form in each artist’s practice.
That’s the case of Misleidys Castillo, 40, an artist who was born with neurological and hearing disabilities, and on the autism spectrum. According to her mother, María Teresa Pedroso, 60, she has also been diagnosed with psychiatric and cerebral conditions. Castillo is deaf and does not speak. Communication is facilitated largely through her mother and brother.
For much of her life, her world has been contained within domestic space. Yet within that space, her work expands to monumental scale.
Her drawings — often reaching two or three meters (about 6.5 to 10 feet) — depict exaggerated, muscular bodies rendered in pencil and watercolor, then cut, colored and reassembled on the wall. Some figures raise their arms in poses that suggest bodybuilders or mythic heroes. Others wear tiny undergarments marked with a letter inside a heart. The repetition is deliberate. The scale is insistent.
Pedroso said her daughter has drawn such figures since she was 6 or 7 years old.
“She decides when to start and when to finish,” says Pedroso. “We can’t intervene. If you tell her something is wrong, she gets frustrated. So we let her do what she wants.”
When a drawing is complete, Castillo signals it in her own way. She steps back. She looks. She smiles. She touches the surface. Sometimes she kisses it.
Then the work must be mounted. If it is removed, Pedroso says, her daughter will return to the wall and restore it.
The intensity of that relationship was visible during a Havana exhibition several years ago. According to her mother, when Castillo entered the gallery and saw one of her large figures installed, she ran toward it and grabbed the painted hand.
“She recognized it immediately,” according to Pedroso. “She knew it was hers.”
In 2021, Pedroso and her daughter left Havana and relocated to Spain. The transition has been difficult. Castillo had lived for decades in the same home, facing the sea. The change in environment disrupted routines that are essential to her.
“She hasn’t adapted,” says Pedroso. “For someone with autism, change is very hard.”
While Castillo’s work expands from within the constraints of domestic space, another artist in the exhibition relies on fragments of public imagery.
Gloria de la Caridad García intervenes discarded posters produced by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). She scavenges what she can find — often damaged, sometimes stained — and draws over them in ballpoint pen and colored ink. Stars, faces and small figures accumulate across the printed surface. Later, she adds cut fragments that echo or disrupt the original composition.
“When I have the posters, I look at everything — the images, the color, the memory they carry,” García says via telephone from Cuba. “Then I work over them. I add my drawings, little things that fit. The colors make people feel something.”
Materials are not always easy to obtain in Cuba. García says she cannot afford to buy posters regularly. Sometimes friends help. Sometimes she works with whatever paper is available.
She also structures her work around the more immediate demands of daily life.
In another message, García described caring for a 90-year-old adult at home while navigating electricity outages and financial strain.
“I have to ‘invent’ money for food,” she says. “I have to cook. I have to give medicine. There are days when there is no electricity.”
She also spoke openly about living through a period of depression in which she even attempted to end her own life.
“This work came to me later in life,” says García. “It has helped me understand life differently. When I feel overwhelmed, I go back to the drawings. I keep going.”
The emotional weight of that testimony resonates with the curator’s framing of the exhibition.
“For these artists, creation is not primarily aesthetic,” explains Castro. “It’s vital. It’s how they manage their relationship with the world.”
The show also includes early sculptural works by Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the Cuban artist and activist currently imprisoned in Cuba. Unlike several of the other artists on view, his confinement is the result of political repression rather than mental illness. Arrested in July 2021, he is serving a five-year sentence in a maximum-security prison on charges including “contempt,” “public disorder” and “insult to national symbols” — accusations that international human rights organizations have criticized as arbitrary. The pieces presented here predate his international visibility as a dissident.
“This is earlier work,” says Castro. “Before everything became politicized. It reminds us that he is, first and always, an artist.”
The remaining artists — Pedro Pablo Bacallao, Isaac Crespo, Daldo Marte and Martha Iris Pérez — work across drawing, collage, sculpture and installation. Some repeat motifs obsessively. Others build dense visual fields from everyday materials. The common thread is not style but circumstance.
All of the works in “No Seasoning” come from NAEMI, founded in 1988 by Juan Martin while he was working in community mental health in Miami. The archive began after Martin encouraged one of the people in his care to paint.
“I realized there were probably many people in psychiatric institutions doing extraordinary work,” says Martin. “And no one was paying attention.”
Over time, the archive expanded to include artists from Cuba, Latin America, Europe and the United States. Some works are purchased directly from artists or their families. Others are donated. What remains consistent, Martin said, is the refusal to impose outside expectations.
“The moment you start telling someone how to be an artist — what material to use, what will sell — you risk losing what made the work necessary,” he says.
Over its three-month run, “No Seasoning” will be accompanied by public programs and performances. But at its core, the exhibition is quieter than its title suggests.
It asks viewers to stand before work that was not made for an art market, not shaped by trend and not softened for easy consumption.
“This art doesn’t ask to be explained. It asks to be seen,” says Castro.
WHAT: “No Seasoning”
WHERE: Copperbridge Foundation, 12500 NE 4th Ave., North Miami.
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Through Saturday, May 23.
COST: Free. Groups by appointment.
INFORMATION: (305) 891-8293 or Copperbridge.org
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