The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami will present two complementary exhibitions on Afro-Cuban art from May 1 to Sept. 12, both guest-curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. “El Pasado Mío/My Own Past” celebrates 43 Afro-Cuban artists active from the 1820s to the present, while “Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection” presents key works of the Afrocubanista movement of the early 20th century, including pieces by Wifredo Lam.
Both exhibitions will be on view simultaneously, allowing visitors to experience the dialogue between two distinct moments in Afro-Cuban art: the formation of Afrocubanismo as a modernist movement, and the broader history of Afro-Cuban artistic practice from the colonial period to the contemporary.
Together, the exhibitions trace two centuries of Afro-Cuban artistic production and offer one of the most ambitious presentations of this body of work in a major U.S. museum. The Lowe Art Museum is the second institution to host “El Pasado Mío/My Own Past,” which was originally presented in 2022-2023 at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University, where it was curated by de la Fuente in collaboration with Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz and Cary Aileen García Yero. The Lowe exhibition in an amplified version, featuring 83 pieces in different formats as opposed to the original 55.
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