Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

This one-day free symposium features a set of presentations and critical dialogues around the contemporary art and rituals of Afro-Cuba. This symposium is led by scholars of Caribbean cultural studies and aesthetics, anthropology, and religious studies. Through a variety of aesthetic, ethnographic, historical, and socio-cultural methods, you will learn about the works of Black Cuban artists along with the complex histories and lived traditions of Afro-Cuban rituals.

Symposium Schedule:

12pm-1pm: Talk by Stephan Palmié

El monte — Then and Now

This lecture takes the 70th anniversary of the publication of Lydia Cabrera’s magnum opus El monte, and its first English translation as an occasion to reflect on the perplexing nature of Cabrera’s text. Cabrera was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the African derived ritual traditions of Cuba that she observed between the 1930s and 1950s. Not unlike American salvage ethnography at the time, El monte thrives on the trope of vanishing traditional authenticity. Yet the result was and still is a thoroughly undisciplined hybrid text, a multi-voiced modernist literary experiment. As such, El monte has been a permanent source of frustration for anthropologists fighting an uphill battle in aiming to extract ethnographic data from it. The book has received rather more attention from literary scholars who, in often equally reductive fashion, tend to focus on Cabrera’s gender and sexual orientation.  My argument is that Font-Navarrete’s careful translation and annotation of El monte – a reappropriation for twenty-first century audiences of both scholars and practitioners – should give us reason to rethink our own ethnographic and authorial practices.

1pm-2pm: Talk by Elizabeth Pérez

Conceiving (of) & Consuming the Orishas: From Catholic Chromos to Visual Art to AI.

In this lecture, Pérez will explore depictions of the Yorùbá-inspired Afro-Cuban deities called orishas in the contemporary artworks of such luminaries as multimedia artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons and painter Harmonia Rosales. She will discuss these artists’ innovations in representing the orishas’ Blackness and creatively subverting traditional conventions for their portrayal that derive in part from the iconography of Roman Catholic chromolithographs. Pérez then turns to the explosion of AI-generated pictures of the orishas in cyberspace and argues that, while digital image generators have given practitioners unprecedented license to render (and racialize) the orishas, they also threaten to reinscribe stereotypes that Black and Afro-Cuban artists have labored to dismantle.

2pm-2:30pm: coffee break

2:30pm-3:30pm: Odette Casamayor-Cisneros

Reinventing the Self: The Identity Politics of Contemporary Afro-Cuban Women Artists

This talk examines ethical-aesthetic processes of self-identification in the works of contemporary Afro-Cuban women artists, including Belkis Ayón, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Gertrudis Rivalta, and Juana Valdés. These processes, which Prof. Casamayor-Cisneros’ conceptualizes as acts of ontological self-birth, involve deconstructing notions of blackness, womanhood, and Cubanness, thereby generating new forms of identification. By studying their visual and performative works, she argues that self-birthing enables Black women to escape the epistemological system that categorizes them as “others.” Thus, Casamayor-Cisneros terms this process epistemological marronage, highlighting how Black women’s intersectional counter-hegemonic agency challenges hetero-patriarchal, colonialist, and Eurocentric narratives. A key focus of her analysis is the concept of monstrosity: examining how self-portraiture as powerful “uncanny” creatures conveys the Black woman’s namelessness and unfathomability—that is, the impossibility to be conceptually apprehended by the hegemonic epistemology, once stereotypical identities are rejected.