On a steamy Tampa morning in April, artist Cesar Cornejo and his assistant worked feverishly to finish a sculpture outside his studio at the University of South Florida. Strips of plywood had been molded into crescent shapes reminiscent of curving boats, and left to dry in the sun. Bands of aluminum would form a skin on top, creating a glimmering façade. In just a few days, they would pack up the piece and ship it to Havana for the Cuba's international art biennial.
By May 22nd, the official opening of the 12th Bienal de la Habana, it seemed hardly to matter that Cornejo had met his deadline. The crate bearing his sculpture, in the way of much Cuba-bound cargo, languished for a week in customs in Kingston, Jamaica, then another two on arrival in Havana. Finally, on the day before the opening of the Bienal, the sculpture appeared at its destination, a modest but distinctive private home in the peaceful neighborhood of Casablanca. There, Cornejo and a team of Cuban installers hastened to mount it to the top of the house, where it took on the function of destination architecture signaling what was inside: a temporary museum of contemporary art.
“I was able to apply a concept that I had been thinking of for a long time,” Cornejo wrote via email earlier this week. “And the biennial was the ideal venue to do it.”
As renewed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba became imminent this spring, Havana’s Bienal — which also celebrated its 30th anniversary this year — was a hotter ticket for American visitors, and an affair more intertwined with U.S. artists and institutions, than ever before. Cornejo, who is from Peru but landed at USF in Tampa as an art professor after completing his Ph.D in Japan, was one of a handful of U.S.-born or -based artists to score spots on the official biennial roster.
Like the Venice Biennale or Art Basel Miami Beach, Havana’s biennial encompasses a passel of collateral exhibitions and un-official spin-offs, from house parties to gallery shows, in addition to projects by just over 100 invited artists; splashy American presences included a Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibition at Havana’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the world premiere of an opera, Cubanacán, co-authored by an American librettist and a Cuban composer.
For a first-time visitor to Havana like me, there was more to see than could be taken in during a sweltering week in late May.
This year’s Bienal, unified by the poetic theme “between ideas and experience,” highlighted interactive, site-specific experiences and community-based interventions like Cornejo’s, in unexpected locations throughout the city, over gallery-bound objects — though plenty of the latter were also on view. (To see a museum display of Cornejo’s work, head to the Orlando Museum of Art, where documentation of his Havana project is included in the Florida Prize exhibition until September.)
Despite a move toward including more international and well-known artists, such as Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren and Michelangelo Pistoletto, the Bienal continued to emphasize, as it has from its founding in 1985, art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Naturally, given Cuba’s communist values, many offerings took place in public spaces, from impromptu street performances to a stellar presentation of public art along Havana’s famous waterfront promenade, el Malecón, where a sculpture of an enormous Facebook thumbs-up presided.
Cornejo’s project hewed close to the Bienal’s populist spirit. During preparations for his project in January, he met with a Cuban family named Chinique, recruited by Bienal organizers, about making their multi-generational home the site of his installation, which would ultimately serve as an exhibition space — a mini “museum” — for two other professional artists as well as a display of drawings by neighborhood children. When Cornejo learned that the Chinique family’s history included operating ferries to shuttle passengers across the canal between Old Havana and Casablanca — when Cuba’s revolutionary government took over, their boats were seized and nationalized — he began to envision the sculptural façade.
To art world cognoscenti, the three curving metal forms mounted above the home evoke a humble Havana version of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. The reference is part of the wry humor and subtle critique of Cornejo’s art — by luring well-to-do and highly educated consumers of contemporary art into everyday homes, he invites such people to consider the intellectual and economic elitism of art’s most powerful institutions. Once visitors arrive, a placard explains the relationship between the sculpture and the family’s personal history — i.e., that the shapes not only invoke Gehry, on purpose, but also allude to the family’s maritime story — and how part of Cornejo’s work as an artist is to orchestrate refurbishments to their home in the name of art.
If art world folks think that’s cool, great, but Cornejo gets his biggest kick out of seeing the neighborhood’s pride at having a visible art project crop up where no others exist. That enthusiasm was on full display when I stopped by with friends, as a gaggle of Cubans departed and a family member welcomed us warmly.
“I am always impressed by how people from communities with almost no exposure to contemporary art understand and embrace projects like this one with great ease,” Cornejo says.
He offers a reminder, echoed by the Havana Bienal at large, that art is at its best when it touches a city.
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2015.