Coco Fusco @ El Museo del Barrio, NYC - "Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island" Exhibition

Coco Fusco

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island

El Museo del Barrio, New York 

September 18, 2025 — January 11, 2026

Coco Fusco

Photo by Aurelio Fusco

Coco Fusco

Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (still), 2021

HD Video, 13:30 mins

Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM

Coco Fusco

A Room of One's Own: Women and Power

in the New America, 2006-2008

Performance documentation

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM

El Museo del Barrio presents Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, the first U.S. survey of the influential Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer COCO FUSCO (b. 1960, lives in New York). The exhibition is spanning more than three decades of Fusco’s groundbreaking career.

Widely recognized for her incisive explorations of the dynamics of politics and power, Fusco’s interdisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, photography, and writing. Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island traces her extensive practice through a selection of more than twenty of her works, created since the 1990s and extending to a new photographic series on view for the first time at El Museo del Barrio.

“Coco Fusco stands among the most provocative voices in contemporary art. Her work challenges conventions, sparks vital conversations, and continues to resonate powerfully at a time of profound social and political reckoning.” —Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio

Organized thematically, the exhibition explores central concerns that Coco Fusco has addressed across her practice, including immigration, military power and surveillance, post-revolutionary Cuban history, and the lasting legacies of colonialism. The presentation offers an expansive view of her multidisciplinary approach through key bodies of work, including:

• Immigration Narratives: Works addressing the perception of immigrants in the US and Europe, including Everyone Here is a New Yorker (2025), a new photographic suite that extends from Fusco's 2024 public art video animation commission by More Art, Inc.

• Intercultural Misunderstandings: A room dedicated to Fusco’s projects, created in counterpoint to the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas, including a reproduction of her iconic Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992/2025), originally performed in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

• Interrogation Tactics: Video, photographs, and performance documentation that consider military tactics, surveillance technologies, and the exploitation of female sexuality in the War on Terror.

• Poetry and Power: A focused selection of video, featuring several works that reflect on the history of artists’ challenges to the Cuban government—a central subject in Fusco’s oeuvre. Together, this selection illuminates the breadth and depth of Fusco’s artistic vision—one that remains acutely relevant in today’s national political and cultural climate.

Coco Fusco 

La noche eterna (The Eternal Night), 2023

HD Video, 1:13:45 mins

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM

Coco Fusco 

La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza), 2012

HD Video, 11:53 mins

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Acquisition enabled by VEZA New Media Fund 2022 

and headline supporters South SOUTH and Niio 

Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia

The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 2003

Video, 31 mins

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York

Acquired through "PROARTISTA: Sustaining the Work 

of Living Contemporary Artists," 

a fund from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust 2008.1

“El Museo del Barrio has been a steadfast supporter of Coco Fusco’s groundbreaking practice from early on, recognizing the power and potency of her work. This includes her participation in the groundbreaking 2008 exhibition Arte No es Vida, as well as her presence in recent collection-based shows such as Culture and the People and Something Beautiful. This survey extends that dialogue, offering audiences a deeper understanding of an artist whose voice remains as vital as ever.” —Susanna V. Temkin, Interim Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio

Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Borrowing its title from the artist's recent monograph publication, Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized at El Museo del Barrio by Susanna V. Temkin, interim chief curator, and Rodrigo Moura, former chief curator, with support from Lee Sessions and Maria Molano Parrado. Exhibition design by Solomonoff Architecture Studio/SAS and graphic design by estúdio gráfico.

ARTIST COCO FUSCO

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. 

Coco Fusco is the author of numerous books, and she contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Her monograph publication Tomorrow, I will Become an Island was published by Thames & Hudson in 2023.

Coco Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). She is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO, NEW YORK

1230 5th Avenue at 104th Street, New York, NY 10029

www.elmuseo.org

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello Exhibition @ Pace, London - "Entre El Día Y La Noche"

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello

Entre El Día Y La Noche

Pace Gallery, London

September 4 — 28, 2024

ALEJANDRO PINEIRO BELLO 

El Misterio de La Noche, 2024 

© Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents the first solo exhibition in the UK—and largest to date—of works by Cuban artist ALEJANDRO PINEIRO BELLO.

Titled Entre El Día Y La Noche (Between Day and Night), Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s exhibition features new paintings and works on paper that symbolically and formally explore cyclical journeys through time, and within the self. Alejandro Piñeiro Bello paints the sociocultural mystic splendor of Caribbean culture with a focus on Cuba and the surrounding island nations’ identities and histories. Using traditional materials, such as oil on raw linen or burlap, he creates striking dialogues between the deep beige of the canvas and an iridescent palette of jade greens, oranges, purples, and teals. Chromatic interplay in Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s work fortifies essential compositional structures, which often appear to revolve around an unseen center point. In these images, his fluidly handled paint forms endless landscapes that travel from dreamlike figuration to pure abstraction. Drawing inspiration from dreams and memories, Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s paintings describe fleeting, timeless feeling.

Taking their inspiration from the atmospheric and emotional changes throughout a Cuban night and day, the scale of works in Entre El Día Y La Noche represent some of the artist’s most ambitious to date. El Misterio De La Noche (2024), the largest painting featured in the exhibition, spans over six meters. Here, Piñeiro Bello employs the structural qualities of classical Western art history while upending expectations of the landscape through his alchemical use of color and non-linear storytelling.

Spirals, shells, and whorls abound throughout the works in Entre El Día Y La Noche, reflecting Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s interest in Transcendentalist and Buddhist belief systems. The spiral that dominates three-quarters of the painting La Espiral Luminosa (2024) draws viewers into the artist’s unique painterly vision. Sweeping from deep aquatic shades at its outer edge into increasingly flame-like hues toward its center, it is unclear if this depicts the cross-section of a deep ocean or if Alejandro Piñeiro Bello has lifted the surface of the water to reveal the reflection of a blazing midday sun. Like its dappled sea blues—created with an economical use of bright, light brushstrokes—the painting quivers between its marine depiction and a field of colorful abstraction.

Nature is dominant in Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s worlds. Figures, when they appear, are small, loosely rendered, and nestled within the dynamic landscapes that surround them. Formally echoing the arcs of the waves, wind, and flora that shape the compositions, these bodies appear to emerge from—and of—the very brushstrokes that describe their setting. Citing Antonio Gaudi, Piñeiro Bello reminds us that “there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.” This impression of interconnectedness is present in Nacimiento (2023-24), whose central figure materializes from a rose-blushed, lotus-like bowl. Recalling Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c.1484-1486), Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s painting is similarly infused with an environmental vitality that raises the natural world to the status of personhood.

Reflecting the island’s rich intercultural heritage, his practice is equally informed by the fiction, poetry, and music of his birthplace. Just as in the literary genre of lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real), these paintings depict the fantastic through an amplification of perceived reality. Inhered in the layers of Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s compositions lie the metamorphic, expressive juxtapositions of Latin America.

In the lower ground floor gallery, Alejandro Piñeiro Bello displays a selection of his works on paper and sketches alongside books and poems that have inspired his practice. Employing watercolor, gouache, and ink, the artist’s works on paper respond to their medium: the ivory paper background, which Piñeiro Bello keeps partially exposed, lends a backdrop of luminosity to the deliberate pen-marked crosshatching. Included reference texts are the 1943 poem “La isla en peso” by Virgilio Piñera, the 1966 novel Paradiso by José Lezama Lima, and Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel El reino de este mundo—the text that introduced lo real maravilloso to the world of literature. Amongst these, Alejandro Piñeiro Bello has placed a childhood photograph of himself, taken in Havana. With this gesture, the artist affirms the awareness of selfhood and origin that saturates his paintings.

Through a practice rooted in identity and memory, ALEJANDRO PINEIRO BELLO (b. 1990, Havana, Cyba) paints the enduring spirit of the Caribbean. Alejandro Piñeiro Bello studied at The National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba (2006–2010), later working as a professor in the Creative Painting department (2010–2011). He was awarded grants from The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, New York and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York in collaboration with Pioneer Works, New York. Alejandro Piñeiro Bello was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022, and in 2023, he was selected for the artist-in-residence program at the Rubell Museum. Recent exhibitions of his work include Future Past Perfect: Escaping Paradise, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (2023); En El Arco Del Caribe, KDR305, Miami, Florida (2023–2024), and Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida (2023–2204). His work is held in important collections such as The Brownstone Foundation, Paris; Chrysler Museum Collection, Norfolk, Virginia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Marquez Art Projects, Miami; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Rubell Museum, Miami; and The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Collection, New York. Alejandro Piñeiro Bello currently lives and works in Miami, Florida.

PACE GALLERY LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London

www.pacegallery.com

Wifredo Lam @ Pace Gallery, NYC - The Imagination at Work

Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work

Pace Gallery, New York

November 10 - December 21, 2021

In collaboration with Gary Nader of Gary Nader Art Centre, Pace Gallery presents Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and rarely seen bronze sculptures, including a significant loan from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The Cuban artist, who early in his career associated with major European figures in the surrealist and cubist movements, invented a radically syncretic visual language that challenged the Eurocentricity of Modernism. The presentation traces the artist’s career from the late 1930s to the 1970s, exploring the influence of Wifredo Lam’s heritage in his art. The exhibition is organized by Nader and Pace’s Senior Director and Curator Andria Hickey with curatorial contributions by Dr. Michaëla Mohrmann, a scholar and curator of Latin American art.

Wifredo Lam believed that “a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.” Taking its title from the artist’s words, this chronological survey presents Wifredo Lam’s many stylistic transformations and painterly innovations. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and Congolese-Iberian mother, Wifredo Lam, who was in dialogue with surrealist and cubist artists, is widely considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Having trained in Spain and France in the early years of his career, the artist was introduced and became lifelong friends and associates with members of the European avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. Over the course of his life, Wifredo Lam radically transformed modernist painting through his unique cross-cultural hybridization of art.

Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work begins with the artist’s paintings from the late 1930s, when he converged with avant-garde artists and intellectuals in Europe. It was during this period that Wifredo Lam encountered Pablo Picasso’s collection of African masks, which would come to influence his later work. Returning to Havana in the early 1940s, Wifredo Lam was struck by the racism and exploitation that characterized Cuban society under the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. In response to these conditions and inspired by the Négritude movement’s celebration of Blackness, Wifredo Lam cultivated a practice that decolonized modernist art. Deeply informed by African sculpture and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, his work during the 1940s developed an iconography referencing Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion. He would eventually view his practice as “an act of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.”

The exhibition features a group of paintings created between 1947 and 1950, a period following Wifredo Lam’s first visit to Haiti in 1946. These works, which are characterized by their somber, muted palette, were informed by the Vodou ceremonies that the artist encountered in Haiti at a time of political unrest. Also on view in the presentation are Wifredo Lam’s paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, during which time the artist relocated to France and traveled frequently to Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico. Works such as Untitled (1957) and La Veille (1959) exemplify the artist’s gradual attenuation of Santería symbols—a consequence of his distance from Cuba but also of his gradual, post-war disassociation from Surrealism. In the 1970s, Lam increasingly favored abstraction, geometry, and fragmentation in his paintings. Personnage (1970) typifies his late career interest in angular, machinic beings that spoke to the Space Age and feelings of alienation.

Among the exhibition’s highlights is a selection of rarely seen bronze sculptures that Wifredo Lam created in Albissola Marina, Italy in the late 1970s. Stemming from the artist’s experimentation with ceramics in the early 1950s, these highly textured statuettes reflect his paintings’ Santería-inspired iconography and reveal the dialogue between Lam’s sculptural practice and paintings, which were often exhibited next to African and Oceanic sculptures.

Wifredo Lam’s work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s highly anticipated exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, which examines the movement outside Western Europe. In 2015 the Centre Pompidou, Paris opened a major retrospective of the artist’s work—an exhibition that traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Tate Modern, London. The artist’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Menil Collection, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate, London; and many more international institutions.

PACE GALLERY

510 West 25th Street, New York

www.pacegallery.com

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Belkis Ayón @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999)

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City 

January 25 - April 29, 2018 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999). This landmark retrospective is the first in the United States dedicated to the work of Belkis Ayón—the late Cuban visual artist who mined the founding myth of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society, Abakuá, to create an independent and powerful visual iconography.

From the Curator’s Statement:

“Cuban artist Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) died at age thirty-two, leaving behind a body of work of considerable importance for the history of contemporary printmaking. Her death remains a painful mystery for the national and international art community that had witnessed with admiration her successful rise to the most demanding artistic circles of the 1990s. Sixteen years after her death, the artist’s estate presents art lovers and researchers the first retrospective exhibition of the artist in the United States—Nkame—which gathers a wide selection of her graphic production from 1986 to 1999.”

Belkis Ayón, who was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, became interested in the Abakuá and their mysterious traditions in 1985, while pursuing art in high school. She was primarily drawn to the figure of Sikán, who according to legend, originally discovered the magic of Abakuá by accidentally trapping a fish who subsequently spoke to her, sharing a secret knowledge – but since women were banned from knowing the organization’s deepest secrets, Sikán was sworn to secrecy. The princess, however, gave in to temptation and divulged this forbidden knowledge to her fiancée; as a result, her life was sacrificed. In Ayón’s works, Sikán is brought back to life, and the myth and mystery surrounding this figure is brought to light, transformed through Ayon’s exceptional collographic prints.

A distinguishing feature of Belkis Ayón’s artwork is her signature use of collography, a difficult and labor-intensive printmaking process whereby materials in a variety of textures and absorbencies are collaged onto a cardboard matrix, applied to a plate that is inked, and then run through a printing press.

“Belkis Ayon’s large-scale prints are captivating in story and technique. We have an opportunity, through her vision, to create a dialogue with mythology, history, culture, and geography while appreciating her printmaking virtuosity,” says Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs at Kemper Museum.

 Curator: Cristina Vives

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art 

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Landscape Painter Tomas Sanchez joins Marlborough Gallery

LANDSCAPE PAINTER TOMAS SANCHEZ 

JOINS MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

Marlborough Gallery announces that the esteemed landscape painter, TOMAS SANCHEZ, has joined its stable of artists.

Tomas Sanchez was born in 1948 in Cuba. He graduated in 1971 from the National School of Art in Havana. In 1980, he won first place in the 19th International Juan Miro Prize of drawing in Barcelona and in 1981 had his first one-man show of drawings at the Miro Foundation in the same city. In 1984, he won the Amelia Palaez National award for painting in the first Biennial of Havana and the following year he was honored by his first retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. In 1988, Tomas Sanchez, received Cuba's National Culture Merit Award given by the State Council. He has had several successful exhibitions in South America, Mexico and Florida where the artist now lives and works. His most recent exhibition (1996) was a one-man show at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

There are currently two books published on Tomas Sanchez's work: Tomas Sanchez and His Pictorial Universe (Palette Publications, 1996) and Tomas Sanchez, Paisaje Interior (Petroleos Mexicanos, 1994). Writing in the text to the former work, Roberto J. Cayuso says that Tomas Sanchez can be associated with Spanish realist painters who understand their art not from a photographic vision, but born from meditation and...prompted by life and authentic visual perceptions. Continuing, he states:

When we admire one of his landscapes, whether it deals with junkyards or interpretations of nature, the first thing that impresses us is the surprising magnificence of the theme and then, the treatment of it. Here, we can almost count the leaves of the trees and the waves of the waters. His clouds seem to be pieces of cotton torn and tossed by the wind that create an exquisite symphony of lights and colors without neglecting the smallest detail, however small it may be. He delivers us with a work of lyricism and unsuspected yearnings.

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

www.marlboroughgallery.com