Another room of your own

Maybe it's a risk to organize "another women's exhibition"; there's always that feeling of losing sight of the very thing you're trying to make visible. But different conversations in recent months led me here; listening to young Cuban artists talk about the absence of referents in art schools was, to say the least, disturbing.

Recently, a cultural promoter in Cuba was surprised at the exhibition of a painting with expressionist features and two meters high. It seemed impossible to him, considering that a very young woman -and of short stature- was its author. And she expressed it freely, in those apparently inclusive public squares that are the social networks. The artist also taught at the oldest fine arts academy in Cuba, San Alejandro.

In the same school, in the early 2000s, some male teachers questioned the right to a large and bright classroom, where a master of contemporary Cuban painting, along with her students, began to remove much more than pigments. Also in those workshops, in the 1990s, the prints of a transgressor of engraving, who immortalized in her works the figure of an African princess sacrificed to preserve a male secret. Decades ago, at the end of the 50s, one of the greatest teaching artists made her debut there as a teacher, initiator of contemporaneity in Cuban art and in her teaching methods; the same one who was separated from the teaching profession because of her outspoken work and character.

The reason for constancy reveres the power of a group of Cuban women artists who at some point in their careers chose to stand up in front of a classroom to share their skills and creative philosophies. It proposes a dialogue between some of those historic Maestras who taught art in Havana -from the 1960s to the 2000s- and those who succeeded them, sometimes as students, sometimes also as educators.

The intertextual play with Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's poem is a white flag. No one is above, no one below. The qualities belong to human nature and not to a gender identity. However, it seems that we are still in a constant search for a place, for "a room of our own" in which to build and recognize ourselves. We do not want to cut off Holofernes' head, but we do want to have the right to wield the knife, if necessary.

Sandra García Herrera, May 2024.