The latest exhibition at the Westchester Regional Library brings together more than 80 contemporary Cuban artists, each working within a shared constraint: a 21-inch circular format that reveals a wide range of approaches, styles and generations.
Organized in collaboration with the Miami-Dade Public Library System, the exhibition, which opened on Friday, April 3 and continues through Thursday, June 25, unfolds as a traveling, evolving project that resists a single narrative. Rather than grouping artists around a theme, curator Miguel Rodez invited each participant to work within the circular format while maintaining their own visual language.
The result is a wide-ranging presentation that reflects the diversity of Cuban artistic production across generations and geographies.
Rodez, a Miami-based artist and independent curator, began developing the exhibition nearly a decade ago. Over time, the initiative expanded beyond its initial scope, evolving into what he describes as both a traveling show and an ongoing record of Cuban visual culture.
“ ‘Circular Reflections’ is a growing, traveling, large-scale contemporary art exhibition and living documentation of Cuban visual creativity,” Rodez said.
The defining gesture of the exhibition, the circle, operates as both formal constraint and conceptual device.
“The project shuns the traditional rectangle format, which boxes in a narrative, in favor of a round portal that transports the audience wherever the artist’s imagination leads,” he said.
For artists accustomed to rectangular composition, that shift required adjustment and opened new ways of organizing space.
Ismael Gómez Peralta, a Cuban-born artist based in Miami whose work often explores architecture and memory, says the circular format posed an initial challenge but ultimately aligned with his existing practice.
“Normally we all work in a rectangular format. It’s the traditional structure,” he said. “Here, the challenge was to rethink that space without losing what I do.”
Rather than adopting a radial or mandala-like composition, Gómez Peralta maintained the architectural logic that defines his work, grounded in structure, weight and spatial tension.
“I kept my sense of gravity, my structures in space,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose that.”
His process begins with an abstract foundation.
“I start by releasing paint across the entire surface, building a kind of base,” he said. “I familiarize myself with the space. I ‘heal’ it, in a way.”
From there, the composition emerges through a balance of intuition and memory.
“I don’t rely on cold reasoning,” he said. “I let instinct guide me, what I’m feeling at that moment.”
The imagery in his piece draws from two long-standing bodies of work: his series on the ruins of Havana and another focusing on cathedral-like structures, developed after the death of his mother.
“I wanted those two elements to come together,” he said. “The ruin and the cathedral, destruction and something more elevated.”
That duality reflects a broader meditation shaped by distance from Cuba, where he lived through the economic crisis of the 1990s before relocating to the United States in 2002.
“Living outside Cuba gives you perspective,” he said. “When you’re inside, you’re too close, almost like a victim of the situation. From a distance, you can process memory differently.”
His work often holds that tension: decay and endurance, loss and continuity.
“There is beauty in Cuba,” he said. “Even within destruction, there is hope.”
While Gómez Peralta approached the format as a structural problem, painter Luisa Mesa, a Miami-based artist known for her intuitive abstract compositions, encountered it differently.
“I’ve worked in circles for years. I love them,” Mesa said. “So for me, nothing really changed. It was a natural space to work in.”
Her process begins not with an image but with color.
“I start with the background. I build the surface first,” she said. “Then I draw into it.”
From there, the work develops organically.
“I work very intuitively,” she said. “I always say the piece knows what it wants. If I don’t interfere too much, it guides me.”
Mesa’s compositions often evoke biological or cosmic systems, forms that suggest cells, constellations or microscopic activity, though she resists assigning fixed meaning.
“I never decide in advance what I want to communicate,” she said. “People bring their own interpretation.”
Over time, she has observed how viewers project their own experiences onto the work.
“People with a scientific background often see something under a microscope,” she said. “Others see something cosmic or even playful.”
That openness is intentional.
“A work of art is a mirror,” she said. “Each person sees something different in it.”
The absence of a prescribed theme across the exhibition reinforces that multiplicity.
“I’m a strong believer in freedom of expression,” Rodez said. “This show is about what’s in the soul of the artists.”
By allowing participants to work without conceptual restriction, he aimed to foreground the breadth of Cuban artistic production, from the figurative to the abstract, from the intimate to the monumental.
“The objective is to challenge preconceived notions of what Cuban art is,” he said. “It cannot be easily categorized.”
That diversity becomes especially visible within the shared constraint of the circle, where each artist negotiates the same boundary in distinct ways.
The exhibition includes work by more than 80 artists across generations, among them Ramón Alejandro, Alejandro Arrechea, Pablo Cano, Ana Albertina Delgado, Ivonne Ferrer, Baruj Salinas and Violeta Roque de Arana, among many others.
Installed within the Westchester Regional Library, a Brutalist structure defined by raw concrete and geometric weight, the exhibition also shifts the context in which the work is encountered.
“I wanted to bring art to people where they don’t necessarily expect it,” Rodez said.
Rather than a traditional museum setting, the library offers a more open environment, where viewers may come across the work outside the conventions of gallery behavior.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of short texts written by Rodez in response to each piece, reflections that range from brief lines to more narrative passages.
“The idea is not to impose meaning,” he said. “It’s to get the viewer thinking, to start a dialogue.”
Ultimately, “Circular Reflections” does not attempt to define Cuban art through a single lens. Instead, it presents a field of individual practices shaped by different histories, geographies and sensibilities.
For Gómez Peralta, that openness reflects the way art itself functions.
“If you are honest in what you do,” he said, “there will always be someone who connects with it.”
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