The exhibit features the lively paintings of Sandra Dooley and the meditative and vocal wood engravings of Guillermo Estrada-Viera. The two share a small studio in Santa Fe, a charming village of wooden houses about 20 minutes outside of Havana. She is 40, and he is 41.

Sandra, who is self-taught (and whose grandfather is from the U.S., hence her name), and Guillermo, who is a trained sculptor, pool their limited resources in every way, and their way of helping their community of wooden houses was to sell their art and donate much of the profits to helping their neighbors. It is ironic that that show, conceived many months ago, opens now only days after Cuba's fiercest hurricane in 40 years. At least 16 people died, thousands of crops were wiped out by the storm and many thousands of homes destroyed or damaged. Sandra's paintings reflect her daily life in Cuba, at home with her friends, her dogs and cats. The paintings are bright splashes of color within which the women are shown reflective and thoughtful. Life is not easy, but it is familial and each scene is filled with friends, family or fantasy. The works are an extension of her own life, for she is lost if she is not painting. The lack of an oil paint can drive her temporarily insane, she says. "I have to paint to live, it's that simple."

Guillermo's wood engravings, on the other hand, touch on the tough core of contemporary Cuban life: his works deal with emigration, religion, strife between lovers and within families, "la lucha en la calle," the daily life struggle that Che Guevara said was much more difficult than winning a war. Estrada-Viera's technique is to use the "libreta," the Cuban family's ration book, as the background for all his woodcuts (he put out a call in Santa Fe for everyone to donate last year's "libretas" to his art; they complied), so though the engraving of a particular series is the same, the personal ration book is different, with different names and different products listed. He then uses products that are purchased with the ration book to make the background of each work -- coffee, candle wax, cooking oil, kerosene, for example. His works include one small bronze sculpture of a fish.

The show is a study in contrasts and it says much about Cuban life that these two very different artists work side by side every day, doing their different thing, going back to their separate families each night and by early morning light are both back at work, separately and together.

Sandra Levinson
Director, Cuban Art Space

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Special thanks to Ralph Casado, Camilo Gaston, Marcos Meconi, Julio Mendoza, Sahnet Pérez-Stubbs