Hot Off the Press! Climbing Aboard

Analays Alvarez Hernandez
Climbing Aboard
Havana Apartment-Galleries and International Art Circuits

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023

Havana’s apartment-galleries have been vital venues for the city’s art scene since the 1990s, hosting art exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. In the context of Cuba’s limited art market and dearth of cultural institutions with international reach, these residential spaces have offered artists a unique opportunity to display their work and to connect with international art circuits. Focusing on the histories of three specific apartment-galleries — El Apartamento, Estudio Figueroa-Vives, and Avecez Art Space — this chapbook reflects on the complex interplay of the local and the global in the ‘worlding’ of cultural institutions.

Analays Álvarez Hernández is an art historian, independent curator, and Assistant Professor at the Université de Montréal. She holds a B.A. in Art History from the Universidad de La Habana, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research focuses on public art, alternatives exhibitions venues, diasporic and Latinx-Canadian artists, and decolonial issues. She recently co-edited Latin American Art(ists) from/in Canada: Expanding Narratives, Territories, and Perspectives (LALVC, University of California Press) and ‘Revised Commemoration’ in Public Art: What Future for the Monument? (RACAR). As an independent curator, Álvarez Hernández has organized several exhibitions mostly in Havana, tsi Tkarón:to (Toronto) and Tiohti:áke/Mooniyang (Montreal), such as The Recipe: Making Latin American Art in Canada(Sur Gallery, 2018 ; OBORO, 2020), Au fil des îles, archipels (Centre d’exposition de l’Université de Montréal, 2022; Musée régional de Rimouski, 2023), and On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging (Onsite Gallery, 2023).

ISSN (Print): 2939-9211
ISSN (Online): 2939-922X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc-ca-03