UB Art Gallery presents "Layers: Collecting Cuban-American Art"

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "Layers: Collecting Cuban-American Art" comprises work from two private and one institutional collection to illustrate how collecting art involves the negotiation of identities.

The exhibition will open in the University at Buffalo Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus in the first and second floor galleries, with a reception on June 11 from 4-7p.m.

Cuban jazz pianist and 2005 JUNO Award Winner, Hilario Durán, who is from Havana, Cuba, and lives in Toronto, will perform from 5-6 p.m. on the night of the opening.

UB Art Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with extended hours on Thursday until 7 p.m. For information, call 645-6912. The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, will be on view through Sept. 7.

"Layers: Collecting Cuban-American Art" combines the private collections of Lynnette Bosch and Jorge Gracia, Samuel P. Capen Chair and SUNY distinguished Professor in the UB Department of Philosophy, and a collection from Lehigh University Art Galleries, inviting the viewer to explore the impulses that inspire art collecting. Bosch's collection includes works in diverse media, but reflects her interests as art historian on the influence of the baroque on Cuban-American art. Gracia's collection emphasizes painting, and relates to his philosophical work on social group identity and personal interests. The collection of photography-based art from Lehigh University, compiled by Ricardo Viera, reveals Viera's interests as an artist, art historian and curator.

"Layers" brings together the works of representative members of different waves of exiled Cuban-born artists who have immigrated to the United States since 1959, during Fidel Castro's rule of the island. The arriving groups include artists who came as adults, artists who came as children and adolescents, and a new group of Cuban-American artists of Cuban ancestry born in this country. The relationships and interactions between these groups are complex and diverse. Yet, joining all is a sense of shared, diverse, and divided identity, split between their Cuban and American sides, along with their experience of exile, the defining element in all of their lives.

A 48-page catalog with 15 full-color plates, an essay by exhibition coordinator Lynette M. F. Bosch, and a foreword by Jorge J. E. Gracia, accompanies the exhibition.

"Layers" is a component of the academic conference Negotiating Identities in Art, Literature and Philosophy: Cuban Americans and American Culture to be held as part of the NEH Summer Seminar for College and University teachers. The conference is organized by Gracia, in conjunction with the Humanities Institute and UB Art Gallery.

More information on the seminar, as well as images of artwork from the exhibition and select interviews with artists can be found at: http://www.philosophy.buffalo.edu/NEH06/index.html.

The UB Art Gallery is funded by the UB College of Arts and Sciences, the Visual Arts Building Fund, the Seymour H. Knox Foundation Fine Arts Fund and the Fine Arts Center Endowment.