Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Gary Wilder

Committee Members

Karen Strassler

Claire Bishop

Jacqueline Loss

Subject Categories

Art Education | Caribbean Languages and Societies | Contemporary Art | Latin American Languages and Societies | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Cuba, Contemporary Art Worlds, Postsocialism, Cultural Elites, Context, Visual Arts Pedagogy

Abstract

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic examination of Cuba’s artworld, where the visual arts are expected not only to engage society at large and render its contradictions legible, but also to work toward transforming it. It challenges approaches to expressive culture that emphasize its representational and critical function, focusing instead on how expectations of criticality are lived, negotiated, resisted, and even ignored in contemporary Cuba. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, it identifies the values that constitute the “Cuban Art Ideal,” charts the Ideal’s consolidation within elite cultural circles, and analyzes its contemporary legacies among artists practicing in 2020s Havana. Across these chapters, I argue that in navigating the relationship between form, content, and context, Cuban artworld professionals disclose the contradictory role of art in a society that is formally still socialist but is simultaneously shaped by the Cuban state’s multiple, uneven experiments with economic liberalization since the fall of the Soviet Union—what I call living in a post-post context and condition.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the University of the Arts-ISA, Cuba’s only institution for visual arts higher education. Combining an analysis of key documents that shaped its pedagogy with an ethnographic analysis of ISA’s art critique classes, this chapter argues that ISA’s pedagogy trains students to internalize the premises of the Cuban Art Ideal by privileging concepts over technique and fostering a discursive environment in which content is most valued when it offers effective critical commentary on el contexto (a vague, overdetermined amalgam of perennial social, economic, and political crises that almost always also point to some aspect of the state’s articulation with daily life). Excavating the deep cultural logic of the Cuban Art Ideal, Chapter 2 examines how art criticism in the early 1990s produced a set of generational oppositions between the 1980s and 1990s that, even at the time of my fieldwork, continued to inform the symbolic coordinates of the Cuban artworld. Chapter 3 positions painting in twenty-first-century Cuba as a meaningful social practice for suspending, however fleetingly, the overwhelming determinations of “Cuba,” thereby pushing against readings of the medium’s resurgence as merely symptomatic of the island’s gradual, albeit uneven, neoliberalization. Chapter 4 examines how two students’ final thesis projects differently assimilated and refracted a pervasive sense of historical foreclosure and political stuckness in post-Castro 2020s Cuba. The Conclusion analyzes a re-performance of Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) at the XIV Havana Biennial, showing how circulating videos of the work on social media reopened debates over art’s social responsibility, thus returning to this dissertation’s central theme: the ambivalent status of the Cuban Art Ideal and el contexto as both burden and asset in a post-post Cuba.

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