Grettel Arrate es graduada en pintura y dibujo de la Academia Provincial de Artes Plásticas José Joaquín Tejada de Santiago de Cuba, en 1983 y licenciada en Historia del Arte, en 1990, en la Universidad de Oriente. Ha realizado más de 14 exposiciones personales en importantes museos y galerías de Cuba y el extranjero y más de 35 proyectos de pintura murales, entre los que se destacan los realizados a partir del Encuentro Internacional de Pintura Mural INTER-NOS. También formó parte del equipo de realización de la monumental Plaza de la Revolución Antonio Maceo de Santiago de Cuba. Desde 1992 hasta la fecha se desempeña como directora del Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, desde donde ha curado, organizado y coordinado más de 600 exposiciones de artistas cubanos y extranjeros. Conjuntamente, se desempeñó como vicepresidenta del Consejo Provincial de las Artes Plásticas en Santiago de Cuba desde 1994 hasta 1996. Fue vicepresidenta de la Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) entre 2005 y 2010, y desde esa fecha hasta 2014 ocupó el cargo de presidenta de esa Asociación. En el 2017 volvió a ocupar esa función hasta 2019, cuando fue elegida vicepresidenta del Comité Provincial. Sus obras se encuentran en colecciones privadas en Francia, Inglaterra, Alemania, Estados Unidos, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Martinica, Guadalupe, Jamaica, Luxemburgo, España, Austria, China, Colombia, Haití, Dinamarca y otros países.

José Bedia is an internationally acclaimed Cuban painter hose art is inspired by many sacred sources, including initiation into the Brillumba lineage of the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte. Bedia’s work often critiques colonial histories by combining myths, symbols, and ritual elements with references to nature and global warfare. His time in Angola as part of the cultural brigades that supported the Angolan-Cuban War against Namibia and South Africa (1985) amplified his quest for the African and indigenous roots of American cultures. He has conducted extensive research in Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Laos.

María Magdalena Campos Pons nació en 1959 en la provincia de Matanzas, en el pueblo de La Vega, Cuba. Ella creció en una plantación de azúcar en una familia con raíces nigerianas, hispanas y chinas. Sus antepasados nigerianos fueron traídos a Cuba como esclavos en el siglo XIX y transmitieron tradiciones, rituales y creencias. Su herencia políglota influye profundamente en la práctica artística de Campos Pons, que combina diversos medios, incluyendo fotografía, performance, pintura, escultura, cine y video. Su trabajo es autobiográfico, investigando temas de historia, memoria, género y religión y cómo informan la identidad. A través de imágenes profundamente poéticas e inquietantes, Campos-Pons evoca historias de la trata transatlántica de esclavos, el añil y las plantaciones de azúcar, las prácticas religiosas católicas y de la santería y los levantamientos revolucionarios.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Édouard Duval Carrié was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris, France; and at the University of Loyola Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Duval Carrié’s art belongs to many prominent museum and private collections globally, including the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa, USA); Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida, USA); Musee des Arts Africains et Océaniens (Paris, France); Musée du Pantheon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. In his work, Duval Carrié portrays a “Marvelous Reality,” as defined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in the prologue for his book, The Kingdom of this World, a story about Haiti that strongly influenced the artist. As a result, Duval Carrié enfolds into his art the fantastic world of his country—by rendering its illustrious myths and legends—in ways that clearly critique the prevailing social and political order within Haitian society. Duval Carrié’s art also features important aspects of Haitian history, including revolutionary heroes and other relevant figures. He references them to comment on the vital impact of Haitian history on contemporary society, including the legacy of slavery and independence and its weighted imprint on the country’s
development up to the present. Duval Carrié and his art also emphasize the neurological effects of immigration, exile,
and displacement on daily Haitian life, at home and abroad.
Duval Carrié has long been interested in connections between Haiti and the Spanish Caribbean, and José Antonio Aponte is key for understanding the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba. Duval Carrié was also drawn to other aspects of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” from his depiction of the biblical story of creation, to the representation of goddesses such as Minerva to the presence of Prester John and Ethiopia. The four paintings here, which respond to two of Aponte’s láminas, convey a sense of how Aponte condensed in his book not only his own history, but that of the whole of the Black Atlantic--a feat in itself and a unique enterprise but unfortunately lost to us.

Alexis Esquivel ha desarrollado su obra fundamentalmente a través de la pintura, abordando de manera crítica diferentes perspectivas de la representación histórica, la problemática racial, la sociedad, la cultura y la política en Cuba. Fue uno de los impulsores de exposiciones pioneras sobre la raza y el racismo en la isla a finales de los noventas, tales como Queloides I Parte, Queloides, y Ni músicos ni deportistas. Sus obras han sido expuestas en numerosas muestras colectivas dentro y fuera de Cuba. Entre las más recientes se encuentran La posibilidad infinita, en el marco de la XIII Bienal de La Habana, The Lotus in the Spite of the Swamp, Prospect 4, Trienal de New Orleans, Kunst x Kuba, en el Ludwing Forum, Without Masks, On Painting, Queloides, Raza y racismo en el arte cubano contemporáneo, y Drapetomania. Dentro de sus muestras personales más destacadas se encuentra “Memorial Garden”, exhibida en el Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno de las Palmas de Gran Canarias, CAAM, 2014, y en el Domus Artium 2002, DA2, de Salamanca, 2015. Obras suyas forman parte de la colección del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, y de la colección de arte contemporáneo cubano del Museo Jorge Pérez de Miami, así como también de la Colección del Afro-Latin American Research Institute de la Universidad de Harvard y del Smith College Museum of Art. Colecciones privadas como la Fundación Rubín, la Von Christierson, la Howard & Patrica Farber, la Ofelia Martín y Javier Núñez entre otras, incluyen también sus obras. Ha obtenido numerosas becas y residencias entre las que destacan, la Beca de Creación para Jóvenes Artistas Iberoamericanos de la Fundación Carolina (Madrid, 2002), la residencia de creación en el Mattress Factory Museum (Pittsburgh, 2010), y la Residencia artística en la Brownstone Foundation (París, 2011). Es licenciado en Educación Plástica del Instituto Superior Pedagógico Enrique José Varona (1991). Trabajó como profesor de la Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (2000-2002) y como profesor invitado en la Universidad de Tufts (2000-2001).

Joëlle Ferly es guadalupeña y artista. Obtuvo un diploma de máster en Imagen Fotográfica de la Universidad de Paris 8 y luego un máster en Bellas Artes de Saint Martins School of Art en Londres. Se formó en fotografía antes de dedicarse al arte contemporáneo. No privilegia ningún medio, sino que aprovecha el aspecto transdisciplinario del arte en diferentes proyectos: fotografía, videoarte, presentaciones y, más recientemente, la escritura y la restitución sonora. Los temas subyacentes de su práctica son el absurdo, su condición de artista en un “país dominado” y las injusticias sociales a las que la artista intenta proponer respuestas estéticas e incluso poéticas. La obra de Ferly ha sido expuesta en galerías y museos en Europa, África, Centroamérica, Estados Unidos y el Caribe. Entre ellas destacan las Bienales de La Habana, Venezuela y Aruba, el Pérez Art Museum y el Little Haiti Cultural Center en Miami, el Festival de Artes Negros en Dakar, Senegal, el Centro de Arte la Regenta (Las Palmas, Gran Canaria), el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), la Fundación Clément en Martinica y el VI Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain en Port-au-Prince, Haití. En 2009 fundó L’Autocarpe, un colectivo de artistas que promueve el arte contemporáneo en Guadalupe.

Teresita Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Fernández’s experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular illusions that evoke natural phenomena and engage audiences in immersive art experiences and conceptual way-finding. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of
American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. Fernández received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For Visionary Aponte, Fernández reflected on Aponte’s understanding of the cosmos as a space of both personal and political reprieve, a space inherently democratic because it could not be colonized. The piece, in pyrite, oil, graphite, and gold, also evokes West African alchemy traditions, with which Aponte and his co-conspirators may have been familiar.

"I'm a sculptor and painter. I was born on the last day of Scorpio, mid-twentieth century, at the top of the Martens hill, close to Santiago de Cuba. My mother: spiritualist, embroiderer, tailor, maraca player, party-goer, faithful wife, good friend, and best of all, mother. Daughter of mambo, who had kidnapped my grandmother, from the dark mountains of Baracoa. My father: tresero, chauffeur, dancer and incessant lovebird. Childhood and adolescence went by in the country and the city. Whenever I could, I chose the country. Perhaps because, despite the pastoral, there I possessed a workshop full of strange equipment- invented by my uncle to fulfill all the things the town needed- such as beautiful furniture, a sewing machine, a toy, even a coffin. At night we talked about the news of the world, of the world below, and more frequently of paradise, where the good ones would go to. In the city all was alien to me, except my mothers somersaults, among the incense, to ward off evil spiritual influences from me. When I took the aptitude test for art school, it was because I want to be a scholar like all of my contemporaries, since 'student' was the password during the Cuban revolution. The persistent memory of encountering the bronze monument to the Unknown Mambi, on the hill of San Juan where I played hide and seek, makes me suspect that it was during that childhood moment that the artist path opened up for me."

Tessa Mars nació en Port-au-Prince, Haití, en 1985, y allí continúa viviendo y trabajando. Completó una licenciatura en Artes Visuales en Francia, en la Universidad Rennes 2 en 2006. Su obra artística se ocupa de la identidad y de los procesos a partir de los cuales nos construimos como individuos, colectivos y grupos. Mirando la identidad desde la perspectiva de género, la historia y la cultura, Mars cuestiona las nociones de pertenencia, sacrificio, transformación y resistencia. Sus proyectos más recientes se centran en el tema del autoestudio. A través de la figura de Tessalines, un híbrido femenino de Jean-Jacques Dessalines, líder de la Revolución haitiana, Mars busca reintroducir a las mujeres en la narrativa histórica y a la vez tomar control de su propia historia. Conectando pasado y presente, las piezas reimaginan narrativas traumáticas – antiguas y nuevas, colectivas y personales- como forma de empoderamiento y sanación. Mediante la representación de su cuerpo, Mars reflexiona sobre el autoexamen, la transformación y la narración como estrategias de supervivencia.

Emilio Martínez es un artista estadounidense nacido en Honduras que adoptó la pintura como su medio de expresión. Nació en Tegucigalpa en 1981. Emigró con su familia a Miami en 1994, donde reside desde entonces. Su obra cobra vida a través de su persistencia en un mundo onírico, creado mediante los sueños repetitivos de sus recuerdos de infancia. Está en contacto continuo con el mundo espiritual mediante íconos, símbolos y textos de un remoto pasado desconocido de antepasados indígenas. Su obra se explica a través de un rompecabezas bicultural que él mismo decodifica. Utiliza diariamente un cuaderno de bocetos donde anota sus obsesiones, pasiones y temores.
La obra de Martínez ha sido expuesta en la University of Syracuse, el Purvis Young Museum of Art (Miami), Little Haiti Cultural Center (Miami) y el Instituto Cultural de México (Miami) entre otros lugares.
La pieza de Martínez para Aponte visionario trabaja la figura de Nerpomene –la “diosa de las batallas”, en palabras de Aponte– quien aparece en la lámina 60 del Libro de pinturas. Martínez representa a Nerpomene como una criatura semejante a una bestia, como una figura-torbellino compuesta de muchos espíritus que la rodean y que han respondido a su llamado de guerra total contra un gobierno injusto. Esta pieza procura remontarse a la historia silenciada para exaltar a un heroico visionario, al tiempo que invita a otros a valorar la perspectiva y el legado de Aponte.

Emilio Adán Martínez, pintor y escultor, nació en Cienfuegos, Cuba, en 1954. En 1961, emigró a Miami, Florida, donde continúa viviendo y trabajando. Aunque Martínez nació en Cuba, su origen étnico incluye ascendencia africana, asiática e indígena. Estas culturas sirven como fuentes primarias de inspiración. Martínez, se esfuerza por comprender el núcleo, el corazón, de las formas naturales, y comunicarlo a través de su obra de arte. Su trabajo anterior, utilizando papel, cuerdas y ramas de pino, se refiere al concepto de viaje, a través de la vida, el espacio y la dimensión, y al paso fugaz del tiempo. Dos ejemplos de este trabajo, Andan Volando (2009) y Ando Volando (2017-18), se instalaron en el Aeropuerto Internacional de Miami, en las terminales Norte y Central, Concourse D y Concourse E, respectivamente. Más recientemente, Martínez ha construido complejas piezas de madera recuperada y metal. Estas piezas, cuando se ven juntas como una instalación, nos recuerdan un futuro deconstruido y, a veces, autodestructivo. Martínez obtuvo su BFA de la Universidad Internacional de Florida. Su trabajo se puede encontrar en colecciones públicas y privadas en los Estados Unidos, América Latina y Europa.
La descripción de Aponte de las láminas 24-25 del Libro de pinturas inspiró a Martínez a trabajar con una gran pieza de roble. A lo largo de la historia, el roble es símbolo de gran fortaleza, sabiduría, resistencia y nobleza, todas cualidades que Aponte representa. En su investigación, Martínez descubrió que los primeros exploradores españoles estaban tan enamorados de los bosques naturales de Cuba, que llevaron de regreso con ellos varias especies. Otro elemento de la pieza, el acero soldado cruzado, simboliza el aprisionamiento de todos los hombres de color, y el dolor y el sufrimiento de los esclavos, infligido a menudo con cadenas y grilletes. La forma de la pieza, de cuerpo redondo, con una cavidad y barras de acero, se refiere al fin espantoso que Aponte sufrió. La fina arena negra en la cavidad representa las profundidades del infierno viviente al que fue sometido el hombre negro e invoca la industria azucarera en Cuba, el catalizador del comercio de esclavos en la isla.

Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL; RACING MY GIRL, SALLY; ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer; GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR; and MOTHER WIT & WATER BORN, a trilogy, including BETWEEN WHISPERED BLOOD-LINES. Her work has been shared at the former Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Capital Fringe Festival, Washington, DC); Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick (New Jersey); and in New York at Wings Theatre, Brecht Forum, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, The Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement, Dumbo Sky and The Little Carib Theatre. Mercer’s writing is published in: The Killens Review
of Arts & Letters, Black Renaissance Noire, Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition and Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance. She has performed in collaboration with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Angela’s Pulse, Abigail DeVille and Charlotte Brathwaite, BWA for BLM and others. Mercer is a co-founder and co-director of Ocean Ana Rising: www. oarinc.org. She is currently a doctoral fellow of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a MFA from American University. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College. Find updates on Mercer’s work at http://windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com.
Mercer’s “Invocation for José Antonio Aponte” calls on the energy that emboldened Aponte to channel The Word into a transnational, visual manifesto of liberation for black Cubans. But Mercer also calls out to ancestral multitudes at the diaspora’s threshold and birthing space--the ocean, Yemonja, Mami Wata, Our Lady Regla--transcending time and perceived national boundaries. We are here now, and before before; we are future, and the living embodiment of sacred cosmologies always returning to push us forward.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín and grew up in Havana. He received a degree from the National School of Arts (1984). While Novoa has lived in Miami since 1995, he maintains a studio in Vedado (Havana) and works on site specific murals and ephemeral projects globally. Since 1987, Novoa has had solo exhibitions at the Cheekwood Museum, (Nashville); in Miami at the Lowe Museum of Art (University of Miami), Locust Project and the former Miami Art Museum; at the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, MA); the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame, IN); and in Havana at Espacio Aglutinador, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and La Galería Habana, among others. Novoa’s work has been featured in many group exhibitions globally, including Lost in Landscape, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Trento, Italy); Politics: I do not like it, but it likes me, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia (Gdansk, Poland); Perder la forma humana, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, (Madrid, Spain);
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA); Crisis | America Latina | Arte y Confrontacion (1910-2010), el Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA). Novoa’s awards include grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. His work is featured in important private and public collections. He has also completed several notable public art commissions.

Vickie Pierre is a Haitian American, mixed media artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she studied at the School of Visual Arts. Pierre’s practice includes various techniques and materials such as painting, drawing and collage, as well as assemblage and installation. Her continued focus is on the exploration of self-identity, with references to feminine tropes and historic and contemporary cultural politics, while concurrently observing and considering latent associations to Haitian culture and mythologies. Pierre has participated in exhibitions worldwide, including National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Miami Art Museum (Perez Art Museum Miami), Miami, FL; White Box, NY, NY; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL.; Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sete, France and Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, among others. Her artworks can be found in private collections as well as public institutions, including Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland; Millennium Partners
Collection of Contemporary Art at The Four Seasons, Miami, Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland and the Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection, Miami. In 2017, Pierre was a recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award for Miami-Dade County. The artist lives and works in Miami.
In Pierre’s piece, titled Lamina 35, the anthropomorphic forms represent a female and a male (José Antonio Aponte) reposing in a dream state. The figures are bejeweled and bound by elements of the natural world, evoking the Yoruba religion believed to have been practiced by Aponte. The length of rope around the black form foreshadows the capture of Aponte by the Spanish government in Cuba and the subsequent hanging and decapitation of the revolutionary leader.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist who spent her childhood and adolescence in Normandy (France), before settling in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and later in Miami. Her strong attachment to her island occurred after her studies during which time Plaisir searched for and, from reading history, learned more details related to her past and her identity. As a result, she combines painting, drawing and monumental installations with performance to present highly intense visual experiences. Plaisir’s art blends life and fiction in both autobiographical and historical narratives from the Caribbean that touch upon universal themes like power, domination, life and death.
She is inspired by Italian quattrocento, Latin American and Caribbean literature. Plaisir incorporates textiles, fibers and fabrics that are socially meaningful into her work. She uses her daily practice to examine the many roles of the individual within society. Her art conveys a sense of humor and beauty while exploring any evidence of society’s humanity that she may discover in our increasingly digital world. Plaisir’s art is poetic. Her essence is theatrical. Her work may appear in many forms, including monumentally-scaled installations or itinerant in-situ performances within exhibitions. Her compositions have been used as children’s book illustrations and other publications and as drawings for animation. Since 2000, Plaisir has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She has also participated in various international contemporary art biennials.
Plaisir was drawn to Aponte’s story—which she saw as at once unreal, beautiful, poetic, formidable, tragic, and cruel—and to Aponte the man, who she imagined as a character filled with holiness, goodness, and humanity. Her series of drawings, titled “The Book of Life,” do not depict particular pages of Aponte’s book. Rather they evoke the way Aponte escapes from the world by deconstructing his time and place, moving through mythology, religion, death, war, love. For Plaisir, Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” represents a kind of beautiful exile, his process of dreaming about a better world.

Asser Saint-Val is a painter, sculptor and installation artist. Cumulative and objective, Saint-Val’s pictures, objects, and environments engage the aesthetics and metaphors of melanin (the organic compound responsible for human skin, hair, and eye color) and neuromelanin (a pigment found specifically in the dopaminergic neurons at the base of the brain). Saint-Val’s images explore the metaphysical reality and materiality of melanin and neuromelanin in relation to identity, his conscientious artistic voice, and his understanding of the roots of racism. Saint-Val’s paintings portray quasi-figurative images that evoke ideas central to modern debates on race and biology. Blending traditional and unconventional art materials (including coffee, chocolate, ginger, and tea), Saint-Val strives to create a surreal fantasia that activates the audience’s imagination with multisensory environments.
Asser Saint-Val moved to South Florida in 1988. He earned BFAs in painting and graphic design from the New World School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited in Florida, New York and throughout the Caribbean. His art is featured in prestigious private collections, including: Francie Bishop Good, Dr. Arturo Mosquera, the Rubell Family and Carlos Sanchoo. Saint-Val has twice received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship Award.
In 2012, he created The Philosopher’s Stone, a large-scale interactive public installation and his largest work to date,
with support from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
In approaching Aponte’s trial testimony and “Book of Paintings,” St. Val was particularly drawn to Aponte’s use of Greek mythology. As a scholar, artist, and genius ahead of his time, Aponte was exploring ideologies of gods and goddesses from Greek Mythology as a tool for transformation, self-empowerment and revolution. St. Val also believes that Aponte used these figures to make connections to himself as a spiritual entity, anticipating a new spiritual philosophy of Afro-Centrism, in which black scholars trace the genesis of the melanated people as far back as Atlantis and Lemuria, the Dogon people, and the star Sirius.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques is a California-born self taught artist with deep Louisiana Creole roots and a couple of academic degrees in other subjects. His first love is music, and he spent much of his life as a poet and performing artist until Hurricane Katrina hit and sent him into a silent meditation from which emerged Jean-Marcel the visual artist. St. Jacques’s great-grandmother made patchwork strip quilts and his great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk for a living. As a visual artist, he works mainly with wood and junk. His wooden quilts represent a way of being with the spirits of his great-grandmother who quilted and his great-grandfather who collected junk. They are also a way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris left by Hurricane Katrina, to find beauty in the ugliness of one of this country’s worst human disasters and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab his house for him and his family.
St. Jacques has pieces in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Jean Marcel’s doorway--created in collaboration with Renée Stout’s work for this show-- is both an altar in homage to the spirit of Aponte, as well as a crossroads or portal between the mortal world and the spirit world, inviting Aponte’s energy to enter and assist the people of the African Diaspora in our ongoing struggle for the right to be ourselves. It also functions as symbol of our ability to open the door to new possibilities as we discover the power we have to create a better world for ourselves. All of the wood used in this work is reclaimed from his Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé neighborhood, built not too long after Aponte’s execution.

Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 where her focus was on painting. However, in 1985, immediately after moving to Washington, D.C., she began to explore the spiritual and cultural roots of her African American heritage through her increasingly sculptural works,
which found their early inspiration in the aesthetics and philosophy of Kongo ritual objects. Stout’s art attracted the attention of museum curators across the United States and led to her becoming the first American artist to have a solo exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Inspired by the African Diaspora, historical and current world events, as well as everyday life in her DC neighborhood, Stout now creates in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation. She has been the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bader Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottleib Foundation and Anonymous Was A Woman. She was also the recipient of the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) and the Sondheim Award from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. Stout’s work is featured in many museum and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Renée’s homage and contemporary reinterpretation of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” aims to create the same kind of focal object or talisman for a revolution that was Aponte’s original intent for his book of collages, drawings and paintings. And like Aponte, she has purposely left the imagery open-ended in order for it to be interpreted on many levels. It is her desire that re-imagining the book will help us to channel our collective energy to coax the original out from its hiding place.

Grettel Arrate es graduada en pintura y dibujo de la Academia Provincial de Artes Plásticas José Joaquín Tejada de Santiago de Cuba, en 1983 y licenciada en Historia del Arte, en 1990, en la Universidad de Oriente. Ha realizado más de 14 exposiciones personales en importantes museos y galerías de Cuba y el extranjero y más de 35 proyectos de pintura murales, entre los que se destacan los realizados a partir del Encuentro Internacional de Pintura Mural INTER-NOS. También formó parte del equipo de realización de la monumental Plaza de la Revolución Antonio Maceo de Santiago de Cuba. Desde 1992 hasta la fecha se desempeña como directora del Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, desde donde ha curado, organizado y coordinado más de 600 exposiciones de artistas cubanos y extranjeros. Conjuntamente, se desempeñó como vicepresidenta del Consejo Provincial de las Artes Plásticas en Santiago de Cuba desde 1994 hasta 1996. Fue vicepresidenta de la Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) entre 2005 y 2010, y desde esa fecha hasta 2014 ocupó el cargo de presidenta de esa Asociación. En el 2017 volvió a ocupar esa función hasta 2019, cuando fue elegida vicepresidenta del Comité Provincial. Sus obras se encuentran en colecciones privadas en Francia, Inglaterra, Alemania, Estados Unidos, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Martinica, Guadalupe, Jamaica, Luxemburgo, España, Austria, China, Colombia, Haití, Dinamarca y otros países.
Su pieza se inspira en el testimonio que dio Aponte sobre su lámina no. 42, que representa las pirámides de Egipto. Arrate intenta recrear lo que narró Aponte, recontextualizando y apropiándose del ambiente faraónico con la simetría y la síntesis de las formas que tan magistralmente aplicaron los egipcios en su vida cotidiana. Ubica en su obra las tres grandes pirámides una dentro de la otra con una geometría perfecta. La textura almenada simboliza la cercanía y las mezclas de las civilizaciones que conviven y se conectan en espacio y tiempo. El pan de oro de tonos azules y metálicos representa la suntuosidad y la riqueza de esa civilización; los números y las líneas rectas y circulares se vinculan al conocimiento matemático y al dominio de las proporciones exactas con las que se calcularon y erigieron esas magníficas edificaciones que han llegado hasta nuestros días. Con el uso de materiales y herramientas contemporáneas intenta traer a nuestro tiempo el lenguaje y el legado de esa civilización y, a la vez, traducir desde su óptica el pensamiento de Aponte.

José Bedia is an internationally acclaimed Cuban painter hose art is inspired by many sacred sources, including initiation into the Brillumba lineage of the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte. Bedia’s work often critiques colonial histories by combining myths, symbols, and ritual elements with references to nature and global warfare. His time in Angola as part of the cultural brigades that supported the Angolan-Cuban War against Namibia and South Africa (1985) amplified his quest for the African and indigenous roots of American cultures. He has conducted extensive research in Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Laos.

Bedia studied at the San Alejandro Art Academy and the Instituto Superior del Arte. He participated in the first Havana Biennial (1984) and first showed abroad in Paris in Magiciens de la Terre (1989). He represented Cuba at the 1990 Venice Biennale and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992). Bedia and his family moved to Mexico in 1991 and settled in Miami in 1993. His art has since been exhibited in the Havana, São Paulo, Venice and Beijing Biennales. His work is featured in numerous collections, including the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes (Havana); MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, and Guggenheim (New York); Tate Modern (London); Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); La Colección Daros (Zurich), MEIAC, DA2, IVAM, CAAM (Spain); and MOCA and PAMM (Miami).

Bedia’s “Júbilo de Aponte” responds to several images in Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” among them Aponte’s selfportrait, the battle scene between white and black armies, depictions of Havana fortresses, the Virgin of Regla, and the Abyssinian lion. Bedia arranged the piece to suggest a construction, a monument or mausoleum, to Aponte’s memory. All of the elements are interlinked and united by a black ribbon—white ribbons are mentioned several times throughout the text as one of the objects that authorities confiscated in his house—so he turned them black instead to allude to a state of mourning.

María Magdalena Campos Pons nació en 1959 en la provincia de Matanzas, en el pueblo de La Vega, Cuba. Ella creció en una plantación de azúcar en una familia con raíces nigerianas, hispanas y chinas. Sus antepasados nigerianos fueron traídos a Cuba como esclavos en el siglo XIX y transmitieron tradiciones, rituales y creencias. Su herencia políglota influye profundamente en la práctica artística de Campos Pons, que combina diversos medios, incluyendo fotografía, performance, pintura, escultura, cine y video. Su trabajo es autobiográfico, investigando temas de historia, memoria, género y religión y cómo informan la identidad. A través de imágenes profundamente poéticas e inquietantes, Campos-Pons evoca historias de la trata transatlántica de esclavos, el añil y las plantaciones de azúcar, las prácticas religiosas católicas y de la santería y los levantamientos revolucionarios.
Las obras de Campos Pons se encuentran en más de 30 colecciones de museos, incluyendo la Smithsonian Institución, el Whitney, el Art Institute de Chicago, la Galería Nacional de Canadá, el Victoria and Albert Museum, MOMA (Nueva York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, y el Pérez Art Museum en Miami, entre otros. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en el MOMA de Nueva York, el Museo de Arte de Indianápolis, el Museo Peabody Essex y la Galería Nacional de Canadá, y otras instituciones distinguidas. Ella ha presentado más de 30 actuaciones encargadas por instituciones como la Guggenheim y el National Portrait Gallery del Smithsonian. Ha participado en la Bienal de Venecia, la Bienal de Dakar, la Bienal de Johannesburgo, Documenta 14, la Trienal de Guangzhou y está incluida en Pacific Standard Time: LA / LA y Prospect.4 Triennial. En octubre de 2017, recibió la Cátedra Cornelius Vanderbilt en la Universidad de Vanderbilt en Nashville, Tennessee.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Édouard Duval Carrié was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris, France; and at the University of Loyola Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Duval Carrié’s art belongs to many prominent museum and private collections globally, including the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa, USA); Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida, USA); Musee des Arts Africains et Océaniens (Paris, France); Musée du Pantheon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. In his work, Duval Carrié portrays a “Marvelous Reality,” as defined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in the prologue for his book, The Kingdom of this World, a story about Haiti that strongly influenced the artist. As a result, Duval Carrié enfolds into his art the fantastic world of his country—by rendering its illustrious myths and legends—in ways that clearly critique the prevailing social and political order within Haitian society. Duval Carrié’s art also features important aspects of Haitian history, including revolutionary heroes and other relevant figures. He references them to comment on the vital impact of Haitian history on contemporary society, including the legacy of slavery and independence and its weighted imprint on the country’s
development up to the present. Duval Carrié and his art also emphasize the neurological effects of immigration, exile,
and displacement on daily Haitian life, at home and abroad.
Duval Carrié has long been interested in connections between Haiti and the Spanish Caribbean, and José Antonio Aponte is key for understanding the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba. Duval Carrié was also drawn to other aspects of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” from his depiction of the biblical story of creation, to the representation of goddesses such as Minerva to the presence of Prester John and Ethiopia. The four paintings here, which respond to two of Aponte’s láminas, convey a sense of how Aponte condensed in his book not only his own history, but that of the whole of the Black Atlantic--a feat in itself and a unique enterprise but unfortunately lost to us.

Alexis Esquivel ha desarrollado su obra fundamentalmente a través de la pintura, abordando de manera crítica diferentes perspectivas de la representación histórica, la problemática racial, la sociedad, la cultura y la política en Cuba. Fue uno de los impulsores de exposiciones pioneras sobre la raza y el racismo en la isla a finales de los noventas, tales como Queloides I Parte, Queloides, y Ni músicos ni deportistas. Sus obras han sido expuestas en numerosas muestras colectivas dentro y fuera de Cuba. Entre las más recientes se encuentran La posibilidad infinita, en el marco de la XIII Bienal de La Habana, The Lotus in the Spite of the Swamp, Prospect 4, Trienal de New Orleans, Kunst x Kuba, en el Ludwing Forum, Without Masks, On Painting, Queloides, Raza y racismo en el arte cubano contemporáneo, y Drapetomania. Dentro de sus muestras personales más destacadas se encuentra “Memorial Garden”, exhibida en el Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno de las Palmas de Gran Canarias, CAAM, 2014, y en el Domus Artium 2002, DA2, de Salamanca, 2015. Obras suyas forman parte de la colección del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, y de la colección de arte contemporáneo cubano del Museo Jorge Pérez de Miami, así como también de la Colección del Afro-Latin American Research Institute de la Universidad de Harvard y del Smith College Museum of Art. Colecciones privadas como la Fundación Rubín, la Von Christierson, la Howard & Patrica Farber, la Ofelia Martín y Javier Núñez entre otras, incluyen también sus obras. Ha obtenido numerosas becas y residencias entre las que destacan, la Beca de Creación para Jóvenes Artistas Iberoamericanos de la Fundación Carolina (Madrid, 2002), la residencia de creación en el Mattress Factory Museum (Pittsburgh, 2010), y la Residencia artística en la Brownstone Foundation (París, 2011). Es licenciado en Educación Plástica del Instituto Superior Pedagógico Enrique José Varona (1991). Trabajó como profesor de la Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (2000-2002) y como profesor invitado en la Universidad de Tufts (2000-2001).

Joëlle Ferly es guadalupeña y artista. Obtuvo un diploma de máster en Imagen Fotográfica de la Universidad de Paris 8 y luego un máster en Bellas Artes de Saint Martins School of Art en Londres. Se formó en fotografía antes de dedicarse al arte contemporáneo. No privilegia ningún medio, sino que aprovecha el aspecto transdisciplinario del arte en diferentes proyectos: fotografía, videoarte, presentaciones y, más recientemente, la escritura y la restitución sonora. Los temas subyacentes de su práctica son el absurdo, su condición de artista en un “país dominado” y las injusticias sociales a las que la artista intenta proponer respuestas estéticas e incluso poéticas. La obra de Ferly ha sido expuesta en galerías y museos en Europa, África, Centroamérica, Estados Unidos y el Caribe. Entre ellas destacan las Bienales de La Habana, Venezuela y Aruba, el Pérez Art Museum y el Little Haiti Cultural Center en Miami, el Festival de Artes Negros en Dakar, Senegal, el Centro de Arte la Regenta (Las Palmas, Gran Canaria), el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), la Fundación Clément en Martinica y el VI Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain en Port-au-Prince, Haití. En 2009 fundó L’Autocarpe, un colectivo de artistas que promueve el arte contemporáneo en Guadalupe.

Teresita Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Fernández’s experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular illusions that evoke natural phenomena and engage audiences in immersive art experiences and conceptual way-finding. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of
American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. Fernández received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For Visionary Aponte, Fernández reflected on Aponte’s understanding of the cosmos as a space of both personal and political reprieve, a space inherently democratic because it could not be colonized. The piece, in pyrite, oil, graphite, and gold, also evokes West African alchemy traditions, with which Aponte and his co-conspirators may have been familiar.

“Soy escultor y pintor, nací el último día de Escorpión, a la mitad del siglo XX, en la punta de la loma de Martens cerca de Santiago de Cuba. Mi madre: espiritista cruzada, bordadora, modista, maraquera, fiestera, fiel esposa, buena amiga y mejor aún madre; hija de mambí, quien había raptado a mi abuela, desde las montañas oscuras de Baracoa. Mi padre: tresero, chofer, bailador y un infinito enamorado. La infancia y adolescencia transcurrieron entre el campo y la ciudad, siempre que pude, escogí el primero. Quizás porque, además de lo bucólico de este, allí contaba con un taller lleno de aparatos extraños inventados por mi tío para hacer todas las cosas que demandaba la comarca, desde unos preciosos muebles, una máquina de tejer, un juguete, hasta un terrible ataúd. Las noches eran para hablar de las últimas del mundo terrenal, del infierno y más frecuentemente del maravilloso paraíso, a donde iríamos los buenos. En la ciudad todo me era ajeno, menos las volteretas y sacudidas de mi madre, en medio del incienso, para alejar de mí las malas influencias espirituales. Cuando me presenté a hacer la prueba de aptitud en la escuela de arte, era principalmente porque quería ser becario como todos mis contemporáneos, pues estudiar era la palabra de pase de la Revolución cubana. El perenne recuerdo del monumento en bronce al Mambí Desconocido en la Loma de San Juan, mientras jugaba al escondido, me hace sospechar que en ese instante se abrió para mí el camino de la plástica”.

Emilio Martínez es un artista estadounidense nacido en Honduras que adoptó la pintura como su medio de expresión. Nació en Tegucigalpa en 1981. Emigró con su familia a Miami en 1994, donde reside desde entonces. Su obra cobra vida a través de su persistencia en un mundo onírico, creado mediante los sueños repetitivos de sus recuerdos de infancia. Está en contacto continuo con el mundo espiritual mediante íconos, símbolos y textos de un remoto pasado desconocido de antepasados indígenas. Su obra se explica a través de un rompecabezas bicultural que él mismo decodifica. Utiliza diariamente un cuaderno de bocetos donde anota sus obsesiones, pasiones y temores.
La obra de Martínez ha sido expuesta en la University of Syracuse, el Purvis Young Museum of Art (Miami), Little Haiti Cultural Center (Miami) y el Instituto Cultural de México (Miami) entre otros lugares.
La pieza de Martínez para Aponte visionario trabaja la figura de Nerpomene –la “diosa de las batallas”, en palabras de Aponte– quien aparece en la lámina 60 del Libro de pinturas. Martínez representa a Nerpomene como una criatura semejante a una bestia, como una figura-torbellino compuesta de muchos espíritus que la rodean y que han respondido a su llamado de guerra total contra un gobierno injusto. Esta pieza procura remontarse a la historia silenciada para exaltar a un heroico visionario, al tiempo que invita a otros a valorar la perspectiva y el legado de Aponte.

Emilio Adán Martínez, pintor y escultor, nació en Cienfuegos, Cuba, en 1954. En 1961, emigró a Miami, Florida, donde continúa viviendo y trabajando. Aunque Martínez nació en Cuba, su origen étnico incluye ascendencia africana, asiática e indígena. Estas culturas sirven como fuentes primarias de inspiración. Martínez, se esfuerza por comprender el núcleo, el corazón, de las formas naturales, y comunicarlo a través de su obra de arte. Su trabajo anterior, utilizando papel, cuerdas y ramas de pino, se refiere al concepto de viaje, a través de la vida, el espacio y la dimensión, y al paso fugaz del tiempo. Dos ejemplos de este trabajo, Andan Volando (2009) y Ando Volando (2017-18), se instalaron en el Aeropuerto Internacional de Miami, en las terminales Norte y Central, Concourse D y Concourse E, respectivamente. Más recientemente, Martínez ha construido complejas piezas de madera recuperada y metal. Estas piezas, cuando se ven juntas como una instalación, nos recuerdan un futuro deconstruido y, a veces, autodestructivo. Martínez obtuvo su BFA de la Universidad Internacional de Florida. Su trabajo se puede encontrar en colecciones públicas y privadas en los Estados Unidos, América Latina y Europa.
La descripción de Aponte de las láminas 24-25 del Libro de pinturas inspiró a Martínez a trabajar con una gran pieza de roble. A lo largo de la historia, el roble es símbolo de gran fortaleza, sabiduría, resistencia y nobleza, todas cualidades que Aponte representa. En su investigación, Martínez descubrió que los primeros exploradores españoles estaban tan enamorados de los bosques naturales de Cuba, que llevaron de regreso con ellos varias especies. Otro elemento de la pieza, el acero soldado cruzado, simboliza el aprisionamiento de todos los hombres de color, y el dolor y el sufrimiento de los esclavos, infligido a menudo con cadenas y grilletes. La forma de la pieza, de cuerpo redondo, con una cavidad y barras de acero, se refiere al fin espantoso que Aponte sufrió. La fina arena negra en la cavidad representa las profundidades del infierno viviente al que fue sometido el hombre negro e invoca la industria azucarera en Cuba, el catalizador del comercio de esclavos en la isla.

Tessa Mars nació en Port-au-Prince, Haití, en 1985, y allí continúa viviendo y trabajando. Completó una licenciatura en Artes Visuales en Francia, en la Universidad Rennes 2 en 2006. Su obra artística se ocupa de la identidad y de los procesos a partir de los cuales nos construimos como individuos, colectivos y grupos. Mirando la identidad desde la perspectiva de género, la historia y la cultura, Mars cuestiona las nociones de pertenencia, sacrificio, transformación y resistencia. Sus proyectos más recientes se centran en el tema del autoestudio. A través de la figura de Tessalines, un híbrido femenino de Jean-Jacques Dessalines, líder de la Revolución haitiana, Mars busca reintroducir a las mujeres en la narrativa histórica y a la vez tomar control de su propia historia. Conectando pasado y presente, las piezas reimaginan narrativas traumáticas – antiguas y nuevas, colectivas y personales- como forma de empoderamiento y sanación. Mediante la representación de su cuerpo, Mars reflexiona sobre el autoexamen, la transformación y la narración como estrategias de supervivencia.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL; RACING MY GIRL, SALLY; ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer; GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR; and MOTHER WIT & WATER BORN, a trilogy, including BETWEEN WHISPERED BLOOD-LINES. Her work has been shared at the former Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Capital Fringe Festival, Washington, DC); Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick (New Jersey); and in New York at Wings Theatre, Brecht Forum, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, The Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement, Dumbo Sky and The Little Carib Theatre. Mercer’s writing is published in: The Killens Review
of Arts & Letters, Black Renaissance Noire, Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition and Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance. She has performed in collaboration with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Angela’s Pulse, Abigail DeVille and Charlotte Brathwaite, BWA for BLM and others. Mercer is a co-founder and co-director of Ocean Ana Rising: www. oarinc.org. She is currently a doctoral fellow of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a MFA from American University. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College. Find updates on Mercer’s work at http://windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com.
Mercer’s “Invocation for José Antonio Aponte” calls on the energy that emboldened Aponte to channel The Word into a transnational, visual manifesto of liberation for black Cubans. But Mercer also calls out to ancestral multitudes at the diaspora’s threshold and birthing space--the ocean, Yemonja, Mami Wata, Our Lady Regla--transcending time and perceived national boundaries. We are here now, and before before; we are future, and the living embodiment of sacred cosmologies always returning to push us forward.

Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín and grew up in Havana. He received a degree from the National School of Arts (1984). While Novoa has lived in Miami since 1995, he maintains a studio in Vedado (Havana) and works on site specific murals and ephemeral projects globally. Since 1987, Novoa has had solo exhibitions at the Cheekwood Museum, (Nashville); in Miami at the Lowe Museum of Art (University of Miami), Locust Project and the former Miami Art Museum; at the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, MA); the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame, IN); and in Havana at Espacio Aglutinador, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and La Galería Habana, among others. Novoa’s work has been featured in many group exhibitions globally, including Lost in Landscape, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Trento, Italy); Politics: I do not like it, but it likes me, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia (Gdansk, Poland); Perder la forma humana, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, (Madrid, Spain);
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA); Crisis | America Latina | Arte y Confrontacion (1910-2010), el Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA). Novoa’s awards include grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. His work is featured in important private and public collections. He has also completed several notable public art commissions.

Vickie Pierre es una artista de medios mixtos haitiano-estadounidense, nacida y criada en Brooklyn, Nueva York, donde estudió en la School of Visual Arts. Su trabajo comprende varias técnicas y materiales, tales como la pintura, el dibujo y el collage, así como el “assemblage” y la instalación. Su enfoque principal es la exploración de la identidad, con referencias a tópicos femeninos y las políticas culturales históricas y contemporáneas. Al mismo tiempo observa y evalúa los vínculos vigentes con la cultura y la mitología haitianas. Pierre ha participado en exposiciones alrededor del mundo, en lugares como el National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Miami Art Museum (Pérez Art Museum), Miami, Florida; White Box, Nueva York; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sete, Francia y el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, entre otros. Sus obras están en colecciones privadas y en instituciones públicas, tales como Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland; Millennium Partners Collection of Contemporary Art at The Four Seasons, Miami, Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, y la Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection, Miami. En 2017, Pierre recibió el South Florida Cultural Consortium Award for Miami-Dade County. La artista vive y trabaja en Miami.
En la pieza titulada Lámina 35, las figuras antropomórficas representan a una hembra y un varón (José Antonio Aponte) reposando en estado onírico. Las figuras lucen joyas y están atadas por elementos del mundo natural que evocan la fe yoruba, religión que se cree Aponte practicaba. El largo de la soga que rodea a la figura negra presagia la captura de Aponte a manos del gobierno español en Cuba, así como el posterior ahorcamiento y decapitación del líder revolucionario.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist who spent her childhood and adolescence in Normandy (France), before settling in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and later in Miami. Her strong attachment to her island occurred after her studies during which time Plaisir searched for and, from reading history, learned more details related to her past and her identity. As a result, she combines painting, drawing and monumental installations with performance to present highly intense visual experiences. Plaisir’s art blends life and fiction in both autobiographical and historical narratives from the Caribbean that touch upon universal themes like power, domination, life and death.
She is inspired by Italian quattrocento, Latin American and Caribbean literature. Plaisir incorporates textiles, fibers and fabrics that are socially meaningful into her work. She uses her daily practice to examine the many roles of the individual within society. Her art conveys a sense of humor and beauty while exploring any evidence of society’s humanity that she may discover in our increasingly digital world. Plaisir’s art is poetic. Her essence is theatrical. Her work may appear in many forms, including monumentally-scaled installations or itinerant in-situ performances within exhibitions. Her compositions have been used as children’s book illustrations and other publications and as drawings for animation. Since 2000, Plaisir has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She has also participated in various international contemporary art biennials.
Plaisir was drawn to Aponte’s story—which she saw as at once unreal, beautiful, poetic, formidable, tragic, and cruel—and to Aponte the man, who she imagined as a character filled with holiness, goodness, and humanity. Her series of drawings, titled “The Book of Life,” do not depict particular pages of Aponte’s book. Rather they evoke the way Aponte escapes from the world by deconstructing his time and place, moving through mythology, religion, death, war, love. For Plaisir, Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” represents a kind of beautiful exile, his process of dreaming about a better world.

Asser Saint-Val is a painter, sculptor and installation artist. Cumulative and objective, Saint-Val’s pictures, objects, and environments engage the aesthetics and metaphors of melanin (the organic compound responsible for human skin, hair, and eye color) and neuromelanin (a pigment found specifically in the dopaminergic neurons at the base of the brain). Saint-Val’s images explore the metaphysical reality and materiality of melanin and neuromelanin in relation to identity, his conscientious artistic voice, and his understanding of the roots of racism. Saint-Val’s paintings portray quasi-figurative images that evoke ideas central to modern debates on race and biology. Blending traditional and unconventional art materials (including coffee, chocolate, ginger, and tea), Saint-Val strives to create a surreal fantasia that activates the audience’s imagination with multisensory environments.
Asser Saint-Val moved to South Florida in 1988. He earned BFAs in painting and graphic design from the New World School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited in Florida, New York and throughout the Caribbean. His art is featured in prestigious private collections, including: Francie Bishop Good, Dr. Arturo Mosquera, the Rubell Family and Carlos Sanchoo. Saint-Val has twice received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship Award.
In 2012, he created The Philosopher’s Stone, a large-scale interactive public installation and his largest work to date,
with support from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
In approaching Aponte’s trial testimony and “Book of Paintings,” St. Val was particularly drawn to Aponte’s use of Greek mythology. As a scholar, artist, and genius ahead of his time, Aponte was exploring ideologies of gods and goddesses from Greek Mythology as a tool for transformation, self-empowerment and revolution. St. Val also believes that Aponte used these figures to make connections to himself as a spiritual entity, anticipating a new spiritual philosophy of Afro-Centrism, in which black scholars trace the genesis of the melanated people as far back as Atlantis and Lemuria, the Dogon people, and the star Sirius.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques is a California-born self taught artist with deep Louisiana Creole roots and a couple of academic degrees in other subjects. His first love is music, and he spent much of his life as a poet and performing artist until Hurricane Katrina hit and sent him into a silent meditation from which emerged Jean-Marcel the visual artist. St. Jacques’s great-grandmother made patchwork strip quilts and his great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk for a living. As a visual artist, he works mainly with wood and junk. His wooden quilts represent a way of being with the spirits of his great-grandmother who quilted and his great-grandfather who collected junk. They are also a way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris left by Hurricane Katrina, to find beauty in the ugliness of one of this country’s worst human disasters and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab his house for him and his family.
St. Jacques has pieces in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Jean Marcel’s doorway--created in collaboration with Renée Stout’s work for this show-- is both an altar in homage to the spirit of Aponte, as well as a crossroads or portal between the mortal world and the spirit world, inviting Aponte’s energy to enter and assist the people of the African Diaspora in our ongoing struggle for the right to be ourselves. It also functions as symbol of our ability to open the door to new possibilities as we discover the power we have to create a better world for ourselves. All of the wood used in this work is reclaimed from his Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé neighborhood, built not too long after Aponte’s execution.

Renée Stout creció en Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, y recibió su diploma en Bellas Artes (BFA) de la Carnegie Mellon University en 1980, donde se especializó en pintura. Después de trasladarse a Washington, DC en 1985, comenzó a explorar las raíces espirituales y culturales de su herencia afroamericana a través de sus obras, cada vez más escultóricas, inspiradas en la estética y la filosofía de los objetos rituales kongo. El arte de Stout llamó la atención de curadores de arte en museos de todo Estados Unidos y se convirtió en la primera artista en tener una exposición individual en el Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Inspirada en la diáspora africana, acontecimientos históricos y noticias contemporáneas, así como en la vida cotidiana en su vecindario de DC, Stout trabaja en diversos medios, tales como pintura, dibujo, escultura con materiales mixtos, fotografía e instalación. Ha recibido reconocimientos de la Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Bader Fund, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, la Gottleib Foundation y Anonymous Was a Woman. También recibió el Driskell Prize, otorgado por el High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia) y el Sondheim Award de la Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. La obra de Stout figura en muchos museos y colecciones privadas nacionales e internacionales, incluyendo el nuevo Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture en Washington, DC.
El homenaje y la reinterpretación contemporánea que hace Renée del Libro de pinturas de Aponte tienen como objetivo crear el mismo tipo de objeto focal o talismán para una revolución que fue el libro original de collages, dibujos y pinturas. Y, al igual que Aponte, Renée ha dejado sus imágenes intencionalmente abiertas a diversos niveles de lectura. Su deseo es que reimaginar el libro nos ayude a canalizar nuestra energía colectiva para animar al libro original a salir de su escondite.

Grettel Arrate es graduada en pintura y dibujo de la Academia Provincial de Artes Plásticas José Joaquín Tejada de Santiago de Cuba, en 1983 y licenciada en Historia del Arte, en 1990, en la Universidad de Oriente. Ha realizado más de 14 exposiciones personales en importantes museos y galerías de Cuba y el extranjero y más de 35 proyectos de pintura murales, entre los que se destacan los realizados a partir del Encuentro Internacional de Pintura Mural INTER-NOS. También formó parte del equipo de realización de la monumental Plaza de la Revolución Antonio Maceo de Santiago de Cuba. Desde 1992 hasta la fecha se desempeña como directora del Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, desde donde ha curado, organizado y coordinado más de 600 exposiciones de artistas cubanos y extranjeros. Conjuntamente, se desempeñó como vicepresidenta del Consejo Provincial de las Artes Plásticas en Santiago de Cuba desde 1994 hasta 1996. Fue vicepresidenta de la Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) entre 2005 y 2010, y desde esa fecha hasta 2014 ocupó el cargo de presidenta de esa Asociación. En el 2017 volvió a ocupar esa función hasta 2019, cuando fue elegida vicepresidenta del Comité Provincial. Sus obras se encuentran en colecciones privadas en Francia, Inglaterra, Alemania, Estados Unidos, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Martinica, Guadalupe, Jamaica, Luxemburgo, España, Austria, China, Colombia, Haití, Dinamarca y otros países.
Su pieza se inspira en el testimonio que dio Aponte sobre su lámina no. 42, que representa las pirámides de Egipto. Arrate intenta recrear lo que narró Aponte, recontextualizando y apropiándose del ambiente faraónico con la simetría y la síntesis de las formas que tan magistralmente aplicaron los egipcios en su vida cotidiana. Ubica en su obra las tres grandes pirámides una dentro de la otra con una geometría perfecta. La textura almenada simboliza la cercanía y las mezclas de las civilizaciones que conviven y se conectan en espacio y tiempo. El pan de oro de tonos azules y metálicos representa la suntuosidad y la riqueza de esa civilización; los números y las líneas rectas y circulares se vinculan al conocimiento matemático y al dominio de las proporciones exactas con las que se calcularon y erigieron esas magníficas edificaciones que han llegado hasta nuestros días. Con el uso de materiales y herramientas contemporáneas intenta traer a nuestro tiempo el lenguaje y el legado de esa civilización y, a la vez, traducir desde su óptica el pensamiento de Aponte.

José Bedia is an internationally acclaimed Cuban painter hose art is inspired by many sacred sources, including initiation into the Brillumba lineage of the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte. Bedia’s work often critiques colonial histories by combining myths, symbols, and ritual elements with references to nature and global warfare. His time in Angola as part of the cultural brigades that supported the Angolan-Cuban War against Namibia and South Africa (1985) amplified his quest for the African and indigenous roots of American cultures. He has conducted extensive research in Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Laos.

Bedia studied at the San Alejandro Art Academy and the Instituto Superior del Arte. He participated in the first Havana Biennial (1984) and first showed abroad in Paris in Magiciens de la Terre (1989). He represented Cuba at the 1990 Venice Biennale and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992). Bedia and his family moved to Mexico in 1991 and settled in Miami in 1993. His art has since been exhibited in the Havana, São Paulo, Venice and Beijing Biennales. His work is featured in numerous collections, including the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes (Havana); MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, and Guggenheim (New York); Tate Modern (London); Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); La Colección Daros (Zurich), MEIAC, DA2, IVAM, CAAM (Spain); and MOCA and PAMM (Miami).

Bedia’s “Júbilo de Aponte” responds to several images in Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” among them Aponte’s selfportrait, the battle scene between white and black armies, depictions of Havana fortresses, the Virgin of Regla, and the Abyssinian lion. Bedia arranged the piece to suggest a construction, a monument or mausoleum, to Aponte’s memory. All of the elements are interlinked and united by a black ribbon—white ribbons are mentioned several times throughout the text as one of the objects that authorities confiscated in his house—so he turned them black instead to allude to a state of mourning.

María Magdalena Campos Pons nació en 1959 en la provincia de Matanzas, en el pueblo de La Vega, Cuba. Ella creció en una plantación de azúcar en una familia con raíces nigerianas, hispanas y chinas. Sus antepasados nigerianos fueron traídos a Cuba como esclavos en el siglo XIX y transmitieron tradiciones, rituales y creencias. Su herencia políglota influye profundamente en la práctica artística de Campos Pons, que combina diversos medios, incluyendo fotografía, performance, pintura, escultura, cine y video. Su trabajo es autobiográfico, investigando temas de historia, memoria, género y religión y cómo informan la identidad. A través de imágenes profundamente poéticas e inquietantes, Campos-Pons evoca historias de la trata transatlántica de esclavos, el añil y las plantaciones de azúcar, las prácticas religiosas católicas y de la santería y los levantamientos revolucionarios.
Las obras de Campos Pons se encuentran en más de 30 colecciones de museos, incluyendo la Smithsonian Institución, el Whitney, el Art Institute de Chicago, la Galería Nacional de Canadá, el Victoria and Albert Museum, MOMA (Nueva York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, y el Pérez Art Museum en Miami, entre otros. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en el MOMA de Nueva York, el Museo de Arte de Indianápolis, el Museo Peabody Essex y la Galería Nacional de Canadá, y otras instituciones distinguidas. Ella ha presentado más de 30 actuaciones encargadas por instituciones como la Guggenheim y el National Portrait Gallery del Smithsonian. Ha participado en la Bienal de Venecia, la Bienal de Dakar, la Bienal de Johannesburgo, Documenta 14, la Trienal de Guangzhou y está incluida en Pacific Standard Time: LA / LA y Prospect.4 Triennial. En octubre de 2017, recibió la Cátedra Cornelius Vanderbilt en la Universidad de Vanderbilt en Nashville, Tennessee.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Édouard Duval Carrié was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris, France; and at the University of Loyola Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Duval Carrié’s art belongs to many prominent museum and private collections globally, including the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa, USA); Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida, USA); Musee des Arts Africains et Océaniens (Paris, France); Musée du Pantheon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. In his work, Duval Carrié portrays a “Marvelous Reality,” as defined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in the prologue for his book, The Kingdom of this World, a story about Haiti that strongly influenced the artist. As a result, Duval Carrié enfolds into his art the fantastic world of his country—by rendering its illustrious myths and legends—in ways that clearly critique the prevailing social and political order within Haitian society. Duval Carrié’s art also features important aspects of Haitian history, including revolutionary heroes and other relevant figures. He references them to comment on the vital impact of Haitian history on contemporary society, including the legacy of slavery and independence and its weighted imprint on the country’s
development up to the present. Duval Carrié and his art also emphasize the neurological effects of immigration, exile,
and displacement on daily Haitian life, at home and abroad.
Duval Carrié has long been interested in connections between Haiti and the Spanish Caribbean, and José Antonio Aponte is key for understanding the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba. Duval Carrié was also drawn to other aspects of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” from his depiction of the biblical story of creation, to the representation of goddesses such as Minerva to the presence of Prester John and Ethiopia. The four paintings here, which respond to two of Aponte’s láminas, convey a sense of how Aponte condensed in his book not only his own history, but that of the whole of the Black Atlantic--a feat in itself and a unique enterprise but unfortunately lost to us.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Joëlle Ferly es guadalupeña y artista. Obtuvo un diploma de máster en Imagen Fotográfica de la Universidad de Paris 8 y luego un máster en Bellas Artes de Saint Martins School of Art en Londres. Se formó en fotografía antes de dedicarse al arte contemporáneo. No privilegia ningún medio, sino que aprovecha el aspecto transdisciplinario del arte en diferentes proyectos: fotografía, videoarte, presentaciones y, más recientemente, la escritura y la restitución sonora. Los temas subyacentes de su práctica son el absurdo, su condición de artista en un “país dominado” y las injusticias sociales a las que la artista intenta proponer respuestas estéticas e incluso poéticas. La obra de Ferly ha sido expuesta en galerías y museos en Europa, África, Centroamérica, Estados Unidos y el Caribe. Entre ellas destacan las Bienales de La Habana, Venezuela y Aruba, el Pérez Art Museum y el Little Haiti Cultural Center en Miami, el Festival de Artes Negros en Dakar, Senegal, el Centro de Arte la Regenta (Las Palmas, Gran Canaria), el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), la Fundación Clément en Martinica y el VI Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain en Port-au-Prince, Haití. En 2009 fundó L’Autocarpe, un colectivo de artistas que promueve el arte contemporáneo en Guadalupe.

Teresita Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Fernández’s experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular illusions that evoke natural phenomena and engage audiences in immersive art experiences and conceptual way-finding. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of
American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. Fernández received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For Visionary Aponte, Fernández reflected on Aponte’s understanding of the cosmos as a space of both personal and political reprieve, a space inherently democratic because it could not be colonized. The piece, in pyrite, oil, graphite, and gold, also evokes West African alchemy traditions, with which Aponte and his co-conspirators may have been familiar.

“Soy escultor y pintor, nací el último día de Escorpión, a la mitad del siglo XX, en la punta de la loma de Martens cerca de Santiago de Cuba. Mi madre: espiritista cruzada, bordadora, modista, maraquera, fiestera, fiel esposa, buena amiga y mejor aún madre; hija de mambí, quien había raptado a mi abuela, desde las montañas oscuras de Baracoa. Mi padre: tresero, chofer, bailador y un infinito enamorado. La infancia y adolescencia transcurrieron entre el campo y la ciudad, siempre que pude, escogí el primero. Quizás porque, además de lo bucólico de este, allí contaba con un taller lleno de aparatos extraños inventados por mi tío para hacer todas las cosas que demandaba la comarca, desde unos preciosos muebles, una máquina de tejer, un juguete, hasta un terrible ataúd. Las noches eran para hablar de las últimas del mundo terrenal, del infierno y más frecuentemente del maravilloso paraíso, a donde iríamos los buenos. En la ciudad todo me era ajeno, menos las volteretas y sacudidas de mi madre, en medio del incienso, para alejar de mí las malas influencias espirituales. Cuando me presenté a hacer la prueba de aptitud en la escuela de arte, era principalmente porque quería ser becario como todos mis contemporáneos, pues estudiar era la palabra de pase de la Revolución cubana. El perenne recuerdo del monumento en bronce al Mambí Desconocido en la Loma de San Juan, mientras jugaba al escondido, me hace sospechar que en ese instante se abrió para mí el camino de la plástica”.

Emilio Martínez es un artista estadounidense nacido en Honduras que adoptó la pintura como su medio de expresión. Nació en Tegucigalpa en 1981. Emigró con su familia a Miami en 1994, donde reside desde entonces. Su obra cobra vida a través de su persistencia en un mundo onírico, creado mediante los sueños repetitivos de sus recuerdos de infancia. Está en contacto continuo con el mundo espiritual mediante íconos, símbolos y textos de un remoto pasado desconocido de antepasados indígenas. Su obra se explica a través de un rompecabezas bicultural que él mismo decodifica. Utiliza diariamente un cuaderno de bocetos donde anota sus obsesiones, pasiones y temores.
La obra de Martínez ha sido expuesta en la University of Syracuse, el Purvis Young Museum of Art (Miami), Little Haiti Cultural Center (Miami) y el Instituto Cultural de México (Miami) entre otros lugares.
La pieza de Martínez para Aponte visionario trabaja la figura de Nerpomene –la “diosa de las batallas”, en palabras de Aponte– quien aparece en la lámina 60 del Libro de pinturas. Martínez representa a Nerpomene como una criatura semejante a una bestia, como una figura-torbellino compuesta de muchos espíritus que la rodean y que han respondido a su llamado de guerra total contra un gobierno injusto. Esta pieza procura remontarse a la historia silenciada para exaltar a un heroico visionario, al tiempo que invita a otros a valorar la perspectiva y el legado de Aponte.

Emilio Adán Martínez, pintor y escultor, nació en Cienfuegos, Cuba, en 1954. En 1961, emigró a Miami, Florida, donde continúa viviendo y trabajando. Aunque Martínez nació en Cuba, su origen étnico incluye ascendencia africana, asiática e indígena. Estas culturas sirven como fuentes primarias de inspiración. Martínez, se esfuerza por comprender el núcleo, el corazón, de las formas naturales, y comunicarlo a través de su obra de arte. Su trabajo anterior, utilizando papel, cuerdas y ramas de pino, se refiere al concepto de viaje, a través de la vida, el espacio y la dimensión, y al paso fugaz del tiempo. Dos ejemplos de este trabajo, Andan Volando (2009) y Ando Volando (2017-18), se instalaron en el Aeropuerto Internacional de Miami, en las terminales Norte y Central, Concourse D y Concourse E, respectivamente. Más recientemente, Martínez ha construido complejas piezas de madera recuperada y metal. Estas piezas, cuando se ven juntas como una instalación, nos recuerdan un futuro deconstruido y, a veces, autodestructivo. Martínez obtuvo su BFA de la Universidad Internacional de Florida. Su trabajo se puede encontrar en colecciones públicas y privadas en los Estados Unidos, América Latina y Europa.
La descripción de Aponte de las láminas 24-25 del Libro de pinturas inspiró a Martínez a trabajar con una gran pieza de roble. A lo largo de la historia, el roble es símbolo de gran fortaleza, sabiduría, resistencia y nobleza, todas cualidades que Aponte representa. En su investigación, Martínez descubrió que los primeros exploradores españoles estaban tan enamorados de los bosques naturales de Cuba, que llevaron de regreso con ellos varias especies. Otro elemento de la pieza, el acero soldado cruzado, simboliza el aprisionamiento de todos los hombres de color, y el dolor y el sufrimiento de los esclavos, infligido a menudo con cadenas y grilletes. La forma de la pieza, de cuerpo redondo, con una cavidad y barras de acero, se refiere al fin espantoso que Aponte sufrió. La fina arena negra en la cavidad representa las profundidades del infierno viviente al que fue sometido el hombre negro e invoca la industria azucarera en Cuba, el catalizador del comercio de esclavos en la isla.

Tessa Mars nació en Port-au-Prince, Haití, en 1985, y allí continúa viviendo y trabajando. Completó una licenciatura en Artes Visuales en Francia, en la Universidad Rennes 2 en 2006. Su obra artística se ocupa de la identidad y de los procesos a partir de los cuales nos construimos como individuos, colectivos y grupos. Mirando la identidad desde la perspectiva de género, la historia y la cultura, Mars cuestiona las nociones de pertenencia, sacrificio, transformación y resistencia. Sus proyectos más recientes se centran en el tema del autoestudio. A través de la figura de Tessalines, un híbrido femenino de Jean-Jacques Dessalines, líder de la Revolución haitiana, Mars busca reintroducir a las mujeres en la narrativa histórica y a la vez tomar control de su propia historia. Conectando pasado y presente, las piezas reimaginan narrativas traumáticas – antiguas y nuevas, colectivas y personales- como forma de empoderamiento y sanación. Mediante la representación de su cuerpo, Mars reflexiona sobre el autoexamen, la transformación y la narración como estrategias de supervivencia.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL; RACING MY GIRL, SALLY; ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer; GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR; and MOTHER WIT & WATER BORN, a trilogy, including BETWEEN WHISPERED BLOOD-LINES. Her work has been shared at the former Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Capital Fringe Festival, Washington, DC); Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick (New Jersey); and in New York at Wings Theatre, Brecht Forum, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, The Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement, Dumbo Sky and The Little Carib Theatre. Mercer’s writing is published in: The Killens Review
of Arts & Letters, Black Renaissance Noire, Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition and Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance. She has performed in collaboration with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Angela’s Pulse, Abigail DeVille and Charlotte Brathwaite, BWA for BLM and others. Mercer is a co-founder and co-director of Ocean Ana Rising: www. oarinc.org. She is currently a doctoral fellow of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a MFA from American University. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College. Find updates on Mercer’s work at http://windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com.
Mercer’s “Invocation for José Antonio Aponte” calls on the energy that emboldened Aponte to channel The Word into a transnational, visual manifesto of liberation for black Cubans. But Mercer also calls out to ancestral multitudes at the diaspora’s threshold and birthing space--the ocean, Yemonja, Mami Wata, Our Lady Regla--transcending time and perceived national boundaries. We are here now, and before before; we are future, and the living embodiment of sacred cosmologies always returning to push us forward.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Vickie Pierre es una artista de medios mixtos haitiano-estadounidense, nacida y criada en Brooklyn, Nueva York, donde estudió en la School of Visual Arts. Su trabajo comprende varias técnicas y materiales, tales como la pintura, el dibujo y el collage, así como el “assemblage” y la instalación. Su enfoque principal es la exploración de la identidad, con referencias a tópicos femeninos y las políticas culturales históricas y contemporáneas. Al mismo tiempo observa y evalúa los vínculos vigentes con la cultura y la mitología haitianas. Pierre ha participado en exposiciones alrededor del mundo, en lugares como el National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Miami Art Museum (Pérez Art Museum), Miami, Florida; White Box, Nueva York; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sete, Francia y el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, entre otros. Sus obras están en colecciones privadas y en instituciones públicas, tales como Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland; Millennium Partners Collection of Contemporary Art at The Four Seasons, Miami, Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, y la Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection, Miami. En 2017, Pierre recibió el South Florida Cultural Consortium Award for Miami-Dade County. La artista vive y trabaja en Miami.
En la pieza titulada Lámina 35, las figuras antropomórficas representan a una hembra y un varón (José Antonio Aponte) reposando en estado onírico. Las figuras lucen joyas y están atadas por elementos del mundo natural que evocan la fe yoruba, religión que se cree Aponte practicaba. El largo de la soga que rodea a la figura negra presagia la captura de Aponte a manos del gobierno español en Cuba, así como el posterior ahorcamiento y decapitación del líder revolucionario.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist who spent her childhood and adolescence in Normandy (France), before settling in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and later in Miami. Her strong attachment to her island occurred after her studies during which time Plaisir searched for and, from reading history, learned more details related to her past and her identity. As a result, she combines painting, drawing and monumental installations with performance to present highly intense visual experiences. Plaisir’s art blends life and fiction in both autobiographical and historical narratives from the Caribbean that touch upon universal themes like power, domination, life and death.
She is inspired by Italian quattrocento, Latin American and Caribbean literature. Plaisir incorporates textiles, fibers and fabrics that are socially meaningful into her work. She uses her daily practice to examine the many roles of the individual within society. Her art conveys a sense of humor and beauty while exploring any evidence of society’s humanity that she may discover in our increasingly digital world. Plaisir’s art is poetic. Her essence is theatrical. Her work may appear in many forms, including monumentally-scaled installations or itinerant in-situ performances within exhibitions. Her compositions have been used as children’s book illustrations and other publications and as drawings for animation. Since 2000, Plaisir has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She has also participated in various international contemporary art biennials.
Plaisir was drawn to Aponte’s story—which she saw as at once unreal, beautiful, poetic, formidable, tragic, and cruel—and to Aponte the man, who she imagined as a character filled with holiness, goodness, and humanity. Her series of drawings, titled “The Book of Life,” do not depict particular pages of Aponte’s book. Rather they evoke the way Aponte escapes from the world by deconstructing his time and place, moving through mythology, religion, death, war, love. For Plaisir, Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” represents a kind of beautiful exile, his process of dreaming about a better world.

Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 where her focus was on painting. However, in 1985, immediately after moving to Washington, D.C., she began to explore the spiritual and cultural roots of her African American heritage through her increasingly sculptural works,
which found their early inspiration in the aesthetics and philosophy of Kongo ritual objects. Stout’s art attracted the attention of museum curators across the United States and led to her becoming the first American artist to have a solo exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Inspired by the African Diaspora, historical and current world events, as well as everyday life in her DC neighborhood, Stout now creates in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation. She has been the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bader Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottleib Foundation and Anonymous Was A Woman. She was also the recipient of the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) and the Sondheim Award from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. Stout’s work is featured in many museum and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Renée’s homage and contemporary reinterpretation of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” aims to create the same kind of focal object or talisman for a revolution that was Aponte’s original intent for his book of collages, drawings and paintings. And like Aponte, she has purposely left the imagery open-ended in order for it to be interpreted on many levels. It is her desire that re-imagining the book will help us to channel our collective energy to coax the original out from its hiding place.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques es un artista autodidacta nacido en California, con profundas raíces en la Luisiana criolla y con un par de grados académicos en otras disciplinas. Su primer amor es la música y pasó buena parte de su vida como poeta e intérprete, hasta que el paso del huracán Katrina lo llevó a una meditación silenciosa de la cual emergió Jean-Marcel, el artista visual. Su bisabuela hacía colchas de retazos y su bisabuelo era un hoodoo man (una espiritualidad popular afroamericana de herencia kongo) que se ganaba la vida recolectando chatarra. Como artista visual, St. Jacques trabaja principalmente con madera y chatarra. Sus colchas de madera representan un modo de estar en contacto con los espíritus de sus antepasados. También constituyen un modo de encontrar una finalidad más elevada para los montones de escombros dejados por el huracán Katrina, de encontrar belleza en medio de la fealdad de uno de los peores desastres humanos de Estados Unidos. Y, en términos prácticos, también es un modo de salvar y rehabilitar la casa del artista, para él y su familia. Algunas de las obras de St. Jacques están en la colección permanente del American Folk Art Museum.
La puerta de Jean-Marcel –creada en colaboración con la obra de Renée Stout para esta exposición– es un altar en homenaje al espíritu de Aponte. Pero también es un cruce o portal entre el mundo de los mortales y el de los espíritus, que invita a la energía de Aponte a entrar para ayudar a la diáspora africana en su continua lucha por el derecho de sus miembros a ser ellos mismos. Funciona, asimismo, como símbolo de nuestra habilidad para abrir la puerta a nuevas posibilidades cuando descubrimos el poder que tenemos para crear un mundo mejor para nosotros. Toda la madera utilizada en esta obra fue tomada del hogar de St. Jacques, siniestrado por el huracán Katrina en el vecindario Tremé,

Renée Stout creció en Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, y recibió su diploma en Bellas Artes (BFA) de la Carnegie Mellon University en 1980, donde se especializó en pintura. Después de trasladarse a Washington, DC en 1985, comenzó a explorar las raíces espirituales y culturales de su herencia afroamericana a través de sus obras, cada vez más escultóricas, inspiradas en la estética y la filosofía de los objetos rituales kongo. El arte de Stout llamó la atención de curadores de arte en museos de todo Estados Unidos y se convirtió en la primera artista en tener una exposición individual en el Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Inspirada en la diáspora africana, acontecimientos históricos y noticias contemporáneas, así como en la vida cotidiana en su vecindario de DC, Stout trabaja en diversos medios, tales como pintura, dibujo, escultura con materiales mixtos, fotografía e instalación. Ha recibido reconocimientos de la Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Bader Fund, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, la Gottleib Foundation y Anonymous Was a Woman. También recibió el Driskell Prize, otorgado por el High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia) y el Sondheim Award de la Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. La obra de Stout figura en muchos museos y colecciones privadas nacionales e internacionales, incluyendo el nuevo Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture en Washington, DC.
El homenaje y la reinterpretación contemporánea que hace Renée del Libro de pinturas de Aponte tienen como objetivo crear el mismo tipo de objeto focal o talismán para una revolución que fue el libro original de collages, dibujos y pinturas. Y, al igual que Aponte, Renée ha dejado sus imágenes intencionalmente abiertas a diversos niveles de lectura. Su deseo es que reimaginar el libro nos ayude a canalizar nuestra energía colectiva para animar al libro original a salir de su escondite.

José Bedia is an internationally acclaimed Cuban painter hose art is inspired by many sacred sources, including initiation into the Brillumba lineage of the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte. Bedia’s work often critiques colonial histories by combining myths, symbols, and ritual elements with references to nature and global warfare. His time in Angola as part of the cultural brigades that supported the Angolan-Cuban War against Namibia and South Africa (1985) amplified his quest for the African and indigenous roots of American cultures. He has conducted extensive research in Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Laos.

Bedia studied at the San Alejandro Art Academy and the Instituto Superior del Arte. He participated in the first Havana Biennial (1984) and first showed abroad in Paris in Magiciens de la Terre (1989). He represented Cuba at the 1990 Venice Biennale and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992). Bedia and his family moved to Mexico in 1991 and settled in Miami in 1993. His art has since been exhibited in the Havana, São Paulo, Venice and Beijing Biennales. His work is featured in numerous collections, including the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes (Havana); MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, and Guggenheim (New York); Tate Modern (London); Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); La Colección Daros (Zurich), MEIAC, DA2, IVAM, CAAM (Spain); and MOCA and PAMM (Miami).

Bedia’s “Júbilo de Aponte” responds to several images in Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” among them Aponte’s selfportrait, the battle scene between white and black armies, depictions of Havana fortresses, the Virgin of Regla, and the Abyssinian lion. Bedia arranged the piece to suggest a construction, a monument or mausoleum, to Aponte’s memory. All of the elements are interlinked and united by a black ribbon—white ribbons are mentioned several times throughout the text as one of the objects that authorities confiscated in his house—so he turned them black instead to allude to a state of mourning.

Leonardo Benzant’s art draws upon his Afro-Dominican/Haitian-American heritage. His practice includes painting, performance, sculpture, sound and installation as he investigates deeply personal experiences of identity, ancestry, family, community and spirituality. Benzant, at times, metaphorically refers to his practice as a form of Urban Shamanism that enfolds information from the uniquely shared histories of code switching, double-consciousness and multiple narratives that people of African descent inherited or adopted as survival strategies for daily life. As a result, his work straddles two worlds— bridging the visible and invisible—while embodying the dynamics of being both sacred and secular. Benzant was recently an artist in residence at Galveston Artist Residency in Texas. His work was featured in the solo exhibition, Afrosupernatural (Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ). He has
participated in group exhibitions, including notable shows at Jenkins Johnson Gallery (New York, NY), The Third Line (Dubai, UAE) and 101/EXHIBIT (Los Angeles, CA). His art is featured in numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture (Charlotte, NC). He is a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant. Benzant attended Pratt Institute.
While Benzant was beginning to work on his “Serenade for Aponte,” he was mistaken for someone else and detained by Galveston police. That personal experience of interrogation deepened his sense of connection to Aponte. The energy of intimidation became embedded in the work, yet transmuted as he sewed and beaded. Benzant intends his sculpture as an nkisi-inspired power object, one that allowed him to explore feelings of being captured or cornered, while offering an opportunity to make something impactful, transformative and transportative, like alchemy.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Édouard Duval Carrié was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris, France; and at the University of Loyola Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Duval Carrié’s art belongs to many prominent museum and private collections globally, including the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa, USA); Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida, USA); Musee des Arts Africains et Océaniens (Paris, France); Musée du Pantheon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. In his work, Duval Carrié portrays a “Marvelous Reality,” as defined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in the prologue for his book, The Kingdom of this World, a story about Haiti that strongly influenced the artist. As a result, Duval Carrié enfolds into his art the fantastic world of his country—by rendering its illustrious myths and legends—in ways that clearly critique the prevailing social and political order within Haitian society. Duval Carrié’s art also features important aspects of Haitian history, including revolutionary heroes and other relevant figures. He references them to comment on the vital impact of Haitian history on contemporary society, including the legacy of slavery and independence and its weighted imprint on the country’s
development up to the present. Duval Carrié and his art also emphasize the neurological effects of immigration, exile,
and displacement on daily Haitian life, at home and abroad.
Duval Carrié has long been interested in connections between Haiti and the Spanish Caribbean, and José Antonio Aponte is key for understanding the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba. Duval Carrié was also drawn to other aspects of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” from his depiction of the biblical story of creation, to the representation of goddesses such as Minerva to the presence of Prester John and Ethiopia. The four paintings here, which respond to two of Aponte’s láminas, convey a sense of how Aponte condensed in his book not only his own history, but that of the whole of the Black Atlantic--a feat in itself and a unique enterprise but unfortunately lost to us.

Teresita Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Fernández’s experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular illusions that evoke natural phenomena and engage audiences in immersive art experiences and conceptual way-finding. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of
American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. Fernández received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For Visionary Aponte, Fernández reflected on Aponte’s understanding of the cosmos as a space of both personal and political reprieve, a space inherently democratic because it could not be colonized. The piece, in pyrite, oil, graphite, and gold, also evokes West African alchemy traditions, with which Aponte and his co-conspirators may have been familiar.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL; RACING MY GIRL, SALLY; ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer; GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR; and MOTHER WIT & WATER BORN, a trilogy, including BETWEEN WHISPERED BLOOD-LINES. Her work has been shared at the former Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Capital Fringe Festival, Washington, DC); Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick (New Jersey); and in New York at Wings Theatre, Brecht Forum, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, The Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement, Dumbo Sky and The Little Carib Theatre. Mercer’s writing is published in: The Killens Review
of Arts & Letters, Black Renaissance Noire, Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition and Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance. She has performed in collaboration with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Angela’s Pulse, Abigail DeVille and Charlotte Brathwaite, BWA for BLM and others. Mercer is a co-founder and co-director of Ocean Ana Rising: www. oarinc.org. She is currently a doctoral fellow of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a MFA from American University. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College. Find updates on Mercer’s work at http://windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com.
Mercer’s “Invocation for José Antonio Aponte” calls on the energy that emboldened Aponte to channel The Word into a transnational, visual manifesto of liberation for black Cubans. But Mercer also calls out to ancestral multitudes at the diaspora’s threshold and birthing space--the ocean, Yemonja, Mami Wata, Our Lady Regla--transcending time and perceived national boundaries. We are here now, and before before; we are future, and the living embodiment of sacred cosmologies always returning to push us forward.

Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín and grew up in Havana. He received a degree from the National School of Arts (1984). While Novoa has lived in Miami since 1995, he maintains a studio in Vedado (Havana) and works on site specific murals and ephemeral projects globally. Since 1987, Novoa has had solo exhibitions at the Cheekwood Museum, (Nashville); in Miami at the Lowe Museum of Art (University of Miami), Locust Project and the former Miami Art Museum; at the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, MA); the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame, IN); and in Havana at Espacio Aglutinador, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and La Galería Habana, among others. Novoa’s work has been featured in many group exhibitions globally, including Lost in Landscape, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Trento, Italy); Politics: I do not like it, but it likes me, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia (Gdansk, Poland); Perder la forma humana, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, (Madrid, Spain);
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA); Crisis | America Latina | Arte y Confrontacion (1910-2010), el Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA). Novoa’s awards include grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. His work is featured in important private and public collections. He has also completed several notable public art commissions.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist who spent her childhood and adolescence in Normandy (France), before settling in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and later in Miami. Her strong attachment to her island occurred after her studies during which time Plaisir searched for and, from reading history, learned more details related to her past and her identity. As a result, she combines painting, drawing and monumental installations with performance to present highly intense visual experiences. Plaisir’s art blends life and fiction in both autobiographical and historical narratives from the Caribbean that touch upon universal themes like power, domination, life and death.
She is inspired by Italian quattrocento, Latin American and Caribbean literature. Plaisir incorporates textiles, fibers and fabrics that are socially meaningful into her work. She uses her daily practice to examine the many roles of the individual within society. Her art conveys a sense of humor and beauty while exploring any evidence of society’s humanity that she may discover in our increasingly digital world. Plaisir’s art is poetic. Her essence is theatrical. Her work may appear in many forms, including monumentally-scaled installations or itinerant in-situ performances within exhibitions. Her compositions have been used as children’s book illustrations and other publications and as drawings for animation. Since 2000, Plaisir has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She has also participated in various international contemporary art biennials.
Plaisir was drawn to Aponte’s story—which she saw as at once unreal, beautiful, poetic, formidable, tragic, and cruel—and to Aponte the man, who she imagined as a character filled with holiness, goodness, and humanity. Her series of drawings, titled “The Book of Life,” do not depict particular pages of Aponte’s book. Rather they evoke the way Aponte escapes from the world by deconstructing his time and place, moving through mythology, religion, death, war, love. For Plaisir, Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” represents a kind of beautiful exile, his process of dreaming about a better world.

Asser Saint-Val is a painter, sculptor and installation artist. Cumulative and objective, Saint-Val’s pictures, objects, and environments engage the aesthetics and metaphors of melanin (the organic compound responsible for human skin, hair, and eye color) and neuromelanin (a pigment found specifically in the dopaminergic neurons at the base of the brain). Saint-Val’s images explore the metaphysical reality and materiality of melanin and neuromelanin in relation to identity, his conscientious artistic voice, and his understanding of the roots of racism. Saint-Val’s paintings portray quasi-figurative images that evoke ideas central to modern debates on race and biology. Blending traditional and unconventional art materials (including coffee, chocolate, ginger, and tea), Saint-Val strives to create a surreal fantasia that activates the audience’s imagination with multisensory environments.
Asser Saint-Val moved to South Florida in 1988. He earned BFAs in painting and graphic design from the New World School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited in Florida, New York and throughout the Caribbean. His art is featured in prestigious private collections, including: Francie Bishop Good, Dr. Arturo Mosquera, the Rubell Family and Carlos Sanchoo. Saint-Val has twice received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship Award.
In 2012, he created The Philosopher’s Stone, a large-scale interactive public installation and his largest work to date,
with support from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
In approaching Aponte’s trial testimony and “Book of Paintings,” St. Val was particularly drawn to Aponte’s use of Greek mythology. As a scholar, artist, and genius ahead of his time, Aponte was exploring ideologies of gods and goddesses from Greek Mythology as a tool for transformation, self-empowerment and revolution. St. Val also believes that Aponte used these figures to make connections to himself as a spiritual entity, anticipating a new spiritual philosophy of Afro-Centrism, in which black scholars trace the genesis of the melanated people as far back as Atlantis and Lemuria, the Dogon people, and the star Sirius.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques is a California-born self taught artist with deep Louisiana Creole roots and a couple of academic degrees in other subjects. His first love is music, and he spent much of his life as a poet and performing artist until Hurricane Katrina hit and sent him into a silent meditation from which emerged Jean-Marcel the visual artist. St. Jacques’s great-grandmother made patchwork strip quilts and his great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk for a living. As a visual artist, he works mainly with wood and junk. His wooden quilts represent a way of being with the spirits of his great-grandmother who quilted and his great-grandfather who collected junk. They are also a way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris left by Hurricane Katrina, to find beauty in the ugliness of one of this country’s worst human disasters and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab his house for him and his family.
St. Jacques has pieces in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Jean Marcel’s doorway--created in collaboration with Renée Stout’s work for this show-- is both an altar in homage to the spirit of Aponte, as well as a crossroads or portal between the mortal world and the spirit world, inviting Aponte’s energy to enter and assist the people of the African Diaspora in our ongoing struggle for the right to be ourselves. It also functions as symbol of our ability to open the door to new possibilities as we discover the power we have to create a better world for ourselves. All of the wood used in this work is reclaimed from his Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé neighborhood, built not too long after Aponte’s execution.

Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 where her focus was on painting. However, in 1985, immediately after moving to Washington, D.C., she began to explore the spiritual and cultural roots of her African American heritage through her increasingly sculptural works,
which found their early inspiration in the aesthetics and philosophy of Kongo ritual objects. Stout’s art attracted the attention of museum curators across the United States and led to her becoming the first American artist to have a solo exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Inspired by the African Diaspora, historical and current world events, as well as everyday life in her DC neighborhood, Stout now creates in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation. She has been the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bader Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottleib Foundation and Anonymous Was A Woman. She was also the recipient of the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) and the Sondheim Award from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. Stout’s work is featured in many museum and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Renée’s homage and contemporary reinterpretation of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” aims to create the same kind of focal object or talisman for a revolution that was Aponte’s original intent for his book of collages, drawings and paintings. And like Aponte, she has purposely left the imagery open-ended in order for it to be interpreted on many levels. It is her desire that re-imagining the book will help us to channel our collective energy to coax the original out from its hiding place.

Vickie Pierre is a Haitian American, mixed media artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she studied at the School of Visual Arts. Pierre’s practice includes various techniques and materials such as painting, drawing and collage, as well as assemblage and installation. Her continued focus is on the exploration of self-identity, with references to feminine tropes and historic and contemporary cultural politics, while concurrently observing and considering latent associations to Haitian culture and mythologies. Pierre has participated in exhibitions worldwide, including National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Miami Art Museum (Perez Art Museum Miami), Miami, FL; White Box, NY, NY; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL.; Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sete, France and Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, among others. Her artworks can be found in private collections as well as public institutions, including Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland; Millennium Partners
Collection of Contemporary Art at The Four Seasons, Miami, Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland and the Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection, Miami. In 2017, Pierre was a recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award for Miami-Dade County. The artist lives and works in Miami.
In Pierre’s piece, titled Lamina 35, the anthropomorphic forms represent a female and a male (José Antonio Aponte) reposing in a dream state. The figures are bejeweled and bound by elements of the natural world, evoking the Yoruba religion believed to have been practiced by Aponte. The length of rope around the black form foreshadows the capture of Aponte by the Spanish government in Cuba and the subsequent hanging and decapitation of the revolutionaryleader.

Emilio Martinez is an Honduran-born American artist who embraced painting as a means of expression. He was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in 1981. He immigrated with his family to Miami in 1994, where he has resided since. His work comes to life through his persistence of the dream realm – created through the constant repetitive dreams from his childhood memories. He has ongoing contact with the spiritual world through icons, symbols and texts from an unknown past of ancient primitive indigenous descendants. His work comes to life through the bicultural puzzle, which he decodes. On a daily basis, he uses a sketchbook where he records his obsessions, passions, and fears.
Martínez’s work has been exhibited at the University of Syracuse, the Purvis Young Museum of Art (Miami), the Little Haiti Cultural Center (Miami), and the Instituto Cultural de México (Miami), among others.
Martínez’s piece for “Visionary Aponte” takes up the figure of Nerpomene, who appears in lámina 60 of the “Book of Paintings” and whom Aponte calls the “goddess of battles.” Mártinez interprets Nerpomene as a beast-like creature, a whirlwind figure composed of many spirits around her, all heeding her call to wage total war against unjust rule. The piece strives to reach back into to faded history to extoll a heroic visionary, while inviting others to survey the world view of Aponte and his legacy.

José Bedia is an internationally acclaimed Cuban painter hose art is inspired by many sacred sources, including initiation into the Brillumba lineage of the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte. Bedia’s work often critiques colonial histories by combining myths, symbols, and ritual elements with references to nature and global warfare. His time in Angola as part of the cultural brigades that supported the Angolan-Cuban War against Namibia and South Africa (1985) amplified his quest for the African and indigenous roots of American cultures. He has conducted extensive research in Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Laos.

Bedia studied at the San Alejandro Art Academy and the Instituto Superior del Arte. He participated in the first Havana Biennial (1984) and first showed abroad in Paris in Magiciens de la Terre (1989). He represented Cuba at the 1990 Venice Biennale and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992). Bedia and his family moved to Mexico in 1991 and settled in Miami in 1993. His art has since been exhibited in the Havana, São Paulo, Venice and Beijing Biennales. His work is featured in numerous collections, including the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes (Havana); MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, and Guggenheim (New York); Tate Modern (London); Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); La Colección Daros (Zurich), MEIAC, DA2, IVAM, CAAM (Spain); and MOCA and PAMM (Miami).

Bedia’s “Júbilo de Aponte” responds to several images in Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” among them Aponte’s selfportrait, the battle scene between white and black armies, depictions of Havana fortresses, the Virgin of Regla, and the Abyssinian lion. Bedia arranged the piece to suggest a construction, a monument or mausoleum, to Aponte’s memory. All of the elements are interlinked and united by a black ribbon—white ribbons are mentioned several times throughout the text as one of the objects that authorities confiscated in his house—so he turned them black instead to allude to a state of mourning.

Leonardo Benzant’s art draws upon his Afro-Dominican/Haitian-American heritage. His practice includes painting, performance, sculpture, sound and installation as he investigates deeply personal experiences of identity, ancestry, family, community and spirituality. Benzant, at times, metaphorically refers to his practice as a form of Urban Shamanism that enfolds information from the uniquely shared histories of code switching, double-consciousness and multiple narratives that people of African descent inherited or adopted as survival strategies for daily life. As a result, his work straddles two worlds— bridging the visible and invisible—while embodying the dynamics of being both sacred and secular. Benzant was recently an artist in residence at Galveston Artist Residency in Texas. His work was featured in the solo exhibition, Afrosupernatural (Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ). He has
participated in group exhibitions, including notable shows at Jenkins Johnson Gallery (New York, NY), The Third Line (Dubai, UAE) and 101/EXHIBIT (Los Angeles, CA). His art is featured in numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture (Charlotte, NC). He is a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant. Benzant attended Pratt Institute.
While Benzant was beginning to work on his “Serenade for Aponte,” he was mistaken for someone else and detained by Galveston police. That personal experience of interrogation deepened his sense of connection to Aponte. The energy of intimidation became embedded in the work, yet transmuted as he sewed and beaded. Benzant intends his sculpture as an nkisi-inspired power object, one that allowed him to explore feelings of being captured or cornered, while offering an opportunity to make something impactful, transformative and transportative, like alchemy.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Édouard Duval Carrié was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris, France; and at the University of Loyola Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Duval Carrié’s art belongs to many prominent museum and private collections globally, including the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa, USA); Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida, USA); Musee des Arts Africains et Océaniens (Paris, France); Musée du Pantheon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. In his work, Duval Carrié portrays a “Marvelous Reality,” as defined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in the prologue for his book, The Kingdom of this World, a story about Haiti that strongly influenced the artist. As a result, Duval Carrié enfolds into his art the fantastic world of his country—by rendering its illustrious myths and legends—in ways that clearly critique the prevailing social and political order within Haitian society. Duval Carrié’s art also features important aspects of Haitian history, including revolutionary heroes and other relevant figures. He references them to comment on the vital impact of Haitian history on contemporary society, including the legacy of slavery and independence and its weighted imprint on the country’s
development up to the present. Duval Carrié and his art also emphasize the neurological effects of immigration, exile,
and displacement on daily Haitian life, at home and abroad.
Duval Carrié has long been interested in connections between Haiti and the Spanish Caribbean, and José Antonio Aponte is key for understanding the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba. Duval Carrié was also drawn to other aspects of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” from his depiction of the biblical story of creation, to the representation of goddesses such as Minerva to the presence of Prester John and Ethiopia. The four paintings here, which respond to two of Aponte’s láminas, convey a sense of how Aponte condensed in his book not only his own history, but that of the whole of the Black Atlantic--a feat in itself and a unique enterprise but unfortunately lost to us.

Teresita Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Fernández’s experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular illusions that evoke natural phenomena and engage audiences in immersive art experiences and conceptual way-finding. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of
American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. Fernández received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For Visionary Aponte, Fernández reflected on Aponte’s understanding of the cosmos as a space of both personal and political reprieve, a space inherently democratic because it could not be colonized. The piece, in pyrite, oil, graphite, and gold, also evokes West African alchemy traditions, with which Aponte and his co-conspirators may have been familiar.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL; RACING MY GIRL, SALLY; ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer; GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR; and MOTHER WIT & WATER BORN, a trilogy, including BETWEEN WHISPERED BLOOD-LINES. Her work has been shared at the former Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Capital Fringe Festival, Washington, DC); Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick (New Jersey); and in New York at Wings Theatre, Brecht Forum, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, The Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement, Dumbo Sky and The Little Carib Theatre. Mercer’s writing is published in: The Killens Review
of Arts & Letters, Black Renaissance Noire, Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition and Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance. She has performed in collaboration with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Angela’s Pulse, Abigail DeVille and Charlotte Brathwaite, BWA for BLM and others. Mercer is a co-founder and co-director of Ocean Ana Rising: www. oarinc.org. She is currently a doctoral fellow of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a MFA from American University. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College. Find updates on Mercer’s work at http://windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com.
Mercer’s “Invocation for José Antonio Aponte” calls on the energy that emboldened Aponte to channel The Word into a transnational, visual manifesto of liberation for black Cubans. But Mercer also calls out to ancestral multitudes at the diaspora’s threshold and birthing space--the ocean, Yemonja, Mami Wata, Our Lady Regla--transcending time and perceived national boundaries. We are here now, and before before; we are future, and the living embodiment of sacred cosmologies always returning to push us forward.

Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín and grew up in Havana. He received a degree from the National School of Arts (1984). While Novoa has lived in Miami since 1995, he maintains a studio in Vedado (Havana) and works on site specific murals and ephemeral projects globally. Since 1987, Novoa has had solo exhibitions at the Cheekwood Museum, (Nashville); in Miami at the Lowe Museum of Art (University of Miami), Locust Project and the former Miami Art Museum; at the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, MA); the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame, IN); and in Havana at Espacio Aglutinador, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and La Galería Habana, among others. Novoa’s work has been featured in many group exhibitions globally, including Lost in Landscape, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Trento, Italy); Politics: I do not like it, but it likes me, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia (Gdansk, Poland); Perder la forma humana, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, (Madrid, Spain);
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA); Crisis | America Latina | Arte y Confrontacion (1910-2010), el Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA). Novoa’s awards include grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. His work is featured in important private and public collections. He has also completed several notable public art commissions.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist who spent her childhood and adolescence in Normandy (France), before settling in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and later in Miami. Her strong attachment to her island occurred after her studies during which time Plaisir searched for and, from reading history, learned more details related to her past and her identity. As a result, she combines painting, drawing and monumental installations with performance to present highly intense visual experiences. Plaisir’s art blends life and fiction in both autobiographical and historical narratives from the Caribbean that touch upon universal themes like power, domination, life and death.
She is inspired by Italian quattrocento, Latin American and Caribbean literature. Plaisir incorporates textiles, fibers and fabrics that are socially meaningful into her work. She uses her daily practice to examine the many roles of the individual within society. Her art conveys a sense of humor and beauty while exploring any evidence of society’s humanity that she may discover in our increasingly digital world. Plaisir’s art is poetic. Her essence is theatrical. Her work may appear in many forms, including monumentally-scaled installations or itinerant in-situ performances within exhibitions. Her compositions have been used as children’s book illustrations and other publications and as drawings for animation. Since 2000, Plaisir has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She has also participated in various international contemporary art biennials.
Plaisir was drawn to Aponte’s story—which she saw as at once unreal, beautiful, poetic, formidable, tragic, and cruel—and to Aponte the man, who she imagined as a character filled with holiness, goodness, and humanity. Her series of drawings, titled “The Book of Life,” do not depict particular pages of Aponte’s book. Rather they evoke the way Aponte escapes from the world by deconstructing his time and place, moving through mythology, religion, death, war, love. For Plaisir, Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” represents a kind of beautiful exile, his process of dreaming about a better world.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques is a California-born self taught artist with deep Louisiana Creole roots and a couple of academic degrees in other subjects. His first love is music, and he spent much of his life as a poet and performing artist until Hurricane Katrina hit and sent him into a silent meditation from which emerged Jean-Marcel the visual artist. St. Jacques’s great-grandmother made patchwork strip quilts and his great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk for a living. As a visual artist, he works mainly with wood and junk. His wooden quilts represent a way of being with the spirits of his great-grandmother who quilted and his great-grandfather who collected junk. They are also a way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris left by Hurricane Katrina, to find beauty in the ugliness of one of this country’s worst human disasters and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab his house for him and his family.
St. Jacques has pieces in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Jean Marcel’s doorway--created in collaboration with Renée Stout’s work for this show-- is both an altar in homage to the spirit of Aponte, as well as a crossroads or portal between the mortal world and the spirit world, inviting Aponte’s energy to enter and assist the people of the African Diaspora in our ongoing struggle for the right to be ourselves. It also functions as symbol of our ability to open the door to new possibilities as we discover the power we have to create a better world for ourselves. All of the wood used in this work is reclaimed from his Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé neighborhood, built not too long after Aponte’s execution.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques is a California-born self taught artist with deep Louisiana Creole roots and a couple of academic degrees in other subjects. His first love is music, and he spent much of his life as a poet and performing artist until Hurricane Katrina hit and sent him into a silent meditation from which emerged Jean-Marcel the visual artist. St. Jacques’s great-grandmother made patchwork strip quilts and his great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk for a living. As a visual artist, he works mainly with wood and junk. His wooden quilts represent a way of being with the spirits of his great-grandmother who quilted and his great-grandfather who collected junk. They are also a way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris left by Hurricane Katrina, to find beauty in the ugliness of one of this country’s worst human disasters and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab his house for him and his family.
St. Jacques has pieces in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Jean Marcel’s doorway--created in collaboration with Renée Stout’s work for this show-- is both an altar in homage to the spirit of Aponte, as well as a crossroads or portal between the mortal world and the spirit world, inviting Aponte’s energy to enter and assist the people of the African Diaspora in our ongoing struggle for the right to be ourselves. It also functions as symbol of our ability to open the door to new possibilities as we discover the power we have to create a better world for ourselves. All of the wood used in this work is reclaimed from his Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé neighborhood, built not too long after Aponte’s execution.

Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 where her focus was on painting. However, in 1985, immediately after moving to Washington, D.C., she began to explore the spiritual and cultural roots of her African American heritage through her increasingly sculptural works,
which found their early inspiration in the aesthetics and philosophy of Kongo ritual objects. Stout’s art attracted the attention of museum curators across the United States and led to her becoming the first American artist to have a solo exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Inspired by the African Diaspora, historical and current world events, as well as everyday life in her DC neighborhood, Stout now creates in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation. She has been the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bader Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottleib Foundation and Anonymous Was A Woman. She was also the recipient of the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) and the Sondheim Award from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. Stout’s work is featured in many museum and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Renée’s homage and contemporary reinterpretation of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” aims to create the same kind of focal object or talisman for a revolution that was Aponte’s original intent for his book of collages, drawings and paintings. And like Aponte, she has purposely left the imagery open-ended in order for it to be interpreted on many levels. It is her desire that re-imagining the book will help us to channel our collective energy to coax the original out from its hiding place.

Vickie Pierre is a Haitian American, mixed media artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she studied at the School of Visual Arts. Pierre’s practice includes various techniques and materials such as painting, drawing and collage, as well as assemblage and installation. Her continued focus is on the exploration of self-identity, with references to feminine tropes and historic and contemporary cultural politics, while concurrently observing and considering latent associations to Haitian culture and mythologies. Pierre has participated in exhibitions worldwide, including National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Miami Art Museum (Perez Art Museum Miami), Miami, FL; White Box, NY, NY; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL.; Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sete, France and Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR, among others. Her artworks can be found in private collections as well as public institutions, including Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland; Millennium Partners
Collection of Contemporary Art at The Four Seasons, Miami, Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland and the Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection, Miami. In 2017, Pierre was a recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award for Miami-Dade County. The artist lives and works in Miami.
In Pierre’s piece, titled Lamina 35, the anthropomorphic forms represent a female and a male (José Antonio Aponte) reposing in a dream state. The figures are bejeweled and bound by elements of the natural world, evoking the Yoruba religion believed to have been practiced by Aponte. The length of rope around the black form foreshadows the capture of Aponte by the Spanish government in Cuba and the subsequent hanging and decapitation of the revolutionary leader.

Emilio Martinez is an Honduran-born American artist who embraced painting as a means of expression. He was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in 1981. He immigrated with his family to Miami in 1994, where he has resided since. His work comes to life through his persistence of the dream realm – created through the constant repetitive dreams from his childhood memories. He has ongoing contact with the spiritual world through icons, symbols and texts from an unknown past of ancient primitive indigenous descendants. His work comes to life through the bicultural puzzle, which he decodes. On a daily basis, he uses a sketchbook where he records his obsessions, passions, and fears.
Martínez’s work has been exhibited at the University of Syracuse, the Purvis Young Museum of Art (Miami), the Little Haiti Cultural Center (Miami), and the Instituto Cultural de México (Miami), among others.
Martínez’s piece for “Visionary Aponte” takes up the figure of Nerpomene, who appears in lámina 60 of the “Book of Paintings” and whom Aponte calls the “goddess of battles.” Mártinez interprets Nerpomene as a beast-like creature, a whirlwind figure composed of many spirits around her, all heeding her call to wage total war against unjust rule. The piece strives to reach back into to faded history to extoll a heroic visionary, while inviting others to survey the world view of Aponte and his legacy.

José Bedia is an internationally acclaimed Cuban painter hose art is inspired by many sacred sources, including initiation into the Brillumba lineage of the Afro-Cuban religion Palo Monte. Bedia’s work often critiques colonial histories by combining myths, symbols, and ritual elements with references to nature and global warfare. His time in Angola as part of the cultural brigades that supported the Angolan-Cuban War against Namibia and South Africa (1985) amplified his quest for the African and indigenous roots of American cultures. He has conducted extensive research in Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Laos.

Bedia studied at the San Alejandro Art Academy and the Instituto Superior del Arte. He participated in the first Havana Biennial (1984) and first showed abroad in Paris in Magiciens de la Terre (1989). He represented Cuba at the 1990 Venice Biennale and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992). Bedia and his family moved to Mexico in 1991 and settled in Miami in 1993. His art has since been exhibited in the Havana, São Paulo, Venice and Beijing Biennales. His work is featured in numerous collections, including the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes (Havana); MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, and Guggenheim (New York); Tate Modern (London); Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC); La Colección Daros (Zurich), MEIAC, DA2, IVAM, CAAM (Spain); and MOCA and PAMM (Miami).

Bedia’s “Júbilo de Aponte” responds to several images in Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” among them Aponte’s selfportrait, the battle scene between white and black armies, depictions of Havana fortresses, the Virgin of Regla, and the Abyssinian lion. Bedia arranged the piece to suggest a construction, a monument or mausoleum, to Aponte’s memory. All of the elements are interlinked and united by a black ribbon—white ribbons are mentioned several times throughout the text as one of the objects that authorities confiscated in his house—so he turned them black instead to allude to a state of mourning.

Leonardo Benzant’s art draws upon his Afro-Dominican/Haitian-American heritage. His practice includes painting, performance, sculpture, sound and installation as he investigates deeply personal experiences of identity, ancestry, family, community and spirituality. Benzant, at times, metaphorically refers to his practice as a form of Urban Shamanism that enfolds information from the uniquely shared histories of code switching, double-consciousness and multiple narratives that people of African descent inherited or adopted as survival strategies for daily life. As a result, his work straddles two worlds— bridging the visible and invisible—while embodying the dynamics of being both sacred and secular. Benzant was recently an artist in residence at Galveston Artist Residency in Texas. His work was featured in the solo exhibition, Afrosupernatural (Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ). He has
participated in group exhibitions, including notable shows at Jenkins Johnson Gallery (New York, NY), The Third Line (Dubai, UAE) and 101/EXHIBIT (Los Angeles, CA). His art is featured in numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture (Charlotte, NC). He is a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant. Benzant attended Pratt Institute.
While Benzant was beginning to work on his “Serenade for Aponte,” he was mistaken for someone else and detained by Galveston police. That personal experience of interrogation deepened his sense of connection to Aponte. The energy of intimidation became embedded in the work, yet transmuted as he sewed and beaded. Benzant intends his sculpture as an nkisi-inspired power object, one that allowed him to explore feelings of being captured or cornered, while offering an opportunity to make something impactful, transformative and transportative, like alchemy.

Juan Roberto Diago graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1990) and began to exhibit his artwork soon after. Diago comes from a family of artists and the work of his grandfather, after whom he is named, was a big influence. The senior Roberto Diago, despite his short life, was one of the pivotal voices of Cuban art in the 1940s.
From the beginning of his career, Diago has been preoccupied with the theme of identity, which he renders and conveys through social inferences. Thematically, the unifying thread in his oeuvre has been his critique of racism in Cuba; something that does not “officially” exist but is present in daily life. His early pieces were distinguished by the use of materials such as discarded wood and metal, as a reference to the living conditions of black people. Although black people do not exclusively endure these conditions, they have historically lived in the poorest neighborhoods and thus subjected to the worst overall living situations. This inspired Diago to make numerous installations that represent scaled-down houses that look like real. Since the 1990s, Diago has participated in numerous exhibitions in Cuba and abroad. He represented Cuba in the 1997 Venice Biennale. His art is represented in prestigious collections globally, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals) Art Foundation in
Miami, Florida; and the Rubin Foundation Collection, New York.
The artist, who was unable to travel to the opening, explains that Aponte inspires him “because he is a warrior, an angel of resistance, and of love.”

Édouard Duval Carrié was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris, France; and at the University of Loyola Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Duval Carrié’s art belongs to many prominent museum and private collections globally, including the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa, USA); Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida, USA); Musee des Arts Africains et Océaniens (Paris, France); Musée du Pantheon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. In his work, Duval Carrié portrays a “Marvelous Reality,” as defined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in the prologue for his book, The Kingdom of this World, a story about Haiti that strongly influenced the artist. As a result, Duval Carrié enfolds into his art the fantastic world of his country—by rendering its illustrious myths and legends—in ways that clearly critique the prevailing social and political order within Haitian society. Duval Carrié’s art also features important aspects of Haitian history, including revolutionary heroes and other relevant figures. He references them to comment on the vital impact of Haitian history on contemporary society, including the legacy of slavery and independence and its weighted imprint on the country’s
development up to the present. Duval Carrié and his art also emphasize the neurological effects of immigration, exile,
and displacement on daily Haitian life, at home and abroad.
Duval Carrié has long been interested in connections between Haiti and the Spanish Caribbean, and José Antonio Aponte is key for understanding the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba. Duval Carrié was also drawn to other aspects of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings,” from his depiction of the biblical story of creation, to the representation of goddesses such as Minerva to the presence of Prester John and Ethiopia. The four paintings here, which respond to two of Aponte’s láminas, convey a sense of how Aponte condensed in his book not only his own history, but that of the whole of the Black Atlantic--a feat in itself and a unique enterprise but unfortunately lost to us.

Teresita Fernández is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Fernández’s experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular illusions that evoke natural phenomena and engage audiences in immersive art experiences and conceptual way-finding. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of
American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. Fernández received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For Visionary Aponte, Fernández reflected on Aponte’s understanding of the cosmos as a space of both personal and political reprieve, a space inherently democratic because it could not be colonized. The piece, in pyrite, oil, graphite, and gold, also evokes West African alchemy traditions, with which Aponte and his co-conspirators may have been familiar.

Clara Morera studied at the National School of Visual Arts and graduated from the San Alejandro Academy, both in Havana. Throughout her studies she focused on painting. She has also worked for many years in a range of disciplines including tapestry, soft sculpture, drawing and multimedia installations. Morera is a member of the Afro-Cuban Art group and Grupo Antillano. Her work was featured in the Grupo Antillano exhibition, Drapetomania, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD, San Francisco, CA). Morera has also exhibited in noted public collections such as the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC (1992); the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana (1970); and recently at Castle Galleries, New Rochelle College (NY); the Lyman Museum (CT); Newark Museum (NJ); the Lowe Museum of Art, University of Miami (FL); and Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Morera’s work has been written about in Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism
and Revue Noire, among others. “A specific feature of Morera’s oeuvre,” writes Ana Belén Martín Sevillano, “is the recurrent depiction of feminine figures . . . represented in unconventional attitudes in an attempt to break down the traditional imaginary.”

Nina Angela Mercer is a cultural worker. Her plays include GUTTA BEAUTIFUL; RACING MY GIRL, SALLY; ITAGUA MEJI: A Road & A Prayer; GYPSY & THE BULLY DOOR; and MOTHER WIT & WATER BORN, a trilogy, including BETWEEN WHISPERED BLOOD-LINES. Her work has been shared at the former Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Capital Fringe Festival, Washington, DC); Rutgers University-Newark and New Brunswick (New Jersey); and in New York at Wings Theatre, Brecht Forum, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, The Nuyorican Poets’ Café, Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement, Dumbo Sky and The Little Carib Theatre. Mercer’s writing is published in: The Killens Review
of Arts & Letters, Black Renaissance Noire, Voices Magazine #SayHerName Edition and Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance. She has performed in collaboration with Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, Angela’s Pulse, Abigail DeVille and Charlotte Brathwaite, BWA for BLM and others. Mercer is a co-founder and co-director of Ocean Ana Rising: www. oarinc.org. She is currently a doctoral fellow of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a MFA from American University. She currently teaches at Brooklyn College. Find updates on Mercer’s work at http://windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com.
Mercer’s “Invocation for José Antonio Aponte” calls on the energy that emboldened Aponte to channel The Word into a transnational, visual manifesto of liberation for black Cubans. But Mercer also calls out to ancestral multitudes at the diaspora’s threshold and birthing space--the ocean, Yemonja, Mami Wata, Our Lady Regla--transcending time and perceived national boundaries. We are here now, and before before; we are future, and the living embodiment of sacred cosmologies always returning to push us forward.

Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín and grew up in Havana. He received a degree from the National School of Arts (1984). While Novoa has lived in Miami since 1995, he maintains a studio in Vedado (Havana) and works on site specific murals and ephemeral projects globally. Since 1987, Novoa has had solo exhibitions at the Cheekwood Museum, (Nashville); in Miami at the Lowe Museum of Art (University of Miami), Locust Project and the former Miami Art Museum; at the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, MA); the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame, IN); and in Havana at Espacio Aglutinador, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and La Galería Habana, among others. Novoa’s work has been featured in many group exhibitions globally, including Lost in Landscape, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Trento, Italy); Politics: I do not like it, but it likes me, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia (Gdansk, Poland); Perder la forma humana, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, (Madrid, Spain);
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA); Crisis | America Latina | Arte y Confrontacion (1910-2010), el Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, El Museo del Barrio (New York, USA). Novoa’s awards include grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. His work is featured in important private and public collections. He has also completed several notable public art commissions.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist who spent her childhood and adolescence in Normandy (France), before settling in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and later in Miami. Her strong attachment to her island occurred after her studies during which time Plaisir searched for and, from reading history, learned more details related to her past and her identity. As a result, she combines painting, drawing and monumental installations with performance to present highly intense visual experiences. Plaisir’s art blends life and fiction in both autobiographical and historical narratives from the Caribbean that touch upon universal themes like power, domination, life and death.
She is inspired by Italian quattrocento, Latin American and Caribbean literature. Plaisir incorporates textiles, fibers and fabrics that are socially meaningful into her work. She uses her daily practice to examine the many roles of the individual within society. Her art conveys a sense of humor and beauty while exploring any evidence of society’s humanity that she may discover in our increasingly digital world. Plaisir’s art is poetic. Her essence is theatrical. Her work may appear in many forms, including monumentally-scaled installations or itinerant in-situ performances within exhibitions. Her compositions have been used as children’s book illustrations and other publications and as drawings for animation. Since 2000, Plaisir has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She has also participated in various international contemporary art biennials.
Plaisir was drawn to Aponte’s story—which she saw as at once unreal, beautiful, poetic, formidable, tragic, and cruel—and to Aponte the man, who she imagined as a character filled with holiness, goodness, and humanity. Her series of drawings, titled “The Book of Life,” do not depict particular pages of Aponte’s book. Rather they evoke the way Aponte escapes from the world by deconstructing his time and place, moving through mythology, religion, death, war, love. For Plaisir, Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” represents a kind of beautiful exile, his process of dreaming about a better world.

Asser Saint-Val is a painter, sculptor and installation artist. Cumulative and objective, Saint-Val’s pictures, objects, and environments engage the aesthetics and metaphors of melanin (the organic compound responsible for human skin, hair, and eye color) and neuromelanin (a pigment found specifically in the dopaminergic neurons at the base of the brain). Saint-Val’s images explore the metaphysical reality and materiality of melanin and neuromelanin in relation to identity, his conscientious artistic voice, and his understanding of the roots of racism. Saint-Val’s paintings portray quasi-figurative images that evoke ideas central to modern debates on race and biology. Blending traditional and unconventional art materials (including coffee, chocolate, ginger, and tea), Saint-Val strives to create a surreal fantasia that activates the audience’s imagination with multisensory environments.
Asser Saint-Val moved to South Florida in 1988. He earned BFAs in painting and graphic design from the New World School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited in Florida, New York and throughout the Caribbean. His art is featured in prestigious private collections, including: Francie Bishop Good, Dr. Arturo Mosquera, the Rubell Family and Carlos Sanchoo. Saint-Val has twice received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship Award.
In 2012, he created The Philosopher’s Stone, a large-scale interactive public installation and his largest work to date,
with support from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
In approaching Aponte’s trial testimony and “Book of Paintings,” St. Val was particularly drawn to Aponte’s use of Greek mythology. As a scholar, artist, and genius ahead of his time, Aponte was exploring ideologies of gods and goddesses from Greek Mythology as a tool for transformation, self-empowerment and revolution. St. Val also believes that Aponte used these figures to make connections to himself as a spiritual entity, anticipating a new spiritual philosophy of Afro-Centrism, in which black scholars trace the genesis of the melanated people as far back as Atlantis and Lemuria, the Dogon people, and the star Sirius.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques is a California-born self taught artist with deep Louisiana Creole roots and a couple of academic degrees in other subjects. His first love is music, and he spent much of his life as a poet and performing artist until Hurricane Katrina hit and sent him into a silent meditation from which emerged Jean-Marcel the visual artist. St. Jacques’s great-grandmother made patchwork strip quilts and his great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk for a living. As a visual artist, he works mainly with wood and junk. His wooden quilts represent a way of being with the spirits of his great-grandmother who quilted and his great-grandfather who collected junk. They are also a way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris left by Hurricane Katrina, to find beauty in the ugliness of one of this country’s worst human disasters and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab his house for him and his family.
St. Jacques has pieces in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Jean Marcel’s doorway--created in collaboration with Renée Stout’s work for this show-- is both an altar in homage to the spirit of Aponte, as well as a crossroads or portal between the mortal world and the spirit world, inviting Aponte’s energy to enter and assist the people of the African Diaspora in our ongoing struggle for the right to be ourselves. It also functions as symbol of our ability to open the door to new possibilities as we discover the power we have to create a better world for ourselves. All of the wood used in this work is reclaimed from his Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé neighborhood, built not too long after Aponte’s execution.

Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 where her focus was on painting. However, in 1985, immediately after moving to Washington, D.C., she began to explore the spiritual and cultural roots of her African American heritage through her increasingly sculptural works,
which found their early inspiration in the aesthetics and philosophy of Kongo ritual objects. Stout’s art attracted the attention of museum curators across the United States and led to her becoming the first American artist to have a solo exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Inspired by the African Diaspora, historical and current world events, as well as everyday life in her DC neighborhood, Stout now creates in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation. She has been the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bader Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottleib Foundation and Anonymous Was A Woman. She was also the recipient of the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) and the Sondheim Award from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. Stout’s work is featured in many museum and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Renée’s homage and contemporary reinterpretation of Aponte’s “Book of Paintings” aims to create the same kind of focal object or talisman for a revolution that was Aponte’s original intent for his book of collages, drawings and paintings. And like Aponte, she has purposely left the imagery open-ended in order for it to be interpreted on many levels. It is her desire that re-imagining the book will help us to channel our collective energy to coax the original out from its hiding place.