The Caribbean and Central America are back in the limelight in this issue, with texts that tackle specific situations in Jamaica and events in the Dominican Republic, while private art collections –this topic will generate more assessments in upcoming issues- shows its face in the region. As a complement to all this, there’s an interview that deals with the basics of institutional art collecting from the concrete standpoint of Cuba.
These matters take center stage in today’s debates and discussions related to the memory and tangible heritage of our societies and cultures: the preservation of art based on a rigorous selection is no doubt one of the greatest contemporary challenges for any nation willing to take on visual creation in all of its expressions with rigor and responsibility.
Certain sui generis architecture produced in Latin America, specifically in Mexico, puts us once again in the face of amazing realities that verge on the marvelous real, so widely used in literature, and get shaped up in so many artistic expressions from our own origins. On the other hand, theoretical reflection continues to make its way through as an interesting element, and so does the timely analysis of some of our most outstanding creators, either with the incisive “outside” text or by the hand of personal interviews, together with others that emerge mightily here and there in the international scene.
The reviewed international events –ARCO Madrid and the Whitney Biennial in New York- stand as two of the most controversial gatherings today in the light of new considerations spinning around the art market.
In the same breath, the Havana Biennial gets a cursory media hype –in terms of Cuban art in collateral exhibits exposed next to the main exposition and the MAC/SAN collective project- as it awaits its complex realization during the circulation of this magazine issue. In upcoming issues, a number of reflections on the expositional corpus of this 11th Havana Biennial will let readers delve deeper into this topic.
Jose Carlos de Santiago
Editor & Publisher
