Georges Francis Flaherty: Printmaking and Strategic Internationalism in Cuba and Puerto Rico

Printmaking and Strategic Internationalism in Revolutionary Cuba and Neocolonial Puerto Rico

Cover of the catalog for the 1st Latin American Graphic Biennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1970

Prints are among the most mobile of art objects, carrying information, struggles, aesthetics, and perhaps a model for a more mobile historiography of art. This presentation traces exchanges between graphic artist-activists based in revolutionary Cuba and neocolonial San Juan, which converged in person or in print-as-proxy in the 1970s and 80s at several printmaking workshops and binelas in San Juan, organized by printmaker Lorenzo Homar, and the Encuentros de Artistas Plásticos Latinoamericanos in Havana, organized by painter Mariano Rodríguez, of the Casa Las Américas. Attracting international participation, these fostered shared and divergent imaginaries of cultural and political resistance that challenged presumptuous narratives of capitalist-democratic triumph in the Western Hemisphere sponsored by the U.S. government. Looking closely at the visual production and cultural brokering of Homar and Rodríguez, as well as select interlocutors, including Samuel B. Cherson, a Cuban critic living in Puerto Rico, George Flaherty analyzes how Cuba was an experimental space for Puerto Rican artists to better understand their coloniality and their revolutionary potential. He also analyzes how Puerto Rico was a laboratory for Cuban artists and curators to understand their strategic internationalism, including the vexing issue of exile. Cuba’s internationalism, often executed through cultural diplomacy, was especially significant after the disillusionment and cultural censorship of the 1970s, the so-called Gray Decade in Cuba, and the Mariel mass migration of 1980.

George Flaherty is an Associate Professor of Art History and Co-director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at the University of Texas at Austin. His scholarship focuses on the visual, urban, and intermedial cultures of modern and contemporary Mexico, Cuba, and the Latino United States. His first book, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement was published by the University of California Press in 2016. His essays and reviews have appeared in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, History of Photography, La Raza (Autry Museum 2017), Genealogías del arte contemporáneo en México, 1952-1967 (UNAM 2015), Desafío de la estabilidad: procesos artísticos en México, 1952-1967 (MUAC 2014), and Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge 2012). George’s research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Getty Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Society of Architectural Historians, and a Fulbright-García Robles grant to Mexico, where he was a Visiting Scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.