previews May 2012

“Caribbean: Crossroads of the World”

Spanning the two centuries between the Haitian Revolution and the present and featuring some 550 works by 350 artists, “Crossroads of the World” is the most ambitious art exhibition about the Caribbean ever mounted. However, it is not a show of Caribbean art per se, but of the Caribbean through art. Fuentes and his curatorial team have organized this overwhelming mass of content around six historical and cultural themes (race and human rights, language and religion, and the impact of plantation industries, to name a few) that articulate a fresh, complex discussion of the

passages May 1996

Félix González Torres

A MUTUAL FRIEND called me in Havana from New York to tell me the news of the death of Félix González Torres. As I hung up the phone I thought that this precarious communication might have been the only link between the artist’s death and the country of his birth. It was like one of Félix’s own works, a subtle line coming down, a minimum trace of a presence in absence. Félix is not well known in Cuba, and his death went as unnoticed as had his life.

I felt an absurd emptiness. I also thought of the telegram that ten years earlier had announced to me the death of Ana Mendieta, 38 years old, like

books December 1994

New Art of Cuba

IN HIS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, Luis Camnitzer says that I should have written this book. This seems the perfect example of the post-Modern death of the author, especially if one also ends up reviewing one’s own unwritten book. But Camnitzer is really the right person for the subject. A frequent visitor to Cuba, he has been involved with the new art since the early ’80s, and, as a Uruguayan, he shares a general cultural perspective as well as some related experience of the periphery. At the same time, living and working in New York have allowed him to maintain a distance from all this. As an artist,

Gerardo Mosquera