200 Years of Afro-Cuban Art is Currently at This Museum
Courtesy of Lowe Art Museum
The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami is presenting what organizers call the “most comprehensive presentation of Afro-Cuban art ever shown.”
On view through September 12, 2026, the dual exhibitions – El Pasado Mio/My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art and Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection – brings together more than 100 works created by 58 Cuban artists over the span of two centuries (between 1822 and 2022).
El Pasado Mio/My Own Past highlights the contributions of Afrodescendant Cuban artists who were historically overlooked or excluded from the traditional canon of Cuban art.
“El Pasado Mio restores critical omissions in the annals of Cuban art history by elevating Afrodescendant artists who have been overlooked, forgotten, or written out of the historical record,” Dr. Jill Deupi, the Lowe Art Museum’s Beaux Arts Executive Director and Chief Curator, said in a release.
Among the exhibition’s highlights are nine paintings by renowned Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, including rarely exhibited works from the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition also reunites works by 11 women artists, who are exhibiting together for the first time. The companion exhibition, Afrocubanismo, explores the 1930s and 1940s cultural movement that embraced Cuba’s African roots through the work of mostly Cuban artists, who identified as white.
Deupi said the exhibition “explores the complexities and contradictions of Afro-Cuban culture, which played a vital and persistent role in Cuban Modernism.” Guest curator Alejandro de la Fuente, director of Harvard’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute, said the paired exhibitions present a different genealogy for Cuban art. “We are rescuing Afrodescendant figures who were sidelined by history and are presenting them with some of the most well-known Cuban artists who are also of African descent,” de la Fuente said in a release.
General admission to the Lowe Art Museum is free. The museum is located on the University of Miami campus and is open Wednesday through Saturday.
For more information, visit lowe.miami.edu.