In the exhibition Selected Pages, Afro-Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta brings to fruition multidimensional universes through oil paint, watercolors, sequins, drawing, photography, video, writing, and performance. The work gathered here is situated within her vast oeuvre, created over three decades. Each piece meticulously reconstructs and unmakes hegemonic accounts of identity and history that shape individuals and communities. Born and educated in Cuba, a graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte, Rivalta subjects Cuba’s society from the colonial period to the present to her vision, as intellectual as it is playful, joyous, embittered, and cutting. Her gaze generally insists upon Cuba’s connection to other parts of the world through discovery, forced migration and labor, through world wars, international crises, nature, the arts, sports, science, and material culture. Even in her drawings of utility objects, flowers, and clothing, the power dynamics that shape perception are foregrounded. There is no denying the “virtuosity and assurance of the technique” implemented in Rivalta’s work.1
Perception is central to one of Gertrudis Rivalta’s most acclaimed series, Un paseo con Walker Evans [A Walk with Walker Evans], begun in 1995, in which the artist traverses Walker Evans’ photographs from his 1933 trip to Havana. Rivalta reoccupies the gaze of the white, male foreign photographer in order to expose the relationships between sexuality, verticality, and unevenness that are implicated within ways of seeing. In 1997, she was the only woman whose work was included in the first of the Queloides exhibitions, part of an ongoing project that focuses on racism in Cuban society. Rivalta’s expression and its circulation call attention to intersectionality and to gender, race, and class and how they align or misalign with one another. In 2021, her work formed part of Cantos de griot. Imágenes y espiritualidad afrocubanas en la Colección Luciano Méndez Sánchez, a group exhibition curated by Suset Sánchez that insisted on showcasing Black female artists’ roles in transmitting histories, knowledge, and collective memory.
From its formalistic qualities to its layered content, Rivalta’s work entails deep reflection about which the artist has remarked:
what is visible is what I use as an invitation to penetrate my final proposals... There are very recognizable, almost primary, winks and schemes at the beginning of the reading of my works, but then there are turns that are complex that require dealing with data—including historical and cultural data—specific to my country that you have to deal with in order to fully grasp the content.2
Language itself is one of the obstacles to arriving at these layers. A Spanish that is embedded in Cuban culture and history is frequently interspersed in Rivalta’s creations. One instance of this emerges in the teatrillo (puppet theater) exhibited here, entitled Renglones (Items), where revolutionary rhetoric, manifest through speech bubbles about productivity and tobacco, sugar, and coffee production plays like a broken record in the minds of the cuquitas or paper cut-out dolls. Only one life-like, Black female is so immersed in her agricultural labor that she hardly seems affected; the State and its rhetoric may be transformed, but not her monotonous and prolonged task. Rivalta also challenges any notion of naturalness that such rhetoric may attempt to impose. She does this in discrete ways. Not only is clothing attached to the bodies with tabs, but so are the very bodies of Rivalta’s figures.
Sometimes, the Russian language also makes an entrance, as in the case of “Fnimaniev,” meaning “Attention,” the title of a 2004 exhibition referencing a Soviet fable that characterized her youth. That show also featured an image of the artist’s sister in a painting entitled Quinceañera con Kremlin (Fifteenth Birthday Girl with Kremlin), in which the mixed-race model, Rivalta’s sister, sits with the Kremlin over her head like Carmen Miranda with her fruit basket headdress. The subject, however, is not smiling, but gazing up rather bitterly at the viewer. The exotic Carmen Miranda that captured the United States is transformed into a darker and more acrimonious other. This is not a celebratory hybridity, but rather a strange and uneasy imposition that draws attention to the colonial aspects of the Soviet-Cuban fraternity.
In Selected Pages, Rivalta delves into the women’s and girl’s magazines with which she grew up, in order to challenge their standardized paradigms of beauty and the aspirations they cultivated among their readers. Replacing magazines such as Vanidades that moved to Miami when Fidel Castro came into power, Mujeres, a magazine for women, launched on the island in 1961, and, in many ways, overlapped with its predecessor, shaping women according to particular ideological directives. While the appearance of, say, a woman on a tractor was a new addition of the early socialist era, balancing women’s personal growth and advising them with regard to their grooming, comportment, and fashion are hardly a revolutionary novelty.
Rivalta’s re-scaling of five of the magazine’s covers using a mixed technique consisting of sequins and oil on canvas, along with her bringing to life the magazine’s cuquitas within the teatrillos (puppet theaters), surface centuries-old legacies of national and transatlantic racial and class tensions as they are lived today by embodied Black female subjects. Often treasured by children, sequins heighten the already-existing aura of the magazines’ covers in Rivalta’s renditions; the seduction is irresistible, and yet, interpretation goes beyond that first entry point. The faces and poses of young women, along with the environment in which they are enveloped, transmit this sensation. Viewers cannot help but question who the true heroes of history are and whether the entire narrative of the victors and the vanquished is worthy of repeating. Who gets to be represented? Do they represent the actual populace? For example, the children paying homage to José Martí in Cheerleaders, in the form of one of the many busts reproduced throughout the island (so many that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1966 film The Death of a Bureaucrat already noted the excess), make competing momentums visible, challenging, through physical force, who is worthy of being seen as constitutive of the nation.
In Guajira, Rivalta calls our attention to the typecasting of Cubans forged by many nineteenth-century artists from abroad, such as the French Fredreric Miahle who, in two series of lithographs of his travels in Cuba, created precursors for Walker Evans’ visual travelog. The canvas entitled Cimarrona (run-away slave) is one that such travelers could not have envisioned. Here, it is helpful to recall critic Odette Casamayor Cisneros’s discussion of cimarronaje (marronage) in Afro-Cuban Cuban art, describing it as “an epistemological struggle from the margins of doxa, which implies the practice of fundamental processes of self-identification, relying on non-Eurocentric knowledge.”3 Rivalta’s “explosion of colors” draws viewers into a dark-skinned woman who is “sensual,” “defiant,” powerful, and liberated; Rivalta calls it the “psychedelia of liberation, the euphoria of liberation.”4 Though this image was never published on a magazine cover, Rivalta rearranges the order of things by placing an image of Aida Hernández Barrientos center stage. Hernández Barrientos was a competitive gymnast in the 1970s and actress on a Cuban television series who played the girlfriend of a young military officer who was sent to fight in the Angolan war. This backstory is important for Rivalta, as she continues to question the effect of narratives of solidarity and internationalism on actual human beings.
The scissors in Corte de pelo (Haircut) are not just cutting hair but commenting on the invisibility of transgendered subjects in the magazines of her youth. Rivalta’s cover once again inserts an image she would have liked to have seen there, demonstrating trangendered subjects to be as much a part of her everyday framework as the emblematic tablecloths and embroideries that are also surrounding the model.
The puppet theaters located in the back of the gallery house the paper cut-out dolls that coincidentally resided in the back of those very publications. Rivalta’s inclusion of the Black Cuban matryoshka attempts to compensate for what she experienced as a dearth of such expressions of hybridity, not just in the pages of Mujeres and Muchacha magazines, but throughout the material culture of her childhood. Rivalta’s Black matryoshka also references the enslaved women who, as caretakers of white children in the colony, and then later, as freed Black women, impacted Cubans’ conceptualizations of the different worldviews that encompass Cubanness. Rivalta has explained this figure of the Black matryoshka in the context of the first of a three-part puppet theater entitled Tres Tiempos, exhibited here:
There are no Black matryoshkas. In this case, the work focuses on the city of Santa Clara, Villa Clara, the central province of Cuba where the artist was born. It examines the departure of the Afro-descendant artist, at the same time that it makes a parallel with the arrival of the colonizers to Cuba in 1492. A ship can be seen in the frieze of the theater in the background. The Black matryoshkas fluttering around the light are talking about this slave ship.5
The Black female cut-outs revolving around the lights offer a phantasmagorical reminder of the extent to which the Enlightenment’s notions of civilization are interwoven in these despicable histories whose legacies have yet to be undone or fixed. Rivalta refers to the Black matryoshka as the conscience of cuquita, the happier and lighter paper cut-out doll whose face at times resembles the artist’s. So does that of the Black matryoshka, whose face is more sorrowful. How could it not be, bearing the weight of such responsibility? By introducing this character into a new rendition of history, Rivalta asks why, if assimilation between Cubans and the Soviets was in fact an aim of the revolution, the impact of Soviet paradigms on Black Cubans wasn’t accounted for in the realm of popular culture, for example.
The second of Tres Tiempos looks directly at that encounter by superimposing the magazine’s cut-out dolls with a poster featuring the Soviet avant-garde, alluding to the question of whether the unusual historical union was as rare as this imaginary juxtaposition. To what extent do the styles (fashion, artistic, and political) merge or clash with Cubans’ visions of themselves and their ability to carry out their “sovereign” dreams?
More than an in-depth examination into the visual language of publicity within Cuban socialist culture, this exhibition explores the psychological imprint it left on Rivalta’s creations wherein distinct temporalities, as well as political and economic geographies, converge. This exhibition of largely new work highlights that common thread among the different series of Rivalta’s oeuvre.