Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present
On view through October 20

Curated by Alejandro de la Fuente
Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Harvard University

A leading member of the new Afro-Cuban cultural movement, visual artist Juan Roberto Diago (b. 1971) has produced a body of work that offers a revisionist history of the Cuban nation. His history, a term that he frequently inserts in his works using the visual language of graffiti, is not the official narrative of a racially harmonious nation, built thanks to the selfless efforts of generous white patriots. Diago's Cuba is a nation built on pain, rape, greed, and the enslavement of millions of displaced Africans, a nation still grappling with the long-term effects of slavery and colonialism. To him, slavery is not the past, but a daily experience of racism and discrimination. Africa is not a root but a wellspring of cultural renovation and personal affirmation, the ancestors that sustain him in his journey. This exhibition of forty mixed-media and installation artworks, his first retrospective, outlines Diago's creative work during his entire career. It traces his singular efforts to construct new pasts, the pasts required to explain the racial tensions of contemporary Cuba, the pasts of this Afro-Cuban present.