Bronx Plans Art Exchange With Cuba

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The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Cuba announced Wednesday that a major exchange of works from their collections would take place this year and next in the most sweeping collaboration between the two countries’ museums in more than 50 years.

The arrangement is the fruit of curatorial negotiations that began long before the recent thaw in diplomatic relations, said Holly Block, the Bronx Museum’s executive director, who has traveled to Cuba and followed the work of artists there for two decades.

Over 80 works of art dating from the 1960s to the present will travel from the Bronx’s permanent collection for display at the National Museum from May 21 through Aug. 16, coinciding with the 12th Havana Biennial. In the fall of 2016, more than 100 works from the National Museum’s collection will come to the Bronx Museum, which has long collected and championed work by Cubans and Cuban-Americans as well as other art from Latin America and from Africa and Asia.

“There are, of course, huge differences between the Bronx and Havana, but there are also a lot of similarities,” Ms. Block said. “The idea is to reinforce the fact that the National Museum is a very local museum, which is what we are, too.”

Large portions of Havana’s collection have traveled before — most notably to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2008 for the show “¡Cuba! Art and History From 1868 to Today.” Since the United States imposed an embargo on trade between the two countries in 1960, many exhibitions of Cuban art have been organized here, and pieces from private American collections have gone on view in Cuba. But there has never been an exchange of this scale or ambition between the two museums. “It makes a lot of sense for us,” said Corina Matamoros, a curator of contemporary art at the National Museum in Havana. “Our museums have a common mission and a common vision about contemporary art, created in specific community contexts.”

The exhibitions this year and next will be jointly titled “Wild Noise,” a reference to the chaotic beauty of urban spaces based on a passage in a Victor Hugo poem about “the wild noise where infinity begins.” Ms. Matamoros, who spoke in Spanish through a translator, said: “I want to be absolutely clear that because we’ve been so isolated for the last 50 years, I really don’t think the United States knows much at all about Cuban art. I think this art, which spans from the ’60s until now, is all going to be a revelation.” She mentioned artists like Antonia Eiríz Vázquez, a painter of powerfully dark Goya-like visions who died in 1995; Raúl Martínez, a Pop-inflected painter and graphic designer, who also died in 1995; and Alfredo Sosabravo, whose vividly colored figurative painting often combines whimsy with a social bite.

The collaboration is another feather in the cap of the relatively tiny Bronx Museum, which in 2013 commissioned the art for the United States pavilionat the Venice Biennale, a complex installation by Sarah Sze.

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