The Abyss of the Ocean: Cuban Women Photographers, Migrations, and the Question of Race focuses on identity and resistance through the creative practices of five artists living and working in the United States, Mexico, and Spain. The exhibition reveals the experiences and strategies of survival of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Coco Fusco, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Gertrudis Rivalta, and Juana Valdés within the matrix of Latinx Art. Through their work, these artists challenge the concept of Latinidad and its relationship to Blackness in the modern/colonial project. Unsettling the totalizing definitions of Cuban, Latin American, and Latinx Art, The Abyss of the Ocean presents key photographic series produced since the 1990s. These photographs lay bare the nuance of the artists’ multiple Diasporic identities while confronting racist and colonialist stereotypes of women’s bodies.
The Abyss of the Ocean: Cuban Women Photographers, Migrations, and the Question of Race is guest-curated by Aldeide Delgado. The exhibition will offer free virtual programs to the general public featuring the artists, curators and special guest speakers beginning in April and running through June 2022. As part of the exhibition, CCCADI will also release an education guide in April that will allow educators and families with young children to explore the work of the five Cuban women photographers featured in the exhibition and the themes their photographs examine.
The Abyss of the Ocean has been made possible with support from the Altman Foundation, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and Open Society Foundations.
Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCADI) is located at 120 East 125th Street in East Harlem, NYC.