From now through Sept. 12, 2026, the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables will have two exhibitions on display that together form the most comprehensive presentation of Afro-Cuban art shown across the world.
“El Pasado Mío: Afrodescent Contributions to Cuban Art” and “Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramon and Nerycs Cernuda Collection” are made up of Afro-Cuban artworks that cannot be reduced to a singular “Black” style, theme, approach or technique. When considered within the historical, political and socioeconomic contexts in which they were created, these works explore Cuba and its complexities through the lives and experiences of Afro-Cuban artists, many of whom have gone unrecognized until now.
The goal of “El Pasado Mío/My Own Past” is to restore the omissions in critical parts of Cuban art history by elevating Afrodescendant artists who have been overlooked, forgotten or written out of the historical record, according to Dr. Jill Deupi, the Lowe Art Museum’s Beaux Arts executive director and chief curator.
“Afrocubanismo” is a parallel project meant to be viewed in conversation with “El Pasado Mío.” All of the artists featured in this exhibition were racialized as white during their lives, with the exception of Wifredo Lam, a celebrated Afro-Cuban painter, considered by some to be the most prominent — and by others, the only — Afrodescendant artist in Cuba in the 20th century.
The guest curator of both exhibitions is Dr. Alejandro de la Fuente, the director of Harvard’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute. A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, Dr. de la Fuente specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations. His works on race, slavery, law, art and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German and French.
“This is an exhibition on a mission, and the mission is to contest the notion that the art history of Cuba can be told through the existing canon, which is hopelessly racialized and hopelessly gendered,” said de la Fuente. “We are surrounded by images that have the great victory of that ideology. It naturalizes a number of images. They're so common, so unremarkable, that we have simply accepted them, and they're part of what a colleague of mine would call our ‘visual literacy.’”
To this day, when considering the predominant narrative of Cuban and Latin American history, the European experience largely eclipses all others, despite the fact that Africans outnumbered European migrants in what we now call Latin America until the end of the 19th century. This late-century wave of European migration to South America was driven by a combination of economic opportunity, political and social pressures, and the region’s own development needs during the second wave of industrialization.
READ MORE: 'You Kill Racism By Speaking About It': Afro-Cuban Artist Sheds Light On Black Experience In Cuba
“I always tell this to my students: nobody was ‘negro’ or ‘Black’ or ‘preto’ when they were boarding the slave ships in the African coasts,” said de la Fuente. “People were Yoruba, they were Kimbundu speakers, they were Kikongo speakers. All of them were transformed into ‘Black,’ all of them were transformed into ‘negro,’ all of them were transformed into ‘noir,’ into ‘preto.’ Think about the epistemological violence of that process of reducing all that diversity into a single category of social debasement.”
The dual exhibitions pose a question: What would happen if Latin America was classified instead as Afro-Latin America — if suddenly actors, processes, contributions and cultural forms that have remained invisible for centuries suddenly came to the surface? Dr. de la Fuente argues that the universal narrative would be complicated to such an extent that it would crumble.
For Tola Porter, Ph.D., an art historian and museum educator at the Lowe, the exhibition is something of a push and pull between cultural histories.
Her favorite artwork in the exhibition, a painting by artist Roberto Diago entitled “Woman at Piano,” exemplifies the friction between African and European cultures to create the crossroads exhibited in the Americas.
“We have an Afro-Cuban Woman who is nude, not naked,” said Porter. “She's playing an instrument of Western music: the piano. She looks like music herself. Her breasts are shaped like musical notes, her earrings are dancing like music, her toes are dancing like music, her fingers are moving so fast and so skillfully that she just closes her eyes.”
Despite her strong feelings toward the painting, Porter emphasizes the importance of the individual interpretation of each work of Afro-Cuban art, leaving room for more than a single story or established narrative to take precedence.
Dr. de la Fuente highlights the idea that the exhibited works call attention to the existence of a very large group of people who cannot be encapsulated into a single style, theme or visual vocabulary in his book entitled “El pasado mío: contribuciones afrodescendientes al arte cubano,” a literary companion to the exhibition.
“‘El Pasado Mío’ is not an endpoint but, rather, an invitation,” said Dr. Deupi. “My hope — one I know the exhibition's guest curator, Harvard’s Dr. Alejandro de la Fuente, shares — is that the show will inspire art historians, scholars, curators and museum leaders to build on the foundation it lays.”
This story was produced by The Miami Times, one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country, as part of a content sharing partnership with the WLRN newsroom. Read more at miamitimesonline.com.
