Published 2017

In the first examination of Diago’s creative work during his entire career, Alejandro de la Fuente provides parallel English- and Spanish-language text, illustrated throughout. The book traces Diago’s singular efforts to construct new pasts—the pasts required to explain the racial tensions of contemporary Cuba and the pasts of this Afro-Cuban present.

 

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At Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, roughly two dozen mixed-media and installation works by Juan Roberto Diago explore Cuban history from an Afro-Cuban perspective. Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present opens with a 6 p.m. reception on Wednesday, February 1, and runs through May 5. Diago will take part in a conversation with the show’s curator, Alejandro de la Fuente, at noon on Friday, February 3.

Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present. Some 25 mixed-media and installation works trace the career of Juan Roberto Diago from the mid-1990s, when he began to construct, through his art, a history of Cuba from an Afro-Cuban perspective.

Slavery is in Cuba’s past, but, as in the United States, its legacy continues. That is the ongoing career theme of mixed-media artist Juan Roberto Diago, who will exhibit 25 pieces in “Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present,” a career retrospective at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art.

Tomorrow evening, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University welcomes Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present. Juan Roberto Diago and the show’s curator, Alejandro de la Fuente, spoke about the exhibition with Cuban Art News.

La exposición reúne unas 25 obras en técnica mixta e instalaciones que trazan la trayectoria de Juan Roberto Diago desde mediados de la década de 1990, cuando comenzó a construir, a través de su arte, una historia alternativa de Cuba, desde una perspectiva afrocubana. La historia de la nación cubana que Diago propone está anclada en pasados vigentes de esclavitud, violencia, discriminación y desarraigo cultural, pasados construidos desde su mirada crítica del presente.