The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) celebrates the acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs from the Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the medium’s evolution in Cuba over nearly six decades — from promoting the Revolution following Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government, to engaging in social and political critique in more recent times as the triumph of the Revolution increasingly gave way to economic hardship and political repression.
Particularly in the years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the fluctuating prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
“With the acquisition of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, now boasts the most complete collection anywhere of post-Revolution Cuban photography, with an emphasis on the years since 1990: nearly 700 works by more than 80 Cuban artists,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We are enormously grateful to Mrs. Plonsker, who assembled the collection through the lasting relationships she forged with artists over many visits to Cuba from 2005 to 2020.”
“The strengths of the Plonsker Collection are unparalleled, in terms of telling the complex and compelling story of post-Revolution Cuban photography,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of photography at the MFAH. “Combined in this exhibition with works already in the Museum’s holdings, the collection allows us to chronicle that story from the ‘epic generation,’ whose work would define the image of the Cuban Revolution, to the succeeding generations of photographers, who questioned the power of photography and its relationship to political authority and who created highly personal work in the context of a greater awareness of international contemporary art.”
The exhibition of some 100 works will be on view September 29, 2024 through August 3, 2025, in the Museum’s Nancy and Rich Kinder Building for modern and contemporary art.
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography
On view through August 5, 2025
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)
1001 Bissonnet St,
Houston, TX 77005
www.mfah.org
