Rafael Villares, a visiting visual artist
from Cuba, spent the week of February 8th at Fordham. He spoke with students
about his work at Professor JoAnna Isaak’s Art and Ecology class on Tuesday,
and capped off the week with a well-attended presentation at Flom Auditorium in
Walsh Library on Friday, February 12th.
Villares, born 1989 in Havana, is a graduate of
Cuba’s oldest and most prestigious art school, Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes
“San Alejandro” and completed his graduate work at the Instituto Superior de
Arte in Havana. His main body of work includes site-specific installations that
invite viewers to participate in the artwork, and often concern the
relationship of human beings to their environment. For many city dwellers, the
plants they tend in clay pots on a windowsill provide their closest contact
with nature. To take this quotidian and intimate experience and move it into
the public urban sphere, he created
“Moving Landscape,” in 2012. He planted a giant pot with a ficus tree
and set a bench at the tree’s base, and then suspended the pot from a crane.
People walking along Havana’s famous seawall, the Malecón, could climb up to
sit on the bench, and from there, experience the city from a new place. The pot
was moved to two other sites in the city, offering different perspectives on
the urban sphere. About the work, Villares said, “art can change your reality.”
 |
| Moving Landscape, 2012. |
Villares connects his work to a long
tradition of art about the landscape, a constant theme in Cuban painting. But
instead of beginning with a canvas, he begins, he said, with the question, “how
do we redefine the notion of landscape?” He described a recent work, “Chromatic
Storm,” as beginning with his desire to capture the experience of a tropical
storm. Installed in the poor community of Casa Blanca, across the harbor from
Havana, the work is a small open room outdoors. Viewers are invited to enter as
colored water rains down from the ceiling, and every five days the water is
replaced with new water of a different color. In another work just exhibited in
Portland, Oregon, he installed the root system of an uprooted tree from local
woods to make a base. Into the tree base, he installed a photographic image of
a night landscape of Havana where a fork of lightning strikes a building. But
the shape of the lightning was manipulated to create the shape of the
Mississippi River and its tributaries. In making this work, Villares wanted to
underscore the parallels seen in nature, as the forks of lightning resonate
with the root system of the tree, and on a metaphoric level, to connect Cuban
culture, symbolized by the uprooted tree, to the diasporic flows of its
peoples.
 |
| Reconciliation, 2012. |
Some of the students in the audience had
already met Villares during visits to his studio in Havana, either during the
2015 study tour on Contemporary Cuban Culture led by Professor Cruz-Malavé
(Modern Languages and Literature) in March of 2015, or in the March, 2013 study
tour on Art and Architecture of Havana, led by Professors Mundy (Art History)
and Benavides (Sociology and Anthropology). The studio visit was one of the
highlights of these Havana courses. Villares' visit to Fordham was made
possible by support from LALS, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
and the Department of Art History and Music.
