Geographies of Cuban Art

May 4, 2011 - 4:00 PM

Corina Matamoros

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba

Corina Matamoros will offer an analysis of Cuban art from the 19th Century to the present, highlighting the continuing interest in social issues and art’s role as a means for dialogue with society. She will briefly sketch the background of 19th Century Cuban art and the rise of the avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to a fuller discussion of art produced after the 1960s with a focus on current developments. She will highlight the work of artists Carlos Garaicoa, José Toirac, Lázaro Saavedra, Abel Barroso, Sandra Ramos, Tania Bruguera, and Los Carpinteros, among other talented young contemporary artists.

Matamoros is an art writer and curator of contemporary Cuban art at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. She graduated as an Art Historian from the University of Havana, and she obtained the Diplome of Museology at The Ecole du Louvre, Paris. Matamoros has curated more than 24 exhibitions with the work of contemporary Cuban artists including Raúl Martínez, José Bedia, Carlos Garaicoa, Los Carpinteros, Kcho, Tania Bruguera, and many others. She has been co-curator of several exhibitions for the Contemporary Art Museum of the University of South Florida, Tampa, and most recently, she organized the show Eagerly Awaiting based on the work of the seminal Cuban pop artist Raúl Martínez, for the Magnan Metz Gallery in New York. Her publications include the book Mirada de curador (2009) and more than forty essays about art and Museum Studies. Matamoros is currently preparing a book about Raúl Martínez. She is a member of the International Council of Museums and of the Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba. Matamoros was awarded with the National Prize of Curatorship in Cuba and with the 2010 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, sponsored by the Rubin Foundation.