MIAMI, Sept. 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- With the issue you will soon have in your hands, Art OnCuba enters into its second year of life. Five numbers, five ambitious projects have allowed us to grow. Although they are too few to declare our maturity, in each of them we have tried to maintain the focus, vision and enthusiasm marking the birth of the magazine. And with this figure we have been able to challenge the fate that has historically marked Cuban cultural publications which in few occasions have been able to extend in time, even under the influx of the most prestigious intellectuals of all periods.
These are times in which the view of a publication project should not lack an intelligent positioning in the editorial market, which is everything, or almost everything. And the Art OnCuba team has maintained, in this sense, a work that is giving substantial results. Of 22 North American cities in which our presence was verified just six months ago—in Barnes&Noble, Books and Books and Hudson News—today we are in almost a hundred, moving also to independent stores like Newsbreak (MA), ABD (NY) and City News (IL). This fills us with pleasure: working to have people really reading us, flooding the spaces in the North American territory eager of information on what is happening in Cuban visual culture, wherever it may be created. This also resizes our commitment of continuing the path we had devised from the beginning, always surprising.
One of the thematic lines of Art OnCuba 04 is memory. And almost everything has to do with memory, but this time we have gathered a set of articles studying the way in which a group of artists build their work, their discourse, firmly supported in the conscious exercise of memory. In a varied spectrum, they have left a testimony, that will also turn into memory, of their reminiscences and personal experiences, of the memory of the nation, of its history, its position in the scenography of its times, of the graphics, the "manners" in the last fifty years. In this context, drawing as tradition and continuous exercise in Cuban art comes to light: drawing as project, as exercise or as oeuvre in itself. Drawings kept in Jose Lezama Lima's house, testimonies of coincidences, intellectual connections, affections; drawings by Marcelo Pogolotti showing a diversity of topics, as the worker and the machine; Raul Milian's extensive oeuvre, recently retaken by the National Fine Arts Museum in an solo exhibition; Carlos Estevez's technique, combining oils and pencils.
Also, from this and other multiple rough edges, a journey on Esterio Segura's poetics and some advances on what will be his next solo exhibition, its inauguration programmed on December in Factoria Habana, in Havana.
Some group shows called our attention because of the clarity and soundness of their curatorial offer, because of timely revisiting what is already known from new perspectives, thus granting other readings to the spectators, or because of the capacity to recover landmarks at times forgotten or displaced from the centers of attention. In this sense, the exhibition The Miami Generation: Revisited, a "reissue" of the one held in 1983 in the Cuban Art and Culture Museum, Miami, goes back to the first generation of Cuban-American artists, who migrated when they were still children and contributed a new sensitivity for creation in the south of Florida and for the history of Cuban art.
For the cover, we have the chance to show an oeuvre by Juan Francisco Elso Padilla (Havana, 1956-1988) that, together with others, had for many years remained out of reach for the public. A rediscovery, a minute to shift our eyes from the dynamics of the gallery and the studios to the inner side of an artist's work, reevaluating and updating the criteria dealt on it.
Art OnCuba is still growing. We will soon be introducing our website too. We still have a very long path travel, not exempt of obstacles of course, but enriching and diverse.
CONTACT: Ariel Machado, 786-546-8304
SOURCE Art OnCuba
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