Sanchez works to be featured / At Havana national museum

By Konk Life News Staff

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) in Havana, Cuba, has announced that it will hold “One Race, the Human Race,” a two-part project encompassing a show of works by Mario Sanchez from January 14 to April 17 and, in February, the first Cuban-American artistic exchange in more than five decades.

 

In Havana, the museum will host an exhibition of 30 intaglios by famed Key West folk artist Mario Sanchez (1908-2005). A second-generation American whose grandparents fled Cuba during the Ten Years’ War in the 1860s, Sanchez mastered the technique of carving lively and sometimes gently satirical scenes of life in Key West in the first half of the 20th century. He was born just six years after Cuba gained its independence from Spain, and equality of all races and religions is a recurring theme in his work (always leavened by Sanchez’s wicked sense of humor). For many decades, Key West was one of the richest cities in the country, its population consisting largely of Cuban refugees, but the island always welcomed people of all races.

 

By the time Sanchez captured the spirit of this bustling community, Key West — whose city motto is “One Human Family” — was home to whites, blacks, Hispanics, Creoles, and men and woman of all religions. The cigar rollers, whose daily routines are so poignantly evoked in Sanchez’s drawings and intaglios, were the best paid factory workers in the U.S. On Main Street, the Wolkowsky, Aronowitz and  Lewinsky buildings testified to the ambitious spirit of the Jews who fled the pogroms in Europe. And everywhere in Sanchez’s work is evidence of a golden age of tolerance, freedom, and the joys of life in this island paradise —from a family on its way to church to the ladies gossiping in the street to holiday celebrations under vivid blue skies, among lush tropical flowers and trees.

 

It is in this spirit that Key West will also play host to a series of residencies and exhibitions during the month of February 2014. Participants will include some of Cuba’s most treasured artists, including Manuel Mendive, Roberto Fabelo, Rocio Garcia, The Merger, Stainless, Reynerio Tamayo, and Sandra Ramos y Rubén Alpízar. Venues for shows by these and other artists include the National Gallery Bellas Artes in Havana and Key West, the Hemingway House Museum, the Studios of Key West, the Old Island Restoration Foundation, the Mel Fisher Museum and the Gato Cigar Factory.

 

The Mario Sanchez exhibition at the MNBA is curated by Nance Frank, an expert on the artist’s work, and Hortensia Montero, curator of contemporary collections at the museum. The show includes seminal works from Sanchez’s seven-decade career, some of which were presented in January 2013 at the American Folk Museumin New York, the Museum of the City of  New York, and the South Street Seaport Museum. Many of the works at the MNBA are on loan from the original families who purchased them in Sanchez’s lifetime.

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