At the Havana Biennial, Seven Nashville Artists Make Cultural Connections

Despite America’s on-again, off-again relationship with Cuba, Americans’ social media feeds are often full of photographs of the country’s 1950s cars, brightly colored buildings, tropical fruits and dancers. But building real community between the two countries requires boldness and vision. Internationally acclaimed artist and Vanderbilt professor Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons aspires to bridge the cultures of her homeland, Matanzas, Cuba — located about 60 miles east of Havana — with her current home, Nashville. 

Invited to participate in Cuba’s most prominent international art event, the 13th Havana Biennial (taking place April 12-May 12), Campos-Pons developed a curatorial project rooted in Matanzas titled Intermittent Rivers. She often incorporates Matanzas’ heritage into her art, and dreaming upon the biennial theme, “The Construction of the Possible,” she imagined a river of creative vitality running through Matanzas.

Campos-Pons has an urgent desire to bring Nashville and Matanzas together in conversation. The cities share overlapping histories of slavery, African-inspired music and the arts. She says she wants Nashville and Matanzas to be sister cities “not on paper, but sister cities in action.” Named director of the biennial’s satellite project in Matanzas, she called on international artists including her colleagues at Vanderbilt, Fisk and Tennessee State universities to submit proposals for the citywide exhibition, challenging them to create work in Matanzas that considers the need for balance among society, culture and nature. Campos-Pons and her curatorial team accepted 62 artists from 16 countries. Seven of the artists are Nashville-based. 

Vanderbilt art professors Jana Harper and Vesna Pavlović are collaborating with Cuban artists on their new artworks. Harper is coordinating with the Matanzas-based dance group Danza Espiral Company and its director Lilian Padrón on a performance that creates a poetic connection of body movement, geography and psychology. Set to sound, it will feature performers parading through the city improvising with burdensome stuffed rice bags. The work will highlight the sometimes graceful, sometimes unwieldy appearance of humans carrying baggage of all types. Pavlović pulled from her interests in socialist revolutionary architecture to create art with Matanzas-based painter Yuriel Michel García Tápanes. Her video installation will include original and archival film and audio recordings collected in both Alamar (a suburb of Havana) and Belgrade, Serbia, where she was born. Alamar shares an architectural connection with Belgrade: The buildings in both cities were constructed using a method from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. With imagery of Tápanes painting building facades in Alamar, the footage calls attention to the failed promise these structures represent now.

Fisk art professor Alicia Henry and Fisk University Galleries director Jamaal Sheats will highlight Afro-Cuban heritage in Matanzas. Henry’s arrangement of nine large-scale cutouts of brown and black heads, representing various ages and genders, will be installed in the city’s courthouse. The illustrious civic venue will lend prominence to the people Henry’s cutouts represent. Sheats’ piece will highlight the influence of the African diaspora on Matanzas. A wall hanging he made of tile from the courthouse will serve as the background for a projection of dancing silhouetted figures. Their movements trace histories of dance and music in Matanzas, from African slave traditions to rumba, a form of ballroom dance that blends African and European styles. The work is grounded in memory, indicating cultural contributions made by Afro-Cubans.

Joining conversations on nature and culture, Farrar Cusomato of Vanderbilt’s art department will present imagery that takes on new meanings in a Cuban context. Cusomato often presents ethical dilemmas in her paintings — here, she’ll provoke questions about human relationships with the environment and provide an international audience with a glimpse into Tennessee. Her work will include depictions of landscapes with a quilt from the American South and surveillance footage of a coyote stalking her farm in Centerville, Tenn. 

When Campos-Pons saw TSU professor Brandon Donahue’s artwork, she connected it with the shapes and textures of the mamey — a common Cuban tree fruit. For the exhibition, Donahue will translate the visual vocabulary from his “Basketball Blooms” — flower-like wall hangings made from deconstructed basketballs — into explorations of the mamey. The eight new sculptural pieces he composed for the biennial will convey aesthetic relationships and cultural significance of the fruit and the basketballs. 

With an influx of tourists coming to Matanzas for the biennial, Vanderbilt professor Alejandro Acierto’s reflections on tourism are particularly pertinent. Acierto, of VU’s Department of Art and Department of Cinema & Media Arts, will focus on the warped ethics that result from tourists’ demands for authentic Cuban cigars while economically disadvantaged Cubans produce counterfeit brand-name ones. Acierto will explore this complicated dynamic in his site-specific installation with sound, video, photographs and performance. 

One of Campos-Pons’ lasting hopes is that the event will bond Nashville and Matanzas into the future. By digging into relevant issues, the Nashville-based artists are prepared to invigorate the conversations among leading international artists in Matanzas and secure a cultural connection with their potential sister city.