Lot Essay
Eduardo Ponjuán and René Francisco Rodríguez collaborated from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and exhibited in Cuba and abroad during that time, notably in Mexico City, where this work was made and first shown. Both graduates of Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, they returned to ISA as faculty members in the late 1980s and mentored many of the artists who emerged in the following decade, among them Los Carpinteros and Yoan Capote.
The duo Ponjuán-René Francisco was active during Cuba’s “Special Period” of the early to mid-1990s, a time of economic crisis that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and their works make wry comment on the cultural politics of that time. Outside Cuba Inside imagines two avatars for Cuba’s future. To the right, Rosie the Riveter, here modeled on a Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening Post (May 29, 1943), sits before a wavy American flag; a rivet gun rests on her lap, and she crushes a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kamph under her foot. Opposing her is sturdy Soviet woman, adapted from (1934), who promotes the collectivization of agriculture, sheaves of wheat gleaming in her hands. In the style of a billboard, the triptych was painted with a mason’s spatula, the heavy impasto positing a connection between artmaking and labor. The title, printed in a classic digital font in the central panel, reads as—and remains—an open question.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
The duo Ponjuán-René Francisco was active during Cuba’s “Special Period” of the early to mid-1990s, a time of economic crisis that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and their works make wry comment on the cultural politics of that time. Outside Cuba Inside imagines two avatars for Cuba’s future. To the right, Rosie the Riveter, here modeled on a Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening Post (May 29, 1943), sits before a wavy American flag; a rivet gun rests on her lap, and she crushes a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kamph under her foot. Opposing her is sturdy Soviet woman, adapted from (1934), who promotes the collectivization of agriculture, sheaves of wheat gleaming in her hands. In the style of a billboard, the triptych was painted with a mason’s spatula, the heavy impasto positing a connection between artmaking and labor. The title, printed in a classic digital font in the central panel, reads as—and remains—an open question.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park