Hermann has been the curator of numerous exhibitions; we particularly remember Suite Quisqueya, New Dominican Painting (co-curator, Paula Gómez), Fernando Peña Defilló: El eterno retorno (co-curator, Karenia Guillarón), Los códigos visuales del merengue, Cuerpo del delito (with Paula Gómez), Dimensiones heroicas: El arte de los años 60 en la República Dominicana (with Paula Gómez). In addition, she extends her centers of interest towards Central America and Latin America. She has given conferences and has published articles on artists of the island, as well as in the magazines ArtNews, Longwood Arts Journal, and the newspaper El Caribe. Her point of view on the relations between the two communities inhabiting the island seems to be very revealing. In the catalogue of Geografías (in)visibles, Centro León (2008), she wrote: “in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, it is fit to introduce the topic of this territory and its artists as one of the communicating vessels in which a situation of dialogue, sometimes inadvertent (or intentionally unnoticed) is produced.”12 Thus, in the sphere of visual arts, the cultural relations between the two island neighbors seem exemplary in a society where the Haitian immigration engenders reactions of rejection. This corroborates the possibility for the art of both countries to erect as guarantors of the spirit of tolerance. On the other hand, it should be stressed that the crossing of experiences on the occasion of the Biennale has constituted an opening and has proved rewarding, compensating in this way isolation. The artists became aware of their region, of an art that is built on a common, if not similar story, about the collective memory about the hybridism unceasingly set forth, on a commitment not to face a specific political ideology, but that translates a resistance to everything that may go against free will and the realization of man. This is linguistically expressed by a series of breaks and new formal, structural and conceptual propositions.
Formal and conceptual relationships Sacha Tebo serves as a model for the relationship between the art worlds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Critics praise the Caribbean character of his work, without ever justifying truly where it resides. Edward Sullivan points 12 Sara Hermann: “Territorios mentales. Apuntes sobre el arte contemporáneo desde Haití y República Dominicana”, en Geografías (in)visibles; Arte contemporáneo latinoamericano en la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Santiago de los Caballeros, Ediciones Centro León, Fundación Cisneros, 2008, p. 27-28.
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out his “hermetic mysticism;” Fernando Ureña Rib is quite vague about “something mystical, something of an ancient mosaic, something modern is interwoven in the work of Sacha Tebo;” while Amable López Meléndez alleges that «he elaborates on our ontological devastations or on identity issues.” I don’t think I’m up for the challenge of decoding his Caribbean essence by referring only to two aspects, but these can contribute to do so: the first is the visceral bond that his island exerts: born in 1934 in Port-au-Prince, he remains in it until 1945, years that leave an indelible stamp. Subsequently he has constant comings and goings, be it Miami, Mexico or Santa Cruz, and intervenes in Caribbean art-related events, either in the First International Painting Biennale in Cuenca (1987, Ecuador); the Third Painting Biennale of the Caribbean and Central America (Santo Domingo, 1996); Dominican and Haitian Parralel Art in a Caribbean Territory (with Myrna Guerrero in 1998); in the Museum of the Americas, Puerto Rico, 1999, Between lines; in Cariforo, 2001, Intercaribbean; or the Sixth Caribbean Biennale (Santo Domingo, 2003). None of this excludes his training abroad (Canada, Paris, Brazil), which grants him openness and allows him, if necessary, to reflect on his identity. The second component of his identity is the ability to pass from a lively and harmonious color palette, from the sweetness of the beeswax in his canvases, to rough, sharp materials as jute fabrics, cut iron, and wood. The symbols of slavery and inhuman conditions are expressed through the metonymies of the amputated hands, sacks of sugar, pieces of masts, yokes, an assembly that takes the form of a slave ship in Sugar (2003). That same year, Cuban artist Carlos René Aguilera –who participated in the Biennales in Havana and Santo Domingo–, carried out a series of pictures about many facets of the sugar cane process. In La ola, bright green fields on which surf the guajiros –farmers in Cuba–, wink to the always compelling work of the shank, where labor has no distractions, such as surfing in pursuit of tourists. Recently, an American artist, Kara Walker, produced an immense sculpture made of sugar, whose entire title clarifies the work: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a tribute to unpaid and burdened workers who have refined our sweet taste from the cane fields to the kitchens of the new world on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Factory, in Brooklyn. Obviously, the differences are multiplied, readings differ
according to the degree of metaphor developed in each work, some more poetic (Sacha Tebo), other recreational (Carlos René Aguilera), or even more emphatic, if we think of K. Walker’s sculpture, which weighed more than four tons and was more than eleven meters high. Plantation economies, consciously or unconsciously, have formed the imagery of the region and its intellectuals. For example, we can not separate the symbolic content in a banana, an eminently colonial product. It has been the subject of a very particular interest since the 19th century. In the case of the Puerto Ricans, Francisco Oller introduced bananas in his still-life paintings in 1869 (Bodegón con guineos, jarra y pajuiles); or Ramon Frade, who claimed his Puerto Rican identity in El pan nuestro (1905), practicing an ellipsis through this religious reference. Bananas equally accompany the every day of Negros de Limón (1936), from Costa Rican artist Manuel de la Cruz González. Their representations arise between islands or coastal strips and then function as element of identity without special claim. Later, Inés Tolentino, José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombian), Jean François Boclé (Martinique) and Miguel Luciano (Puerto Rican) take over bananas as detonators of memory against many stigmas. Ines Tolentino does not intend to resort to the fictional memory developed by García Márquez, in Vivir para contarla; or to question the official story through the massacre of banana workers in Colombia, that Restrepo addressed in Musa paradisiaca, from 1993; neither refers to the work of Jean François Boclé Boat (2004) or Banana Project Episode I (2007); not even to Banana Boy Project (2000), by Yasser Musa. Those “or” do not mean that there is no kinship between them; but that these take different routes and they emerge in different times and places. Ines inserted the symbolic fruit in Cada quien su camino (2007), work that boasts a great delicacy in the way of tackling sensitive subjects; this contributes to the quality of the drawing. Here is the association which gives meaning, all in nuances: scattered bananas, wagons, a portrait of the dictator, erotic female legs, a dog, the passing of the days of confinement, attend a fragmentary view of the history of the Dominican Republic. Marcos Lora Read had approached this fragmentary view of history through Cinco car-rozas para la historia (1991), exhibited at the 4th Havana Biennale. Very dense from the aesthetic point of view, this installation threw light, in the proper sense and figuratively, on the exploitation of man
and slave trafficking, mentioning even the name of the first slaves. If we refer to history, the European diachronic approach does not match this discontinuous, non-linear, between the continent and the islands. In the first place because the latter was built, reported and transmitted by the Dominator. In addition, each country met fringes of history and different burdens, depending on the colonizer –Spanish, English, French, Dutch, or North American– and their respective independence movements, whose dates escalate from 1804 to 2010, that is, by more than two hundred years. When Edouard Glissant used the beautiful metaphor of “jumping from rock to rock,” he stressed the need to meet panels of history separated by gaps, establishing absent ties, temporary or cultural, to revisit the silenced. This is a constant of the arts of the Caribbean, and certainly that is the reason why we can speak of a Caribbean constant. Radhamés Mejía fragments his canvases, weaving their backgrounds with thousands of signs, his language is polysemic. Making reference to the spatial fragmentation which has awakened away physically from the Caribbean, and as a consequence of their historical fragmentation, as well as of the graphical partitioning present in art since ancient times –Egyptian art – up to our days, passing through the codes of the BD and the new figuration. Similarly, he inserts symbols of Taíno culture, reminiscent of religious rites, as possessed by several worlds that are balanced, not demonstrating any difference between the rites of Voodoo and Santería (Canto del hechicero, 1994 and Fases rituales, 2001). María Aybar is also at the confluence between Voodoo and Santería, and creates a magico-religious space that exceeds the internal border. Its legacy has been passed down through a displacement of anecdotes: El nacimiento del gagá (Paul Giudicelli, 1960), El sacrificio del chivo (Eligio Pichardo, 1958), the recognition of syncretism, as indicated by Marta Pérez’s Virgen negra (1987) or Jorge Severino’s Santa Marta la Dominadora (1977). This claim of identity, in fact dictated by a vital necessity, considered less this component as a source of wealth than as a factor in marginalization (Carlos Sangiovanni, Religion, rituals and marginality, 1983). Mejía and Aybar, are close, in a way, to the work of Cuban artist José Bedia, who resorts to Mexican pre-Columbian and African sources –originating cultures, it is said, a very inaccurate statement as the cultures brought by the African
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