Installation view of Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection, 2023, Phoenix Art Museum.
We’re pleased a lithograph by Luis Cruz Azaceta is included in Lo que es, es lo que ha sido/What It Is, Is What Has Been: Selections from the ASU Art Museum’s Cuban Art Collection at the Phoenix Art Museum.
The exhibition highlights the contemporary Cuban collection from ASU Art Museum to provide a deeper context to PhxArt's simultaneous presentation of the retrospective Juan Francisco Elso: Por América. The exhibition is concerned with artistic expression during times of humanitarian crisis and social upheaval, and features ASU Art Museum’s most iconic artworks created during the period immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, a time then-president Fidel Castro termed Cuba’s Special Period in a Time of Peace. Due to severe food and material shortages, thousands of Cubans fled in 1993-1994, the height of the crisis, on makeshift rafts in attempts to reach the United States. Azaceta immigrated from Cuba to the United States in 1960, and The Scream is a self-portrait that expresses the discomfort of displacement
The exhibition will be on view through September 17, 2023.