José Braulio Bedia Valdés

Cuban draftsman, painter, and installation artist. One of the most significant artists who emerged in the 1980s of the twentieth century.

He was born in Havana. Son of parents of humble origins, from childhood he had a natural inclination toward drawing and painting. At first his vocation was driven by the idea of becoming a comic book illustrator. The only artistic precedent in his family, if it could be considered as such, was the graphic facility his father demonstrated when creating signs on commission.

He entered the San Alejandro Academy in 1972. In the admission tests he had expressed his interest in comics, which was rejected by the evaluating panel as inappropriate for great art. Despite the disappointment suffered, he decided to enroll and learn the academic foundations of painting, the specialty in which he graduated in 1976.

Given his predilection for drawing images from primitive cultures, he was encouraged by professor Antonio Alejo to document himself on indigenous art. Thus he gradually introduced himself to learning about non-western traditional cultures, and instructed himself in the visualization of pre-Columbian, African, and Oceanic art. These subjects were taught in the first year, which is why that year was essential for his aspirations.

He then became part, in 1976, of the first class of the then newly founded Superior Institute of Art (ISA), where he enrolled in painting to continue university-level studies. Under the influence of socialist realism, the new institution invited several Soviet professors whose ideological-aesthetic doctrines and methods did not suit Bedia's training and plastic concerns. The artist knew how to overcome this and maintained an alternative line of work that at the same time allowed him to delve into prehistoric civilizations and other cultures such as Etruscan and Celtic. He completed his studies at ISA in 1981.

He won the Grand Prize at the 1982 Landscape Salon, organized by the National Museum of Fine Arts, with his work Affluent. As part of the competition he won an incentive trip to Hungary with a stop in Berlin, where he had the opportunity to visit the Pergamon Museum. In Budapest he visited the ethnology museum and was able to access many of its primitive expression relics. All of this constituted his first major experience outside of Cuba.

A second and transcendental moment abroad took place in February 1985 when he obtained a scholarship, with the help of Luis Camnitzer, at the Old Westbury College, belonging to the State University of New York. He remained there for four months as a resident, together with artists Ricardo Rodríguez Brey and Flavio Garciandía.

He visited several museums, came into contact with the works of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and befriended Cherokee poet and artist Jimi Durham, who convinced Claes Oldenburg and his wife (who already had references of Bedia through Cuban Ana Mendieta) to finance him a trip to South Dakota with the objective of meeting and working with the Sioux people at the Rosebud reservation.

He worked as an instructor at the Casa de Cultura of Marianao from 1972 to 1982 and as director of the municipal gallery for one year (1982-1983). From 1984 he became a painting and easel restorer at the National Museum of Fine Arts until 1987, the year he was accepted as a professor at ISA.

Previously, in 1986, he had taught a plastic arts course to Maya-Chontal indigenous children in the state of Tabasco, Mexico. The Association of Plastic Artists of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba awarded him the Biennial Criticism Prize for being the most outstanding artist in the 1987-88 biennium, shared with Ángel Ramírez. He collaborated as an illustrator in the magazines Revolución y Cultura and El Caimán Barbudo. In the early 90s he moved to Mexico and, since July 1993, he has resided and worked in Miami.

His first exhibition took place at the headquarters of Moncada magazine in 1978, but it was from 1980 that he began a series of exhibitions titled American Chronicles –with two other editions in 1982 and 1986–, which laid the foundations for his creative production.

Special mention deserves Persistence of Use from 1984, held at the National Museum of Fine Arts. In the exhibition he emphasized how certain functions, characteristic of prehistoric times, remained in all present-day cultures, as well as the instruments to carry them out. These and other interests had been distinctive of archaeologists and ethnologists, fundamentally, so Bedia proposed a novel discourse with other possibilities for development.

Within Cuban art, José Bedia is one of the most important creators of the tendency that addresses expressions, customs, themes, and values of the so-called primitive civilizations of America, through the use of methods proper to contemporary art. His work mixes painting and anthropology, while taking advantage of the perspectives established by conceptualism. It is not only about content but also about the execution and structuring of the pieces, since he operates directly with primitive elements from very different sources: Mesoamerican mythology (Aztec codices), shamanism, cults of African origin (minkisi from Congolese imagery), Eskimo poetry, charades, rituals, symbols, animism. All of these resources serve as a starting point for a very simple and natural figuration, loaded with content vigor in the manner of mythic narratives.

His early work founded a new iconography based on documentary images of an extinct or disappearing world. Bedia recognizes the external transcultural influence that these cultures have involuntarily been suffering with respect to Western tradition. Hence his identification with them proceeds in an analogous but opposite direction: starting from his Western formation and through a system of conscious and intellectual reflection, he seeks to approach these cultures and experience their influences transculturally. This author does not recreate myths as occurs in other cases of Cuban art; his art functions as a mediator between ritual and artistic reality. He brings the ancestral into the modern and equates mythic truth with historical truth.

For Bedia, drawing has been essential as a starting point for establishing a language. It is the creative mold from which he departs to make a subsequent shift toward painting or artistic installation. He superimposes different symbolic references in the same image, where one sign refers to another in a kind of symbiosis that synthesizes the attributes and modus vivendi of those "other" civilizations. Frequently his pieces have included, as an imitation of primitive artisanal methods, objects fabricated by himself: arrows, amulets, ceramics, which are at the same time reality and allegory. It is a successful effort to communicate and unify the physical and spiritual universe of the "modern" subject and that of the "primitive" subject.

Bedia has challenged the exclusivity of hegemonic centers of culture and science, as he articulates an artistic cosmovision that has demonstrated the value and relevance of many forms of "savage" thinking that still subsist in diverse peoples of America and Africa. He has brought into question the idea of progress as an ascending line that overcomes the past and leads to superior stages. According to some scholars of the artist's poetics, his principal achievement consists in contributing to the complicated and tortuous process of decentralizing Western culture, that is, "de-Eurocentering" modern culture.

Among his emblematic works can be cited: Twelve Knives (1983), The Stroke of Time (1983), Profile of a People (installation, 1985), Mother of War (1989), Wherever I Go It Will Be Like This (1992), and more recently The Island Awaiting a Signal (2002), among others.

His pieces have been part of numerous exhibitions and appear in countless collections in the United States, Cuba, and Europe. He was included in the exhibition Latin American Artists of the 20th Century, organized by MOMA in the late 90s.