Alberto Lescay Merencio is the winner of the 2021 Plastic Arts Prize

December 29, 2021

The proclamation this Tuesday of Alberto Lescay Merencio as the recipient of the National Prize for Plastic Arts 2021 honored a creator fully committed to the development and destiny of contemporary Cuban culture, traits that are revealed at the highest level in both his sculptural work and painting.

Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1950, graduate successively from the local academy José Joaquín Tejada, from the National School of Art of Cubanacán and from the Repin Academy of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), he is the author of sculptural pieces that are inscribed in the most remarkable of Cuban monumental art and of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as of a non-figurative pictorial body of work with highly expressive gestures.

Lescay is responsible for the equestrian figure of Antonio Maceo in the square that bears the name of the hero in Santiago de Cuba; the Monument to the Maroon in the heights of a mountain near the Santiago village of El Cobre; Vuelo Lam, located in a park in El Vedado; the Monument to the Warrior Spirit, in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela; and the evocation of Mariana Grajales, in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery, among other notable achievements.

Upon receiving notification of the prize, awarded by a jury composed of Rafael Zarza, José Villa Soberón, Helmo Hernández and Jorge R. Bermúdez, the artist was immersed in the execution of the Monument to José Antonio Aponte, which next year will rise on the northern coast of Mayabeque province, near the site where in 1812 the first anti-colonialist and abolitionist insurrection in the history of the nation took place.