Lillian Guerra, PhD, professor of history at University of Florida and curator of this exhibition, will present a lecture in conjunction with Archives of the Consciousness: Six Cuban Artists. The lecture will take place on Thursday, January 23^rd at 5 p.m. in the Wien Experimental Theatre located in the Quick Center for the Arts. After the lecture there will be an Opening Reception at 6 p.m. with refreshments and live music in the Quick Center lobby.

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Featuring recent and key past works by internationally renowned artists, this exhibition explores the many mythologies of liberation and fulfillment promised by modern life as well as the peculiar challenges they represent for island Cubans who must navigate Cuba’s contradictory system of combining capitalism with Communist rule since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through sculpture, painting, photography and mixed media, artists Abel Barroso, Luis Camejo, Roberto Diago, Manuel Mendive, Mabel Poblet and Eduardo (“Choco”) Roca interrogate the ways that consumerism, migration, patriarchy and the legacies of slavery shape the definitions and differential experiences of freedom that twenty-first-century technology affords all of us. Yet these works anchor the viewer in deeply Cuban locations of consciousness, revealing how austerity and sacrifice, self-reliance and dependence, fear and valor, joy and anguish reflect central principles of survival in a society where egalitarian dreams have long clashed with scarcity, poverty and painful political realities.

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Image: Manuel Mendive Hoyo, Yesterday Afternoon (Ayer Por la Tarde), 2018, acrylic on canvas. Collection of Steven and Terry Certilman