Artists] remain the last best hope for a puncturing of ingrained biases, false consciousness, and wholesale cultural renewal. They are the cables, the deck, and pylons that constitute the bridge from recession to renaissance.
-Christian Viveros-Fauné
-Christian Viveros-Fauné
Abandon the security of tradition. Art doesn’t offer predictable messages, but it most powerful when it orchestrates perplexity, fails to confirm what you already know, and instead sends you away temporarily disoriented but newly attuned to experiences in ways that are perhaps even more powerful because they are vague, rogue, and indeterminate.
- Kirk Varnadoe
I grew up in Tampa, Florida and was introduced to modern art by way of the Graphic Studio artists who worked at the University of South Florida. Robert Mapplethorpe, James Rosenquist, Chuck Close, Los Carpinteros, and Robert Rauchenburg were among those who visited for sustained periods to produce graphic pieces. Because my parents supported the program and collected the prints, the powerful images had a profound effect on me. I saw them on our walls, I wondered about them, and I looked for stories. Now I own one of them, a very large Victor Muniz, inspired by a film character in City of God.
Note: Because Ybor City was an everyday part of life in Tampa, it is likely that along the way its colorful sights, sounds, and tastes served as subtle influences for my eventual connections with Cuba.
Beginning in childhood I have drawn pictures of people and objects in the chapbooks I carry with me. One chapbook consists of people on subways, another of Guatemalans at work. Because drawing requires observational skills, I have understood that I am drawing someone or something, an “object” selected by me, but that my subjective perspective shapes, edits, and transforms the visual outcome.
In college, where I majored in Latin American Studies and minored in Art and Art History, I began to appreciate formal aspects of art, but I wasn’t any better than my Stanford classmates when it came to explaining the meanings and techniques. Along with fine arts courses required for my minor (collage, painting, drawing, and digital media), I took my first art history course. I remember panicking in sophomore year when the Teacher’s Assistant turned to the class and asked us to say something critical about a slide projection of a Lee Krasner work.
It was a terrifying struggle to write about artwork for the first time instead of making it! But when it came time to draft my first art history paper I found I liked it a lot more than any other subject I was taking. Also I recognized the value of editing!
During the summer of my freshman year I lived with my older brother in New York City and signed up for a survey art history course at New York University (1997). This fieldwork class provided a terrific art history experience! We visited museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, MoMa, and the Frick. I remember standing in amazement as our professor explained the formal and historical significance of the Demoisselles D’Avignon. There was such a fascinating story hiding beneath the surface! It was an introduction to context.
I really enjoyed the art history reading assignments that allowed greater familiarity with the broader formal trajectories in Western Art, from Peloponnesian to Picasso to Pollock. Reading assignments and the required papers fine-tuned my ability to verbalize visual information in a coherent, concise, and persuasive format.
Following the NYU summer experience of museums and gallery explorations, I returned to Stanford and took American Abstract Expressionism, a course that exposed me to an art movement that was uniquely American. I learned about the impact of Mexican muralists like Siqueiros on American Abstract Expressionism. The cultural connections between Latin American and American artists encouraged me to consider connections between other artists in different geographical and cultural spaces. My enthusiasm for art history increased during this incredible semester of pure modern Americana!
I tried to make sense of these connections and contradictions in my researched papers and became aware that the theoretical frameworks, in turn, had begun to inspire my own artwork. I was beginning to create artwork that was more socially relevant and personally meaningful. In a paper about Jackson Pollock I argued that his later work’s use of scale, gesture, and handprints implied that the painting was as much a record of the artist’s existence as a space to be gazed at.
Most of my free time in the art studios during my sophomore, junior, and senior year at Stanford was spent tackling concerns about space, composition, color, and scale. My interests and efforts resulted in the Nathan Oliviera Award for Painting by the Stanford Art Department when I graduated in 2000.
In addition to my work in the art department, my Honors’ Thesis for my Latin American and Caribbean Studies major focused on Cuban photographers. Not unlike many of the artists I had come to know, the photographers similarly used their cameras to empower themselves with cultural agency. This area of study underscored once again the value and importance of the visual artist as a kind of storyteller.
These concerns about artistic agency and storytelling simmered on the middle burner after college when I moved to New York City and spent five years working in the fast-paced deadline-driven world of publishing (Gotham, Hamptons, Los Angeles Confidential Magazines, 2000-05). It was good to have a job and the experience enhanced my writing skills and expanded my knowledge about commerce, creativity, and the “real” world.
In 2006, I was accepted by the Latin American Studies Department of New York University. I chose a Performance Studies focus and studied with Professor Diana Taylor, whose research pertains to new ideas and methods about art and performance in Latin America. For the Performance Studies focus, I took a course in Lima, Peru with the Yuyachkani indigenous theater group. The masks, cultural iconography, and new methods for engaging audiences that characterized this theatre group’s repertoire broadened my notions about artistic agency and meaningful cultural contributions. These parallel notions have contributed to my on-going interest in writing about Cuban artwork, artists and the vital stories they tell.
In 2007 a Tinker Fellowship (2007) research grant allowed me to travel to Cuba once again to investigate artistic agency and expression. There, I saw first-hand how a handful of Cuban visual artists were illustrating the story of Cuban history as it unfolded around them with vibrant and imaginative artwork that was much more enthralling—and somehow more true—than the accounts presented by news media and shrewd economic analysis. Moreover, their expressions were set in the midst of an economic catastrophe.
The Cuba window closed abruptly when worsening US-Cuba diplomatic relations led to tightened travel restrictions. Although I felt detoured from my imagined destiny, the deviation was temporary. I became a Peace Corps Volunteer (2008-10) in Guatemala, an experience that made the most of the cumulative three years of time I would have had to spend waiting in limbo for policy relaxation by the soon-to-be President Obama. I was accepted right out of NYU grad school and assigned to a village set in the shadow of a large, inactive volcano on the slopes of which coffee was grown. I helped to market the coffee produced by my community to foreign buyers by using the writing, video editing, publicity, and marketing skills that I had accumulated during my professional experiences in New York City.
Peace Corps experience may seem about as far removed from the sphere of art history as the moon, but it turned to be just the other way around. Peace Corps service experiences reminded me once again that stories matter; they are at the heart of all cultural and social agency. I realized that stories were as vital for all societies as food, clothing, and shelter are for all individuals. While living near my Guatemalan volcano, I appreciated how artists were the record keepers, the storytellers. Their stories provided them with the power of cultural agency.
The Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies hired me straight out of Peace Corps service. All of the past experiences I have been presenting in this statement —Stanford University, NYU, The Peace Corps, etc.—have converged like a fairy tale with a happy ending to produce Act III in the Life of Alexander Nixon, M.A!
The Center for Cuban Studies exemplifies the notion that artists can bridge the misunderstandings between countries. We build bridges by sending educational groups to Cuba to meet Cuban artists, learn about their art, and expect that on their return home, they will share their experiences with fellow US Citizens. The Center has provided me with access to Cuban art and arts that I had never imagined. My responsibilities center on Cuban art and artists, so as to stimulate public curiosity, excitement, and support.
Often I write stories about Cuban art for on-line publication (CUBAUpdate and ARTSlant). In the articles I try to contextualize the cultural contributions by Cuban artists, whose work we exhibit, photograph, archive, and sell. I also translate interviews and articles by other writers, edit and translate, sub title videos, write press releases, and blog about Cuban art. On occasion I paint colorful acrylic titles on the wall for each of the continuous stream of exhibitions at the Center. My news articles focus frequently on Cuba’s recent cultural recession-to-renaissance during which a new generation of Cuban artists have came of age and contributed to the visual chapter of Cuban history.
That's it! (for now)
-- Alexander Nixon, M.A.
