342 Chapter 13
about race served to discourage further collective efforts by artists
interested in building an Afro-Cuban cultural and racial movement.
Despite this setback, members of collectives such as Grupo Antillano
and others continued to explore these themes in their individual work.
A number of black Cuban artists who began to exhibit their work in
the mid 1980s and early 1990s explored Afro-Cuban themes including
religion, cultural heritage and race in varying degrees, among other
topics, in their individual art works. Among these were Belkis Ayón (b.
1967, d. 1999), María Magdalena Campos Pons (b. 1959), Manuel Piña
(b. 1958) and René Peña (b. 1957). Ayón and Campos Pons attended
the Instituto Superior de Arte in the 1980s while Piña and Peña began
their art careers in the beginning of the 1990s after careers in other
fields, engineering and English language respectively. While each of
these artists’ work addressed Afro-Cuban topics in varying degrees,
their output is not considered part of a distinct movement.
By the late 1990s, with a younger generation of artists coming to
the forefront, the parallel but mostly separate trajectories of the art
school collectives and the Afro-Cuban groups started to blend. Vari-
ous 1990s collectives addressed issues such as sexuality and gender in
various forms, and criticized the government for problems such as
lack of adequate housing and economic opportunity, attempting to
intervene in some of these problems within the limited means avail-
able to them.
Projects explicitly dealing with race, such as Queloides, began to
carve out space in official art venues. Two group exhibitions took
place in 1997, first Queloides, curated by critic Omar Pascual Castillo
and artist Alexis Esquivel, and later that year, Ni Músicos, Ni Deportistas,
curated by Ariel Ribeaux. A second Queloides exhibition took place in
- The first Queloides exhibition was held at Casa de Africa and pre-
sented in an anthropological context (part of a conference on Afro-
Cuba), placing the discussion of race within the more acceptable
framework of ethnological and historical research rather than as part
of contemporary social relations.^4 However the second and third exhi-
bitions were presented in art venues, with Ni Músicos presented at the