St. Augustine, as unique as it is, has a parallel universe one that is explored in "The Binding of Two Cultures," an exhibit of artwork from Baracoa, Cuba, that opens today at the St. Augustine Art Association.
The paintings and sculptures represent the work of 15 artists from Baracoa, a small town near Guantanamo Bay on the remote eastern tip of Cuba. Like St. Augustine, Baracoa was the first Spanish settlement in that part of the New World, and like St. Augustine, it has cultivated a thriving artists' community. Bringing them together was the idea of Ivan Schulman of Highland Beach, a distinguished scholar in Spanish and comparative literature who heads the education and culture committee of the St. Augustine-Baracoa Friendship Association. He currently oversees an undergraduate program he designed for American students at the University of Havana in Cuba through the Institute for Study Abroad.
"As a longtime traveler and participant in Cuban cultural events, it occurred to me that there was a relationship that should be pointed out between the two art communities," Schulman says. As the exhibit took shape, organizers sensed that the relationship represents broader cultural ties between Cuba and the United States.
"There is a relationship of similarity rather than dissimilarity," between the two countries that often gets lost in their stormy political relationship, he says. That concept will be further explored Saturday in an exhibit-related public forum, 4 p.m. at the Art Association, 22 Marine St., guided by art and history experts.
The project is co-sponsored by the Florida Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Friendship Association vice president Alberto Jones of Palm Coast, who was born 64 years ago in Cuba, is well acquainted with its turbulent political history and its love-hate relationship with the United States.
But, he says, "over 500 years of history, both communities are intertwined one way or another. Why should we shut that out because you may have a different political view? We have so much in common."
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, professor Louis Perez, author of "On Becoming Cuban," has built a scholarly career on that observation. "There are so many Cuban idiosyncracies tied to American culture," Perez says.
Perez, who will be a key speaker at the Saturday forum, says that the Cuban identity, despite the omnipresent rhetoric of Fidel Castro's Marxist regime, has persistent American elements, including shared passions for cars, baseball, even consumerism. "By and large, when Americans talk to Cubans, they discern a genuine affection that is not connected with the policies of the Cuban government," Perez says. Transcending politics to reach people is what the Friendship Association and the exhibit are all about, says Jones. He sees the exhibit as an opportunity "to open the door for people to start seeing the big picture."
The big picture is illustrated by the many small pictures and sculptures that speak on a personal, human scale. Two of the artists represented in the show, Guillermo Orlando Piedra Labanino and Roel Caboverde Llacer, will be visiting St. Augustine during the course of the exhibit, which runs through June 29, to further strengthen the cultural bond. Neither artist has traveled outside Cuba before.
"It will be exciting to see their reaction to this country," says Sali McIntire of St. Augustine, secretary of the Friendship Association. "We're hoping to do some workshops with the artists.
They have a wealth of things to share, including Santeria (a merging of native deities with Catholic saints) and Afro-Cuban influence in their art. This is essentially folk art, reflecting their very specific cultural traditions from Baracoa, which is very isolated from the rest of Cuba."
Yet the artwork is anything but naive. Caboverde depicts the friends, fishermen, sugarcane cutters and peasant women familiar to him, using a colorful, neo-cubist style that reverberates with angular motion, affection and wit. His work will be included in a major exhibit of Cuban art that will travel to art museums across the nation this fall.
Piedra is known internationally, and his work highlights the cross-cultural influences that bridge geographic and political divides. His style varies from impressionist watercolor streetscapes to expressionist "mug shots" in oils. In Piedra's gallery, an intellectual cubist exercise in architectural arrangement might hang next to a romanticized reverie of two lovers lost in lush, flowering vegetation.
Other artists in the show include painters Antonio Rojas Sanchez, Rolando Estevez Gamboa and Roland Matos Camejo, and sculptors Noel Coutin Lobaina and Andrey Guilarte Romero. Representative work and biographical information of all 15 artists can be viewed at www.staugustine-baracoa.org clicking on "Art Exchange".
"This art exhibit was originally going to include sending St. Augustine artists to Baracoa, a real cultural exchange between artists," says McIntire. "We've had to scratch that part of the project because we can't take American artists down to Cuba anymore due to American policy." Instead, the south gallery of the Art Association will be hung with the work of St. Augustine artists in a juried show that coincides with the Baracoa exhibit.
So for now the Friendship Association imports cultural emissaries from Cuba and exports humanitarian aid to Baracoa. The association has in the past collected and shipped pianos to Cuba, and helped get a Baracoa museum renovated, but now it is sponsoring self-help workshops for the blind, handicapped, elderly and high-risk-pregnancy women of Baracoa. "We're sharpening our focus on the more vulnerable populations," McIntire says.
The "Binding of Two Cultures" exhibit will help that effort, Jones says, by emphasizing "the ways people can think creatively of doing something good rather than ways to do harm. "It's amazing, when there is good will, how much people can accomplish, even if their numbers are few," he says..
