“Layered Lives” Exhibition at the Harn Museum of Art

Layered Lives gathers a constellation of Cuban women artists whose practices unfold within an aesthetic shaped by circulation, memory and embodiment. They work across diverse media and distinct artistic vocabularies, offering intimate and inventive perspectives on identity, spirituality, migration and the lived realities of women in Cuba and its diasporas.

Drawing on hydrofeminist frameworks, Layered Lives foregrounds care, connection and the sustaining of self and others as central to contemporary Cuban art. Spanning sixty works from the last three decades, the exhibition situates each work within a “liquid perspective:” a mode of seeing that privileges relationality, collectivity and permeability over isolation and fixity.

Each work offers multiple points of entry, unfolding a labyrinth of layered narratives that immerse viewers in the complexities of Cuban subjectivity. In these practices, the sea’s tides resonate with cycles of labor and care; its depths hold what official histories have overlooked; its horizon evokes desires that traverse political and geographic borders. Within the exhibition, the female experience emerges not as a metaphor but as a deliberate mode of attention allowing silenced and subsumed stories to resurface as radical counter-histories.

image: Alejandra Glez, “Oshun 0,” 2023, Loan from the Discoveries in Art Certilman Family Collection