Paul Niell

The ferry from Havana to Regla, Cuba, transports visitors from today’s cruise ship docks across a brief stretch of water in about 20 min. Despite its brevity, this watery passage symbolically foregrounds the Marian devotion on the southern rim of the grand harbor. In this way, water conjoins African diasporic histories of enslavement, labor, survival, resistance, daily life, and religiosity within Havana Bay, into which two urban geographies project. Regla historically served as a municipality for dockworkers and shipwrights and became an enclave for identity creation, civil association, and religious worship for people of African descent. The church and sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de Regla (“Our Lady of Regla”) has nurtured this connection as it houses effigies of the venerated Virgin, adorned in blue. The Virgin of Regla represents one of two, along with El Cobre, of the most important Marian devotions on the island of Cuba and is the focus of insular and diasporic pilgrimage. In Regla, the Virgin’s nautical iconography decorates the sanctuary and historically connects her to the working populations who sustained this devotion as they serviced Havana Harbor with their labor. Adjacent to the church is a waterfront park that looks out on the water and the city of Havana beyond. Bordered on one side by a low wall, the park incorporates a large ceiba tree, ceiba pentandra, also known as the silk cotton or kapok tree, a tropical species with a large trunk and spreading tree canopy native to Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, northern South America, and West Africa (with a similar variety found in South and Southeast Asia). This article considers landscape as a methodology for examining the interplay of this tree and the adjacent church as interwoven and mutually reinforcing sites of devotion for the worship of the Virgin Mary and the oricha Yemayá in Regla, Cuba, with a view toward a broader set of local and global spaces.

In this paper, we consider the material and visual implications of coloniality – the darker side of modernity, and structure of management that underpins and supports modernity’s rhetoric of promises – within the circum-Caribbean through a reflection on curating the exhibition Decolonising Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. By juxtaposing the recent work of Haitian-born American painter and sculptor Edouard Duval- Carrié (1954b) and a selection of historical artefacts from the Southeastern US we bring to light the recursive patterns of colonialism and exploitation in which the Gulf region has been culturally, economically, and politically entangled. Our collaborative exhibition deconstructs the notion of refine- ment both in the aesthetic sense and also as processes by which a resource becomes a product. For Duval-Carrié, the Caribbean is not merely a case study for these broader global dynamics, but rather the crucible from which the modern, industrial age emerges. We thus approach this exhibition as an experiment in decolonising the museum – itself a tool of coloniality – by creating dynamic visual and material relationships in the gallery that deny the viewer the convenient binaries of past/present, art/artefact, and US/ Caribbean, and thus forge new possibilities for a kind of decolonial museality that reflects upon its own medial limitations.

Historical complexity, spatial overlap, the perishability of architecture, and the relatively marginal and fragmented state of the field of Caribbean architectural history in U.S. academia call for the development of a digital resource that I have named Caribes: A Digital Database and Virtual Research Interface for the Study of Caribbean Architecture and Landscape. This endeavor commenced in 2015 in collaboration with University Libraries at Florida State University where I am associate professor in the Department of Art History. This article details the conceptualization and current developmental stage of this project.

In the 1830s, Cuban and Spanish patrons sponsored three public fountains, designed and carved in Italy, for new and redesigned urban spaces in Havana. In their reconfiguration of international forms, materials, and iconographies, the fountains reveal diverging notions of the patria (motherland or homeland) within the Spanish Empire. The iconography of the works partook of broader visual and textual rhetorics that speak to a burgeoning Atlantic world city renegotiating its engagement with empire and its growing conception of itself as a distinctive, local setting. Employing transatlantic discourses, the classicizing fountains addressed the center-periphery dialectic established by Spanish colonialism.

The founding of Havana's fine arts academy of San Alejandro in 1818, initially as a school for instruction in drawing, was modeled upon strategies by the Spanish monarchy to establish art academies and drawing schools for the cultural improvement of the empire. Sponsored by Spanish Intendant Alejandro Ramírez and the city's Royal Economic Society of the Friends of the Country, the opening of the Havana academy coincided with the island's escalating racial politics. Tensions between the work of popular painters of African descent and a nascent curriculum in fine arts directed by European masters are reflected in discourses surrounding the academy's foundation. The story of San Alejandro's early years thus reveals that the establishment of a school of drawing for Havana was tied not only to an imperial objective to spread buen gusto (good taste) throughout the empire, but also to agendas within the local socio-racial hierarchy.

Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 considers the commemoration of Havana’s foundational site in the late colonial period as a heritage process. According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/black_artists_atlantic_world

This Special Issue acknowledges and draws inspiration from recent scholarship on artists in the Spanish colonial territories throughout the Americas, such as the essay by Barbara Munday and Aaron Hyman, “Out of the Shadow of Vasari: Towards a New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America,” Colonial Latin American Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2015): 283-317; the monograph by Susan Verdi-Webster, Lettered Artists and the Language of Empire: Painters and the Profession in Early Colonial Quito (University of Texas Press, 2017); the 2019 Hescah symposium at the University of Florida, “Beyond Biography: Artistic Practice & Personhood in Colonial Latin America,” organized by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi; and the Special Edition of the Colonial Latin American Review, “Visualizing Blackness in Colonial Latin America,” co-edited by Kathryn Santner and Helen Melling, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2021. The study of black artists and image makers in the southern Atlantic has been further advanced by the work of scholars, such as Ximena A. Gómez, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Linda Rodríguez, and Miguel Valerio. These studies shed light on the methodological challenges as well as the importance of considering the lives, careers, and agencies of Spanish colonial artists in the writing of these regions’ social and cultural histories. Among the salient dimensions addressed by these projects is the role of race in shaping the professional lives of artists. For the northern Atlantic, which is situated later in time than those of the Ibero-Americas and the Caribbean and in contexts informed by Protestant conceptions and practices of the image, relationships between the artist, the art, the viewer, and race have been examined in such works as Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke University Press, 2010), Anna O. Marley’s edited collection of essays Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (University of California Press, 2012), and Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visual Culture in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York University Press, 2015).

Engaging with the subject of black artists in the Atlantic World raises a number of critical questions. How did racial blackness shape the professional worlds negotiated by artists in the Atlantic? How does race impact the ways in which we consider black artists in the Atlantic whose racial classification is not necessarily evident in the formal and stylistic properties of their work? If an artist is of African descent, must their art be a matter of race? What was the relationship between race, blackness, and the creation of the category of “artist” in the Atlantic? What other forms of making and imagery are at stake in this field of inquiry beyond artist and art, as institutionally redefined by academies of art?  How has the discourse of race obscured African and African American agency, awareness, and negotiations of imperial/colonial power? How do we address the limits of the historic archive in recovering the stories of such artists? What can be learned by looking across national and imperial boundaries in the Atlantic with respect to the histories of black artists? These questions will be considered and addressed within this Special Issue.

Contributions by Lucia Santa Ana Lozada, Jorge Fernando Buján, the late Francisco Corti, Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni, Jaime Lara, and Paul Niell.

For most of us who reside in the northern hemisphere, the image that first comes to mind at the mention of architecture in Latin America is some type of colonial-style building, that is, one that derives its essential inspiration from Renaissance or Baroque traditions. Such buildings can range from very elaborate creations, like some of the churches in Mexico, to the simplified and austere designs that characterize the mission churches in California and the American southwest. But this image leaves out a large and important corpus of architecture in the Americas whose sources go back directly to the late Middle Ages. The aim of this collection is to provide an introduction to a topic that is virtually unknown, and to identify the circumstances that gave rise to the Gothic style in the colonial period, and subsequently the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century.

The volume opens with a general introduction by the two editors to Late Gothic and Gothic Revival in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America. The first three essays, which follow, treat the Late Gothic period, beginning in the early sixteenth century, when waves of European invaders toppled the empires of the Aztec and the Inca, constructed urban centers, and founded religious complexes for the conversion of the indigenous population. In efforts to assert legitimate political authority, to "civilize" according to European culture, and to establish the workings of societies on a frontier, colonial builders looked first to the Late Gothic style of Europe to express power and presence overseas. Early churches, convents, civic buildings, and private houses in the Spanish colonial Americas reveal a lingering taste for things Gothic, one that would persist into the seventeenth century and reveal a multifaceted causation.

After a hiatus of about a century and half, during the course of the first decades the nineteenth century, the Gothic style was revived in parts of Latin America, and by the early twentieth nearly every country in the region had followed suit. The four essays dealing with this more recent development reveal numerous parallelisms between two large but widely separated countries within Spanish-speaking America. In Mexico and Argentina, architects and patrons who desired Gothic forms did not look back to the Late Gothic of the colonial era for inspiration, but to contemporary Europe. As Latin countries gained independence, the new political climate encouraged wider contacts with other parts of the world, and immigration was a key player in this regard. To a large extent, it was the immigrant communities from Britain, France, Germany and Italy that were primarily responsible for introducing Gothic Revival into the Americas. Initially, this was driven both by fashion and a desire to assert national identity, but by the late nineteenth century the Gothic style was readily accepted by Latin Americans as a whole, regardless of whether they were recent arrivals or descendants of the earliest settlers.

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, 'Bajo su sombra': The narration and reception of colonial urban space in early nineteenth-century Havana, Cuba. ...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we consider the material and visual implications of coloniality – the darker side of modernity, and structure of management that underpins and supports modernity’s rhetoric of promises – within the circum-Caribbean through a reflection on curating the exhibition Decolonising Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. By juxtaposing the recent work of Haitian-born American painter and sculptor Edouard Duval-Carrié (1954b) and a selection of historical artefacts from the Southeastern US we bring to light the recursive patterns of colonialism and exploitation in which the Gulf region has been culturally, economically, and politically entangled. Our collaborative exhibition deconstructs the notion of refinement both in the aesthetic sense and also as processes by which a resource becomes a product. For Duval-Carrié, the Caribbean is not merely a case study for these broader global dynamics, but rather the crucible from which the modern, industrial age emerges. We thus approach this exhibition as an experiment in decolonising the museum – itself a tool of coloniality – by creating dynamic visual and material relationships in the gallery that deny the viewer the convenient binaries of past/present, art/artefact, and US/Caribbean, and thus forge new possibilities for a kind of decolonial museality that reflects upon its own medial limitations.