Cuban Art News interviews Rachel Weiss

Rachel Weiss is a professor of arts administration and policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who has been traveling to Cuba, and writing about Cuban art, since 1986. Her book, To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art, was published earlier this year by the University of Minnesota Press. Cuban Art News recently spoke with Weiss about the book, and about contemporary Cuban art in general.

Tell us a little about yourself. How did you come to be interested in Cuban art? And how did you decide to write the book?

For me, this line of research started in 1985, when I saw a slide show that Gerardo Mosquera gave about work that was being done in Havana. It was the force of the work that really got my attention, and we began a dialogue that has continued for a very long time. I had done a number of projects—an exhibition, an exchange program, things like that—in the second half of the 1980s, some of them in collaboration with Gerardo, and I was following the situation pretty closely. As I’m sure you know, things began to change pretty drastically in the last years of that decade. It began to be a very different situation, both in terms of what the possibilities were for artists and what it meant to engage from outside. There was such a shift in terms of the address of the work, in terms of national versus a market audience.

Published in: Cuban Art News


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