Bridging the Cuban Divide

“We’re going to be in the eye of the storm,” said Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

Maybe so, maybe not. But the museum’s next attraction, “Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island,” is certainly arriving at a moment when all things Cuban seem newsworthy.

The exhibition of 43 works by 19 artists, which opens Saturday, has been traveling across the country for the past two years, and it was booked at the Long Beach museum long before the fate of 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez became the subject of an impassioned international debate. With that controversy still going strong, the show is likely to be an attention-getter--and a mixed blessing.

Luke is delighted to have an opportunity to build the audience of the 4-year-old institution. Devoted to the work of artists who have lived and worked in Latin America since World War II, the museum is struggling to establish itself in the community, gain credibility in the art world and expand its facilities and programs. But he knows that his staff will have to fend off criticism from those who think staging any exhibition of Cuban art is tantamount to supporting Castro.

“This couldn’t be farther from an official exhibition,” Luke said, looking over plans for the installation in an office at the museum. “Presenting the show has nothing to do with politics; it’s about our mission. I think it’s very important to talk about the culture of Cuba. You can’t be a Latin American art museum today that ignores some of the best art produced in the Americas. Cuban art deserves to be seen.”

For all Luke’s passion, the Cuba show isn’t breaking completely new ground in Southern California. Several Los Angeles galleries--including Iturralde, Couturier, Track 16 and Christopher Grimes--as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art have presented the work of Cuban artists, some of whom are featured in Long Beach. But the traveling show is a landmark, billed as “the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated entirely to the work of the new generation of Cuban artists.”

“Contemporary Art From Cuba” was organized by Marilyn Zeitlan, director of the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, where the show opened in the fall of 1998. After Long Beach, the exhibition will appear at UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum (Oct. 20-Dec. 16) and at the Spencer Art Museum at the University of Kansas in Lawrence (January-March 2001).

Reached by telephone in her office, Zeitlan said she first visited Cuba in 1978 and wanted to return but didn’t do so until 1996. “I spent two weeks there and was knocked out by the work,” she said. “I was so impressed by the artists’ creativity and imagination, and the humor and the bite of their work. And they were so highly skilled. There’s this combination of intelligence and skill and something great to make the work about.” Although the artists have had to struggle to survive, their experience has provided a rich supply of subject matter, she said.

Zeitlan decided that there should be a major exhibition of the work she had seen and that she would organize it. She faced obstacles because of the strained relations between the United States and Cuba. But despite “the purported enmity,” the U.S. has a strong presence in Cuba, which often turns up in Cuban contemporary art as “an implied love-hate for everything American,” she said.

One work she selected, “Dreaming of Things American” by Osvaldo Yero, merges the two countries’ flags in a fractured image strewn with bits of American Pop art. A larger, much more poignant piece by Yero, “Sea of Tears,” will cover a 15-foot-wide gallery wall with 750 blue-glazed, cast porcelain hands of Cuban artists.

“The work in the show is very funny and very sad,” Zeitlan said. And although Americans may not know much about Cuba, most people who see the traveling show “get it,” she said.

Since rediscovering Cuba in 1996, she has traveled there about 15 times. For the exhibition, she selected a varied assortment of works that deal with the theme of survival. “For Cuba,” a wood sculpture by Fernando Rodriguez, to be stationed at the entrance of the show in Long Beach, depicts a man pulling a train of miniature trailers loaded with ordinary household items and toiletries that are unavailable in Cuba. At the end of the exhibition, another large wood sculpture, “The Prophet” by Carlos Estevez, depicts a giant male nude puppet. With strings running from nails all over its body to rafters of the museum, the figure is hopelessly ensnared and controlled by unseen forces.

Between these two imposing pieces, visitors will find paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations that take a critical view of life in Cuba and portray clashes of ideals and cultures. About the only thing missing is dispassionate abstraction.

In Esterio Seguria’s sculpture “Carnival Promenade,” for example, a Buddha and a female figure ride on an elaborately decorated armored tank that’s perched on a lace-draped pedestal. Sandra Ramos’ “Self-Recognition of the Fish 1” depicts a nude woman whose feet, hands and head are fish tanks, filled with water, miniature furniture and live fish.

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The exhibition of Cuban art amounts to a coming-out event for the museum. It has presented many exhibitions over the past four years, but this unexpectedly timely one is likely to have the largest impact to date. About 30,000 visitors are expected to see the show in Long Beach and attend related lectures and performing arts events. Many of them probably will be making their first trip to an institution that aspires to be a popular educational, artistic and entertainment center, but is probably best characterized as a work in progress.

The museum is the creation of Dr. Robert Gumbiner, a collector of Latin American art and the founder of FHP International Corp., a health maintenance organization. He launched the museum in a sprawling complex in a run-down neighborhood on Alamitos Avenue, east of downtown Long Beach. Erected in the 1920s as a silent-film studio, the building was transformed into a roller-skating rink in the 1930s.

Gumbiner--who converted his group medical practice into a nonprofit corporation in 1961 and subsequently built an HMO empire with 11 facilities--turned the building into a senior health care center and established a community art gallery there in 1985. He stepped down as FHP’s chief executive in 1990 but was chairman of the board until 1995, when he was ousted in a dispute over the direction of the company.

A week after he was unwillingly named chairman emeritus, he resigned from the FHP board and announced a plan to transform the Long Beach facility into a museum for Latin American art. The idea was to create a showplace for underexposed culture and a home for the collection he had built during 30 years of travels in Latin America.

The Robert Gumbiner Foundation, which owns the building, spent $10 million to renovate it as a museum--designed by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan--and to set up operations. The museum opened its doors in 1996, billing itself as “the only museum in the Western United States which exclusively features contemporary Latin American fine art.”

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The mission has remained constant even as the administrative staff has changed repeatedly. Patricia House was the first executive director, followed by Lee Tyson, David Woods and, finally, Luke. “It’s a big challenge to build a new Latin American museum that is growing fast and has to be well-managed and efficient,” Luke said.

Now retired, Gumbiner is still the major backer of the museum--which currently runs on a $2-million annual budget--but it also receives city, county and state funding, and Luke is struggling to make the institution self-supporting.

“We aren’t there yet,” he said. But he seems to have enough successes to sustain his dreams.

A native of Mexico, Luke started his U.S. career in diplomatic circles. He worked in Washington, D.C., during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as first secretary of the Mexican Embassy, then moved to Los Angeles, where he was Mexico’s counselor for cultural affairs. He took charge of the museum in January 1999.

“When Robert Gumbiner asked me to be director, I didn’t think twice,” he said. “I loved the energy of the place. This is a dream, not just for Mexico, but for all of Latin America.” Having attended “too many cocktail parties and accomplished too little” as a diplomat, he is working harder than ever in Long Beach but says “the challenges are good challenges.”

Calling himself “a cultural activist” who believes that “culture can build bridges and bring us together,” Luke said his goal is to create a different type of museum in Long Beach. “We see ourselves in the service industry, so to speak. We take an integrated approach to culture,” he said.

Luke hopes to feed all the senses and a variety of tastes with a multifaceted program of holiday festivals, salsa dancing, poetry readings and art history lectures by first-rate scholars. He would like to keep the museum open late in the evening and offer a seductive array of visual art, dance, music and food. “I want to cancel the idea of high and low culture; they can blend and be one in the same. I don’t think to make something popular is to debase it,” he said.

Children’s art workshops are conducted near the entrance to the museum, and their projects are related to the exhibitions, he said, pointing out programs that are already in place. The restaurant, ViVA, serves affordable Latin American cuisine, while the gift shop offers high-quality ethnic products, he said. A nearly completed 15,000-square-foot space includes a large room for performing arts events and a 200-seat auditorium for lectures and films. Additional plans call for a sculpture garden and a supplementary parking lot on adjacent grounds.

Art exhibitions are the heart of the program, however. The spacious galleries typically offer selections from the museum’s 500-piece collection, on long-term loan from the Gumbiner Foundation, along with temporary exhibitions from other sources.

The Cuban show is definitely a special attraction, but it fits easily into ongoing programs. The artists, whose ages range from about 25 to 40, have had many opportunities to exhibit their work abroad since Zeitlan organized her exhibition. Some of them have become quite well-known in contemporary art circles, but they have yet to achieve much of a presence in mainstream museums.

“There are a lot of opportunities in museums for the famous and the dead,” Luke said. “Most of our artists are alive. Many of them are well-known at home but not here.” And that adds to the museum’s challenge.

“I guarantee you that if we did a Wifredo Lam show instead of ‘Contemporary Art From Cuba,’ there would be no controversy, no problems and there would be great reviews,” he said, referring to the internationally renowned Cuban painter who was affiliated with Picasso and the Surrealists in Paris and is credited with blending his Latin American sensibility with European, African and Oceanic traditions.

“There’s no need to show Wifredo Lam. He’s made it,” Luke said. “We speak for those who have no voice, no big institution behind them.”

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“Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island,” Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach. Saturday to Sept. 10. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; Sundays, noon-6 p.m. Admission: adults, $7; students and seniors, $6; children age 12 and under, free. (562) 437-1689.