Author Description

"Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s" was published as the companion catalogue for an eponymous museum exhibition (University of Miami/Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, FL, March 17 - June 12, 2022); the first such show to focus solely on the artistic production of artists of Cuban descent active in the US in the 1980s. Featuring scholarly essays by Elizabeth Cerejido, PhD (Chair, Cuban Heritage Collection of the University of Miami Libraries); Chon Noriega (Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media, UCLA); and Gean Moreno (Director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, ICA Miami), "Radical Conventions" examines a pivotal moment in contemporary American art history. Unlike other texts examining diasporic Cuban and Cuban American Art in the 1980s, this book moves beyond the reductive lenses of exile, displacement, and bi-culturalism to frame the practices of artists such as Tony Labat, Ana Mendieta, and María Martínez-Cañas within the avant-garde's broader aesthetic and discursive tenets. Working in various cities throughout the U.S., the artists featured in this publication did not intentionally seek to be radical; in fact, they largely worked within the conventions of contemporary artistic production. Their radicality instead resided in the contextual factors and historical circumstances that defined their lives and informed their work: HIV/AIDS, identity politics, postmodernism, and Reagan-era conservatism. Many of the issues addressed in their works are both steeped in the past and intensely relevant today. In addition to substantive essays, "Radical Conventions" features full-color reproductions of all works featured in the related exhibition.