Collective exhibition

White Room Gallery, November, 2023 - February, 2024.

Cuban art today is like a machine that keeps running after the engine has stopped. In spite of the loss of the cultural climate of the 80s, the intellectual exodus, the contraction of art teaching, the jineteo and the extreme situation in which the country finds itself, artists continue to sprout in Cuba like weeds. This is the beginning of the words to the catalog of Temple metaphorsa group exhibition that has become a milestone in the historiography of contemporary Cuban art. An exhibition held in 1993, a list of very young artists then -nowadays relevant figures of the visual panorama in the island-, and a text written by curator and critic Gerardo Mosquera. Thirty years have passed. 

If the reference to the 1980s were omitted, that quote could be placed in a much more immediate framework in which Cuba's artistic production is currently developing. It is not the intention to compare both generations of creators, nor is it intended to affirm that the characteristics that define the art generated since then and until today have remained unchanged.

The idea of a new contest for the visual arts in Cuba arises from the need for spaces of visibility and circulation for emerging art, sustained during the last decades. There are few examples that remain in the midst of a sustained crisis that has also affected the institutional management from which most of these contests -say salons, contests, calls for entries of various kinds- have emerged.

In these circumstances, the Fondo de Arte Joven (Young Art Fund) has projected an initiative focused on supporting the most recent promotions of Cuban visual artists living and working in Cuba: malaYerba. visual arts competition.

The exhibition that has resulted from this first edition approaches the group expression of a set of concerns of a new generation of artists; nevertheless, it would seem that we are in front of constant déjà vuThe exhibition is a collection of stories, scenes, icons already recognizable to those of us who have spent some time in contact with contemporary Cuban art.

With the wink to Mosquera's definition -now used as the title of a contest- we emphasize the constant germination of artists, works and projects, in the midst of a habitat that insists on being rough for them. 

Sandra García Herrera