Juan Francisco Elso’s Indelible Art of América
The Cuban sculptor fused Latin America, Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean traditions. He inspired a maverick movement — and one of the year’s best shows.
By Holland Cotter
Over decades of seasons spent trawling through museums and galleries I’ve seen, up close or in passing, countless works of contemporary art. A few have entered my bloodstream instantly and indelibly. One was a sculpture called “Por América (José Marti)” by the short-lived Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso.
That was in 1993 when, in the wake of the Columbus Quincentenary year, a group exhibition of new Latin American art called “Ante America” (translated in its catalog as “Regarding America”) traveled from Bogotá, Colombia, to the Queens Museum in New York.
With new work emphasizing African, Indigenous and diasporic sources, the show was designed as a definition-stretching, stereotype-shattering response to the Museum of Modern Art’s big, Modernist-minded “Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century,” also on view that year.
The 1986 Elso sculpture was a centerpiece of the Queens show. A tribute to Marti, the 19th-century anti colonialist Cuban hero and writer, who conceived of “America” as a yet-to-be-realized social utopia, transcultural and transhemispheric, the sculpture was composed of a single wood-carved, glass-eyed male figure. Standing around five feet tall, he appeared to be caught, as if exhausted or stunned, in mid-stride. ( … )