Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba

With its current stay at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the exhibition Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba reached its sixth edition, including those presented in the United States and Cuba. Before Philadelphia, Drapetomanía… has toured in Santiago de Cuba, Havana, New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge (Massachusetts), and in the near future it will travel to the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. It is the contemporary Cuban Art exhibition most widely seen in the United States in the last four years. The exhibition pays tribute to Grupo Antillano (1978-1983), a collective that reclaimed the Afro-Caribbean tradition as a foundational element in the genesis and formation of Cuban cultural and social identity. Curated by historian and professor Alejandro de La Fuente, the show is organized in two sections. The first considers works of artists who were members of the group, such as Esteban Ayala, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, Manuel Couceiro, Herminio Escalona, Ever Fonseca, Ramón Haití, Adelaida Herrera, Arnaldo Larrinaga, Oscar Rodríguez Lasseria, Alberto Lescay, Manuel Mendive, Leonel Morales, Clara Morera, Miguel Ocejo, Rafael Queneditt, and Julia Valdés. The second section features works of more recent vintage that, in their different ways, connect with the poetic and discursive concerns that engaged Grupo Antillano. The artists in this section are Belkis Ayón, José Bedia, Choco, Juan Roberto Diago, Alexis Esquivel, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Andrés Montalván Cuellar, Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal, Douglas Pérez Castro, René Peña, Elio Rodríguez Valdés, and Leandro Soto. Drapetomanía… features a wide variety of formats, like painting, sculpture, installation, photograph, and video art. These formats, in turn, express a variety of poetics and styles, such as neo-figurative painting, abstraction, conceptual art, minimalism, and Pop. The proliferation of expressive formats and aesthetics gives the show a special museographic richness, in order to narrate a curatorial discourse marked by the critical recovery of an art event (Grupo Antillano) that has been under a dense layer of oblivion in the historiography of post-revolutionary Cuban art. The exhibition responds, to a degree, to the conceptual complexity of its material, which connects statements that are not only artistic, but also ethnic-racial, anthropological, and, of course, historical and socio-cultural. In that sense, it is important to explain the significance of the term drapetomania, included in the show's title. From the Greek drapetes (to flee or escape) and mania (mental illness), drapetomania refers to an "illness" described in the mid-Nineteenth Century by a doctor active in slave plantations in Louisiana. Its main symptom was an "irrepressible and pathological" desire to escape and be free. Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba posits, through the work of several generations of contemporary Cuban artists, the pertinence of reflecting about the past, present, and future of Cuban culture, art, and society with their Afro-Caribbean legacy as a foundational referent. In any case, as the curator says, Drapetomanía supports the central thesis launched by Grupo Antillano, according to which it is impossible to conceive Cuba outside of its Afro-Caribbean and Antillean space."