Notes related to Cuba

By Violeta Lozada

As the global art market recalibrates, a quiet but powerful shift is rising. Collectors are increasingly moving away from multimillion-dollar blue-chip purchases and towards living artists whose work offers emotional resonance, personal connection, and affordability. Cuban painter Eric Alfaro is a standout in this new wave, an artist whose work combines painterly sophistication with accessible pricing and deeply human themes.

The exhibition brings together works by the Cuban master alongside eleven artists who have found in him inspiration, guidance, and a space for dialogue.

By Violeta Lozada

For the first time, twin brothers Elliot and Erick Jiménez step into a museum as an artistic duo, presenting a body of work that is both personal and deeply spiritual. Identical twins with identical passions, they work through photography to explore themes of memory, identity, and tradition, but with a profound layer of meaning rooted in their spiritual practice of Lucumí, a syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion born in late nineteenth-century Cuba. Emerging from the fusion of Yoruba, Catholicism, and Spiritism, Lucumí continues to shape lives across generations of the Cuban diaspora, and in the case of the Jiménez brothers, it has become both inspiration and guide.

By Álvaro de Benito

Barcelona's MACBA presents I Have Learned to Swim on Dry Land, the first monographic exhibition that a Spanish institution dedicates to Cuban-American artist and activist Coco Fusco (New York, USA, 1960). The exhibition, titled after the opening sentence of Virgilio Peña's short story Swimming, offers a journey through several thematic nuclei revolving around words, language, and silence, as well as the semiotics and symbolism entwined with these concepts.

Twin Photography Duo’s First Solo Museum Exhibition Weaves Afro-Cuban Spirituality with Painterly Explorations of their Cultural Heritage.

The Museum of Modern Art will host the most extensive retrospective devoted to the artist in the United States, on view at MoMA from November 10, 2025, through March 28, 2026.

The Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art (CAAC) presents Sensemayá. Cánticos para matar a la Culebra (Sensemaya. Chants to kill the snake), the first solo institutional exhibition in Spain by Claribel Calderius (Havana, Cuba, 1986). Conceived specifically for the San Bruno Chapel, the project is a site-specific intervention that draws on the space’s historical and spiritual resonance—qualities that align seamlessly with the symbolic universe of the Cuban artist.

The Cervantes Institute in New York presents the exhibition Fabelo. Critical States, a selection of 13 works by renowned Cuban artist Roberto Fabelo, curated by Mario José Hernández. The collection invites viewers to immerse themselves in a disturbing universe where the real and the fantastic coexist in an unstable balance.

Elba Benítez Gallery in Madrid, in collaboration with Clarissa Bronfman, presents a must-see exhibition by Jorge Pardo (Havana, Cuba, 1963), featuring a selection of works designed and created specifically for the gallery space. Emphasizing the importance of space, the Cuban artist employs his signature multidisciplinary approach to explore how color and texture influence perception. To this end, the exhibition is arranged in areas that serve a dual purpose.

Intricate between action and register, El Apartamento hosts Algo deja quien se va, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Reynier Leyva Novo (Havana, Cuba, 1983). Starting from the political concept of historical memory and linking it to the issues of power and colonialism, the artist unfolds in two well-differentiated series his proposal to approach these lines, and extends his networks to the impact (or influence) they have on the institutional and cultural fabric.

The American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora presents Antonia Eiriz: In the Eye of the Sibyl, an exhibition showcasing the best of the painter’s work from 1960 to 1990, offering an exceptional insight into the creative journey of one of the most controversial and innovative artists in Cuban art of her time.

Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez, known for her multidimensional paintings that challenge Minimalism with abstract, erotic forms, has died at the age 98. Her death was confirmed by the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and Galerie Lelong & Co., which has represented the artist since 2013.

Based on the biologicist theories on territoriality and the relationships derived from living beings with their immediate environment, the Angeles Baños gallery from Badajoz proposes an exhibition project to three Latin American artists so that, through their experiences and their personal vision, they can materialize and express those feelings of territoriality, and always from the parallelism of the human being with the rest of living beings.

Locust Projects presents Bare Tool (Herramienta desnuda), a new exhibition by artist Alexandre Arrechea that explores the action of a stone skipping across water as a metaphor for “social sculpture” and the resulting ripple effect, which the artist envisions in three acts: “The Tool,” “The Action,” and “The Implications,” unfolding as a large scale, immersive multimedia experience that invites reflection on the power of individual acts.

The DA2 hosts the last stage of the itinerancy of the Luciano Méndez Sánchez Contemporary Cuban Art Collection, a cycle of exhibitions that the collection started in 2019 in Spain in this institution and that reflects, through different curatorial lines, the realities and attitudes around contemporary art in Cuba.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas presented the exhibition Women Who I Could’ve Been, featuring the latest work of renowned artist Ana Albertina Delgado.

Casa de America joins the program of Muestra t, cultural festival of Madrid Orgullo (MADO) 2024, with the exhibition Jungle, by Cuban artist Leslie Sardinias. It is curated by Aldones Nino.

The Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), located in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, is hosting the exhibition Toda utopía pasa por la barriga, a tour through the work of Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, Cuba, 1967) curated by Lillebit Fabraga that best connects with architecture, the natural order and the location of the human being in the system.

The Green Havana project is a captured sample of a time and an attitude, the same one that transits between evasion and hedonism and the social reality of the Cuban capital, a unique and referential site of that almost isolated Cuba and of a popular culture grown in the shadow of political influences.

The CINTAS Foundation announced the 2023-2024 Fellows for the programs of: Architecture & Design, Creative Writing, Brandon Fradd Music Composition, Sondra Gilman González-Falla Photography and Visual Arts.

The Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston presented the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of Cuban conceptual artist Reynier Leyva Novo.

MIAMI

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América offers a captivating retrospective of the brief, yet significant career of the late Cuban artist.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is a monographic exhibition at Brooklyn Museum of a visionary voice in photography, immersive installation, painting, and performance. On view since September 16^th, 2023.

The exhibition at Casa América presents the work of Cuban painter Rafael Soriano (1920-1915), a recognized master of geometric abstraction and a figure of global transcendence in the art world of the twentieth century.

El Museo del Barrio presents Juan Francisco Elso’s exhibition Por América, offering a new, contemporary revisions on canonical figures and figures and theories from Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American art history.

The Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Miami Dade College (MDC) presents Estuary [Pavilion for MOAD], a work by Cuban American artist Rafael Domenech.

The Fairfield University Art Museum and the Art Museum at the University of Saint Joseph announce the closing of the monographic exhibition Gladys Triana: A Path to Enlightenment, 1971-2021, which displays the work of Gladys Triana (b. Cuba, 1937) at these two venues simultaneously. This exhibition, which opened on September 23, 2022, marked the first collaboration between both exhibitions to provide a two-venue survey of an artist’s work.

Mariano: Variations on a Theme is the first major retrospective exhibition of the work of Cuban artist Mariano Rodríguez (b. 1912, Havana; d. 1990, Havana) in the United States. Exhibited first at the McMullen Museum of Art in Boston, the exhibition is organized with the collaboration of the Fundación Mariano Rodríguez.

[NAME] Publications inaugurated their new space in West Miami with the exhibition Rafael Domenech: An Oracle on a Tomato, Ubiquitous Rectangles. The exhibition includes a series of newly-commissioned objects that activate the hidden potentials in the traditional book form by unfolding it as multi-media painting-like structures.

Radical Conventions is presented in collaboration with the Cuban Heritage Collection of the University of Miami Libraries. Curated by Elizabeth Cerejido, PhD., the exhibition will be on view until June 12^th.