The new Cuban art grew up in the supercharged and conflicting
currents of revolution, sometimes tracking to its optimism and at
others scalded by it. But even more than that it was an art with
extraordinary relation and relevance to the life of the country
across social, domestic, cultural, and psychological registers:
aggressive, protean, and perennially restless within an
extraordinary conviction about the possibilities of art.-from the
Introduction In 1981, Volumen Uno, an exhibition at a Havana
gallery, inaugurated a new chapter in the rich history of Cuban
art. Featuring an eclectic mix of works by eleven young artists
filtered through a variety of styles-informalism, Pop, minimalism,
conceptualism, performance, graffiti, and povera-the art was a
sharp break with the past in both form and content. More of a
phenomenon than a formal movement, the new Cuban art was both a
reaction to the sovietization of Cuban culture in the 1970s and the
dynamic entry of a generation of artists born around the Revolution
and formed by its orthodoxies and its poetic idealism. In this
spectacularly illustrated volume, Rachel Weiss offers the
definitive critical history of the new Cuban art, exploring its
remarkable artistic accomplishments and its role as catalyst for,
and site of, public debate. Weiss draws on two decades of
engagement with Cuban art and on the statements of the artists
themselves to read individual artworks against the complex
relationships between artists, their local and global audiences,
and the Cuban state. Tracing the shift from the optimism of the
early 1980s to the cultural cynicism that paralleled the
near-collapse of Cuban society in the 1990s, To and from Utopia in
the New Cuban Art identifies a renewed idealism among the artists
about the potential role of culture in Cuban society.
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