The Tampa Museum of Art gives us views of Cuba’s decrepit grandeur and contemporary Mexican art.
by Megan VoellerTwo exhibitions at the Tampa Museum of Art highlight Latin America this summer: one offering glimpses into Havana buildings through photographs by an artist from the American Midwest; the other showcasing 20th and 21st century works by Mexican and Mexican-American artists.
Miradas: Ancient Roots in Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art, Works from the Bank of America Collection presents a survey of influential artists in the form of about 100 prints, photographs, and to a lesser extent paintings, drawn from the corporate collection. The artists included are impressive — Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Gabriel Orozco, Graciela Iturbide, Judithe Hernandez, among others — but the selection doesn’t comprise first-rate works, with the exception of certain photographs. Perhaps that’s unimportant when you consider how much TMA paid to borrow the exhibition: nothing.
Curated by Cesàreo Moreno of the National Museum of Mexican Art in collaboration with Bank of America staff, Miradas is one of the corporation’s traveling exhibitions, which museums and nonprofit galleries can use for free. (Actually mounting the exhibition, of course, requires an investment of museum resources.) TMA isn’t the only local institution lining up to borrow — in October, Mixing Metaphors, an exhibition of African American art also curated from the Bank of America collection, opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
The upshot for Tampa Bay audiences is a chance to see a selection of interesting, if not exactly dazzling, works that expand the traditional picture of modernism as a primarily American, and secondarily European, endeavor into one that is deeply intercultural and difficult to reduce to basic principles. For example, in his “Tarascan Idol” (1931), Jean Charlot — a Paris-born artist of mestizo Zapotec descent who lived in Mexico City during the 1920s and New York during the 1930s — fuses an interest in abstraction with Tarascan symbology, painting a pre-Columbian totem emerging from a background of flat planes. A suite of lithographs by Siqueiros, the famed muralist who led workshops in New York in the 1930s for American students, including Jackson Pollock, renders traditional Mexican themes like motherhood and village life in wild, non-local color, turning skies pink and green and mountains ochre and blue.
With more informational labels than the average visitor wants to read, the exhibition feels a bit arduous, but diligence pays dividends in the opportunity to compare, say, the early-to-mid 20th century surrealism of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s photography with that of Graciela Iturbide, a contemporary artist born at the height of Alvarez Bravo’s career in the 1940s who studied under his mentorship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Or to move from there into the work of conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco, born 1962, whose photographs of curious found objects and scenarios function as visual one-liners and have helped solidify his reputation as one of the most respected contemporary artists in the world.
Faded Elegance: Photographs of Havana by Michael Eastman is the more crowd-pleasing exhibition. Eastman, a self-taught photographer based in St. Louis, has carved out an impressive niche by practicing architectural photography with the eye of an anthropologist. This venture has taken him to cities including Lisbon, Prague, Budapest, Seville, Paris, Memphis, New Orleans, and Havana, and to unfathomably beautiful edifices to capture their interiors — and, somewhat less often, exteriors — with a large format camera.
Twenty-nine of his photographs taken in Havana are the focus of the TMA exhibition, which originated at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. The photos, printed to stunning dimensions of 7-1/2-foot tall by 6-foot wide, are gorgeous. Eastman describes them as portraits of spaces, rather than people, and openly exercises a romantic sensibility when it comes to color balancing in the digital darkroom of Photoshop. The results are huge, supersaturated photographs of historic Cuban homes that a viewer could almost step inside. Exteriors showcase the island’s eclectic architectural physiognomy. (Consider the flamboyance of a particular sky blue Art Nouveau-Rococo facade, dramatically asymmetrical and adorned with a cupcake-like balcony canopy, against the more staid, classical faces of two adjacent buildings in “#107 Havana.”) Interiors offer up a voyeur’s delight of incongruously ostentatious Venetian-style glass chandeliers, painted tile floors, scalloped archways, and the inevitable shabby furniture and peeling paint.
What might keep a viewer from falling fully under the exhibition’s spell is the predictability of the depiction of Cuba it offers. Here is Havana at its most sentimentalized, even Orientalized in the sense that Edward Said used the term to describe a pattern of representation which legitimates the dominance of one culture over another. That American audiences love to consume pictures of crumbling Cuba — and these are among the most beautiful I have seen — reveals much about us. For one thing, the wistful regret we feel toward our own fast-cheap-and-ugly urban-suburban growth following World War II, our careless abandonment of an architectural character, which Havana seems to exude effortlessly. (Another of Eastman’s portfolios, Vanishing America, directly engages that nostalgia.) For another, the frisson we experience upon seeing visual evidence of communism defeated — e.g., the juxtaposition of peeling paint with a portrait of Fidel.
The peculiar poignance of Eastman’s images stems from our knowledge that, sooner or later, we’ll be there to spoil what’s left of this “authentic” Cuba.