Welcome to the Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies! Cuban art is still very little known in the United States, especially that made by artists still living and working in Cuba.

 

The Cuban Art Space project to collect art, photographs and posters from Cuba was born with the Center, but it was not until 1999 that a public gallery space opened as part of the Center.

 

Its goal is to promote the work of Cuban artists, especially those still living and working in Cuba, and to educate the U.S. public about Cuba’s cultural life.

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Upcoming Events

  • June 5, 2009
    José Fuster - Los Cubano    s

Jorge Perugorría
Recent Paintings

April 21, 2009

 

Jorge PerugorríaCuba's best-known actor is fast becoming known as one of Cuba's most exciting painters. The Cuban Art Space will present Pichi's recent paintings in a show that opens April 21 and will be up for a month. Perugorria will be here for the Havana Film Festival in New York which opens April 16 with a film in which he stars, and will be at the gallery opening of his show.

 

Born August 13, 1965 in Wajay, a neighborhood in Boyeros, on the edge of Havana, Pichi at 11 took painting classes at the local “casa de cultura” and took part in drawing contests at his school. In 1984 he started working as an actor in a school theater group where he was studying civil engineering, and won various acting prizes in student theater festivals. In 1985 he was chosen by Humberto Rodríguez, director of the important amateur group Olga Alonso to play Shakespearean roles, important to his education as an actor. In 1988 he started working professionally in the theater group Arte Popular Caribeño directed by Eugenio Hernández, one of Cuba’s best. The next year he became part of the Rita Montaner theater group, playing lead actor in several productions, including “The Glass Menagerie” and “Tea and Sympathy,” part of a successful trilogy of U.S. plays, in 1990. In 1992 he helped found a theater group called “The Public,” which made its debut with Genet’s “The Maids,” in which Pichi played Clara. At the same time he was doing theater, he started making films for television and working in a few tv series. He also acted in several shorts done by students at the Film School in San Antonio de los Baños.

 

His life as a film actor really began, of course, with “Strawberry and Chocolate,” in which he played Diego, the gay protagonist. He won numerous awards for that role, opening doors to international filmmaking. He starred most recently in Steven Soderberg's "Che" and in the film that opens the festival, "El Cuerno de la Abundancia" (Horn of Plenty).

 

Since 2001, Pichi has taken part in many group exhibitions and had several one-man shows, the most recent, in 2006 and 2009 in Madrid, 2006 in Italy and India, 2007 at the Cuban Art Space in New York. In 2005, his exhibition “Labyrinth” was shown at the Galleria del Palazzo in Florence.

 

Although his life as a painter is relatively new, he is excited by it, and says that “I’ve found in painting a freedom that I don’t have in film.”

 

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231 West 29th Street 4 Fl | New York NY 10001 | 212.242.0559 | cubanartspace@gmail.com