Art Palenques: An Independent Art Movement

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Four: Racialized Politics and Activism within the United States and Latin America

Abstract

Art can be an element of oppositional culture that embodies resistance to oppressive powers, critiques current realities, and imagines new possibilities (Dennis, 2012; Martines, 1997). Artist- activists have faced government repression through criminalization, surveillance, and violence (Dennis, 2016). Black artists, regardless of political activity, have also faced exclusion and repression. I draw on oral history interviews of the foundational members of Cuba’s reemergent independent art movement (2018 to present) to understand the emergence of this movement and their reception by the dissident community throughout the Cuban diaspora. I found that actors in formal art institutions in the island have engaged in anti-Black racism by rejecting and expelling Black artists and Black art forms from the institutions. As a response to this exclusion, Black artists have established autonomous, alternative, and independent art spaces I call “art palenques.” However, repression of these artists, turned these communal art spaces into explicitly political, anti-state spaces. This shift earned their acceptance into the largely white, dissident movement outside of the island. Moments of interest convergence like these, between Black and non-Black communities have been occurrences of fungibility (Hartman, 1997/2022), where Black people’s bodies are incorporated in non-Black struggles for power. The flexible solidarity (Collins, 2017) necessary for sustained and democratic organizing requires new values that do not uphold systematic structures of extraction and subjugation, but of justice, love, and liberation.

Author

• Suyent Rodriguez Candeaux, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque