Aldo Menéndez, Important Figure of Pictorial Renewal in Cuba, Dies in Miami

December 19, 2020

The plastic artist, cultural promoter and Cuban art critic Aldo Menéndez passed away this Friday in Miami at the age of 72, victim of a heart attack.

Menéndez's wife and also artist Ivonne Ferrer confirmed the news to a Florida publication.

Cuban critic and curator Janet Batet commented on it on her Facebook wall with heartfelt words: "Aldo Menéndez has gone and the world shrinks a little more. Friend, host without equal, conversationalist like few others. Full of dreams and projects until the last day. He always had a ready hand for those he could help. With him departs a piece of memory of contemporary Cuban art. He leaves us, however, always generous, so much."

Menéndez was born in Cienfuegos in 1948, and his artistic training took place in the plastic arts workshop directed in that city by the legendary artist and writer Samuel Feijóo, as well as in Austria and at the National School of Art in Havana, where he had among his teachers Fayad Jamis and met Chilean artist Roberto Matta.

Nevertheless, he affirmed that painter Servando Cabrera was his "best teacher and intellectual mentor."

He ventured into painting and graphic design, and in the 1960s and 1970s he exhibited posters, drawings and paintings in exhibitions in Cuba, Europe and Latin America, and in parallel developed an intense career as a cultural critic from the pages of the magazine Revolución y Cultura, where he was a collaborator of Alejo Carpentier.

He also was part of the group of artists that renewed the visual arts in Cuba in the 1970s, alongside painters such as Flavio Garciandía and Nélida López.

He was also a curator and cultural promoter, and in 1983 he founded the Experimental Workshop of Artistic Screen Printing, today Taller René Portocarrero, a pioneering institution that had a great impact on the graphic arts of Cuba and Latin America and whose role in the renewal of the arts in Cuba was outstanding.

Menéndez is considered one of the pioneers in the artistic practice of performance on the Island, and his influence would be decisive for groups of young artists such as Arte Calle and Provisional, which in the 1980s and 1990s produced work with marked critical content that led them to clash with Cuban government authorities.

In 1990 the artist definitively left the Island. He first resided in Spain and subsequently settled in the USA.

Among his books stands out Everything I Wanted to Know About Cuban Artistic Screen Printing… and They Never Told Me (2017), and among the exhibitions he curated are Artists in Purgatory / Artistas en el Purgatorio, exhibited in 2017 at the Kendall Art Center and dedicated to exiled Cuban artists.

His work is part, among other artistic institutions in the world, of the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, the Museum of Latin American Art in California and the Casa de América in Madrid.