New York
Yoan Capote is among the politically conscious artists currently enjoying eased constraints in Cuba, where Fidel Castro, in 1959, established a Communist regime 90 miles from the U.S. coast. With his pulse attuned to his native culture and his heart beating at a free-world pace, Capote treads terrain still hot-wired with reprisals for dissidence. His works, strongly rooted in local tradition, grow to universal proportions as he deftly detours around homegrown maladies to project his message onto a global stage. It’s a familiar strategy, a phenomenon common in many totalitarian countries (consider China and the art of Ai Weiwei, for example), which selectively permit controversial art to proliferate throughout the art market where cultural insights are often obscured by media hype. The works in Capote’s recent exhibition, “Collective Unconscious,” dig beneath such rhetoric to uncover the psyche of his complex island nation. …see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
