Cuba's National Visual Arts Council recently announced in Havana its 2013 National Curatorship Awards, in the categories of Solo and Group exhibition.
In the Solo Exhibition category, the award went to José M. Noceda Fernández for the exhibition Wifredo Lam. Entre la pintura y el grabado, presented between December, 2012 and January, 2013 at the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of Lam's birth, featuring 82 works in painting, drawing, collage, and prints from different period in the Cuban artist's long career; 78 of them came from Havana's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes' extraordinary collection.
The Group Exhibition award went to Nelson Herrera Ysla for Señales de vida: arquitectura and diseño cubanos contemporaneos, with the participation of several Cuban architects and collectives, as well as industrial designers whose work challenge the country's economic conditions in search of solution of a high aesthetic and functional level. This show was also part of the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center's temporary program (March-April), and it offered a broad sampling of the vitality of these disciplines in Cuba through specific creations and, above all, projects.
Both curators are part of the Havana Biennial's team and have carried out intensive professional activities both in Cuba and abroad, among them important group exhibitions in Honduras, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain, as well as the general curatorship for the 16th Paiz Biennial in Guatemala in 2008 (Herrera Ysla) and the 10th Cuenca Biennial in 2011 (Noceda Fernández). They also write for a number of specialist periodicals in Cuba, Latin America, and the Caribbean region.