Cuban photography at MFA Houston

Celebrating the acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs from the Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, “Navigating  the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston traces the medium’s evolution in Cuba over nearly six decades — from promoting the Revolution following Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government, to engaging in social and political critique in more recent times as the triumph of the Revolution increasingly gave way to economic hardship and political repression. Particularly in the years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the fluctuating  prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.

“The strengths of the Plonsker Collection are unparalleled, in terms of telling the complex and compelling story of post-Revolution Cuban photography,” Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of photography at the MFAH, said. “Combined in this exhibition with works already in the Museum’s holdings, the collection allows us to chronicle that story from the ‘epic generation,’ whose work would define the image of the Cuban Revolution, to the succeeding generations of photographers, who questioned the power of photography and its relationship to political authority and who created highly personal work in the context of a greater awareness of international contemporary art.” 

The exhibition of some 100 works will be on view September 29, 2024 through August 3,  2025, in the Museum’s Nancy and Rich Kinder Building for modern and contemporary art. 

“With the acquisition of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, now boasts the most complete collection anywhere of post-Revolution Cuban photography, with an emphasis on the years since 1990: nearly 700 works by more than 80 Cuban artists,” Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, said. “We are enormously grateful to Mrs. Plonsker, who assembled the collection through the lasting relationships she forged with artists over many visits to Cuba from 2005 to 2020.”  

Prologue: The “Epic” Generation 

The exhibition begins with a brief prologue featuring works by the so-called “epic”  generation of photographers—Alberto Korda, Raul Corrales and Osvaldo Salas among  them—who used the medium to further the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, celebrating its heroes and promoting its ambitions. It opens with Korda’s iconic portrait of Che Guevara, Guerrillero Heroico (1960), the most widely reproduced and recognized of all Cuban photographs.

Gallery 1: Life in Post-Revolution Cuba 

The first gallery presents images of daily life in Cuba, primarily from the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with  photographs that reference patriotic themes: the Cuban flag, veterans, a military parade and public portraits of 19^th-century Independence hero José Martí and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. While ostensibly  honoring the new Cuba, many of the images question both the power of photography and its relationship to political authority.

An untitled 1992 photograph by José Figueroa depicts dozens of freshly made prints of Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait of Che laid out on a bed – Figueroa was Korda’s longtime printer – and suggests the ubiquity of that iconic image as both propaganda and commodity. Other photographs in this section of the exhibition depict the hardships and aspirations of rural Cubans in the post-revolutionary era as well as the day-to-day joys of life divorced from political concerns.

Photographers in this section include Pedro Abascal, Raúl Cañibano, María Cienfuegos Leiseca, José Julián Martí,  Humberto Mayol and Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui.

Gallery 2: Memory, the Body, and Identity 

The second section of the exhibition marks a pivotal shift in Cuban photography. As the nation plunged into economic, social and political crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its financial support, a time that Castro dubbed the “Special Period,” many photographers turned from documentation of the public sphere to a more personal  and poetic exploration of the private realm. Photographers treated the body, often their own, as the path through which to examine their present situation through the lens of Afro Cuban rituals, personal history, queer identity, race and gender.

This particularly rich  section features exceptional work by Juan Carlos Alom, Arien Chang Castán, José Manuel  Fors, Alejandro González, Eduardo Hernandez Santos, Cirenaica Moreira, René Peña, and  others.

Gallery 3: Myth and Reality 

In the final section of the exhibition, composed primarily of work made since 2005, photographers address the current political, social and economic situation more directly than in previous years—but slyly still, in order not to run afoul of government dictates and official arbiters of culture. This most recent generation of photographers, born well after the Revolution, came of age in the depths of the Special Period, and began their artistic careers with a greater awareness of international contemporary art.

Again, national symbols appear—the Cuban flag, currency, stamps, historic events—but this time with a knowing nod to their emptiness. The precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba and the widespread desire for emigration are common subjects.  

This gallery includes work by Adrián Fernández, Alejandro González, Glenda Léon, Liudmila & Nelson, Yasser Piña Peña, Sandra  Ramos, Esterio Segura, Lisette Solórzano, and others.