¡ECHÁNDOLA! Art Show at Chinatown SOUP Gallery NYC feat. Mujercitos Collective

Elena V. Molina
8 min readJun 20, 2021

“¡Echándola!” — or, “Let’s get it!” — celebrates the energy and momentum of young Cuban creatives in this post-historical moment. Chinatown Soup partnered with curators Gerardo Muñoz and Elena V. Molina alongside a collaborative constellation of Cuba’s rising art stars to present practices that interrogate and reimagine the sociopolitical stagnancy of their built environment. ¡Echándola! is on view from July 2 -11, 2021.

We got some Press:

El Nuevo Herald: Muestra de arte cubano contemporáneo aterriza en NYC

Infrapolitical Reflections: Four Theses on the Mujercitos Collective. Notes for a brief gallery talk by Gerardo Muñoz

Diario de Las Américas: Mujercitos Magazine: Un gesto ‘underground’ en Cuba

Rialta Magazine: Obras enfermas, desamparadas: el colectivo Mujercitos y artistas invitados exponen en Nueva York

Participating artists are exhibited under Mujercitos Collective, a multimedia, transformative visual grammar paradigmatic of the contemporary Cuban art scene’s youngest generation that emerged in Havana, summer 2019. The group gathers diverse artists spanning multiple disciplines: Victor Fernández (film and video art), Claudia Patricia Pérez (drawing and visual design), Román Gutiérrez (fiction), and Juan Miguel-Pozo (painting). Their vision is heavily influenced by American pop and underground punk and pulp cultures, as well as the imaginaries of advertising consumer society that haunt late-stage capitalism.

“Cosas que te callas // Things We Do Not Say” 2020. Digital collage.

¡Echándola! features a substantial sample of Mujercitos’ work — drawings, collages, video, designs, painting, textiles, sound-based and on-site pieces — while trying to avoid mere documentation. Cover design is a central activity that accompanies monthly publication of Mujercitos magazine, which is the foundational artwork of this exhibit. While the covers are primarily designed by Claudia Patricia Pérez, Mujercitos is known to invite follow-traveler artists to contribute their own designs. Prioritization of the cover design process speaks to Mujercitos’ fascination with the counterculture music scene and iconic transmission of its message.

These cover designs become linguistic devices communicating consumption, satire, and slapstick humor reminiscent of North American magazines such as National Lampoon or Mad. One could also read them as profaning the socialist poster (“el cartel socialista”), which was a dominant form of propaganda art after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Unlike socialist posters, Mujercitos covers do not promote state-driven mobilization; instead, they recycle and subvert the order of icons, historical figures, and well-known established slogans.

Todos mentimos bien el viernes por la noche” // “We are all good liars on a Friday night.” 2018 Ink markers, pens and color pencils with collage on paper.

Mujercitos also identifies with “Generación de los 80s” that took Cuban art from museums to the streets (“Arte Calle”). Creating outside the aesthetic trends of early millennium Cuban art, (which often centered the country’s post-Communist transition of the early 1990’s), their strategies retreat from national identity as a main referent. From this perspective, conventional attitudes of the artistic “avant-garde” and its recent associations with “art activism” fail to engage the nature of everyday routines, the partying lifestyle, and the circulation of currency generated by Obama’s normalization of US-Cuba relations in 2016. Mujercitos’ visual language chronicles preferences of the country’s youth that are no longer contingent upon their historical inheritance.

Departing the culturalist and identitarian frameworks that define much of contemporary Cuban art invites authentic appreciation for the ways people live in Cuba while also underlining the universal impact of ideology and consumerism on human life — all central to Mujercitos’ gestures. Through various dislocations we may sense experiential and visual novelty from a collective that is working with the texture of life, desire, and imagination of youth.

Chekkk 2020 Digital collage

Mujercitos & friends… included on the show:

Juan Miguel Pozo

Juan Miguel Pozo’s painting deals with explorations in the relation between visual structures, political propaganda, and political imaginaries from the socialist epoch. Pozo’s most recent painting series, to which “Partially Painted Structure” (2020) belongs, explores the divergent languages and forms of Cuban and East Germany socialist imaginaries with an overtly emphasis on monumentalism and the work of memory. In this specific painting, the elephant juxtaposed with layers of colors and linear frames, wants to convey the power of iconicity while retaining the different layers of materiality of the process of painting in the canvas.

Raychel Carrión

This snow globe titled “Bola de nieve” (2020) by Raychel Carrión translates into an object his systematic visual critique of Cuban reality as subsumed in the structure of violence. The simplicity of the snow globe is intervened by a police baton that emerges vertically at the center of the sphere. For Carrión this entails a continuation of his aesthetic horizon which tries to convey a sense of violence within the field of reality and of our interactions with others in daily life. For Carrión the police baton is not meant to represent solely police brutality, but rather the constitutive and ongoing violence that mediates between existence and the world. Although there is no racialized intention from the artist, the piece metonymically also suggests vis-à-vis the contrast of black and white (as well as the title that could be read in reference to an afrocuban pianist and songwriter, ‘Bola de Nieve’), the condition of black existence in a hostile world where politics and the police have become undifferentiated poles of contemporary states. The tilted and erected baton can also be read as the phallic signifier that structures social order, and which cannot be covered up even with fall snow. The piece is meant for spectators to be touched and shaken.

Hamlet Lavastida

These two drawings pencils on paper — “Billetaje” (2021) and “Agromercado” belong to Hamlet Lavastida’s ongoing drawing series that capture quotidian objects, characters, and images from contemporary Cuban society. “Billetaje” (2021) thematizes the materiality of money, and the mystical element embedded in cash represents in a society where the state still exerts control over monetary regulation and exchange rates. This drawing which was used to illustrate a piece published by Mujercitos Magazine entitled “El billete quemando la calle”, also wants to illustrate, without metaphors and mediations, how the vital force of money moves and generates new energies in Cuban civil society, contesting the state overarching planning and objectives, while achieving new degrees of autonomy and self-empowerment for everyday people. On the other hand, “Agromercado”, more allegorical in its composition and signification, represents three pig heads with the subtitle “First Manifesto to Abolish Cubaness”. This drawing positions itself not only politically, but also more secretively against the identity and transcultural discourses that have structured the long history of Cuban intellectual and political imaginations since its independence. The headless animal might also be a reminder that contemporary Cuban society is devoid of authority, that is, without a center head or ideology at the helm, and that we just have to learn how to look.

Artist Biographies

Claudia Patricia Pérez Olivera (Havana, 1993). Studied in the National Academy of the Arts of San Alejandro, with an emphasis on sculpture, and she graduated from the Superior Institute of Design in Havana in 2019. She is now the visual editor and designer of Mujercitos Magazine. Her work has been exhibited in collective exhibitions su has “Y como se reproducen” (2019), “Exposición Puzzle” (III), both in Galería Taller Gorria, Havana 2019. Her personal show “Todos mentimos bien el viernes por la noche”, was part of the exhibition La Comuna at Salón de Protocolo, La Habana, 2019.

Raychel Carrión (Havana, 1978). Graduated in 2011 from the National Institute of Art, Havana Cuba. He also studied in the Art of Conduct Workshop led by contemporary artist Tania Bruguera in 2006–2008. He has showed his work in international and national galleries, his practices expand from performance, painting, conceptual art, and most recent an extensive series of drawings still in progress entitled “El penúltimo vómito” (“The second to last vomit”, 2020–2021). He lives and work in Albarracín, Spain. https://www.raychelcarrion.com/

Juan Miguel Pozo (Holguín, 1970). His artistic training began in Cuba, and later he did higher studies in Germany. He studied at the Eart School for Painting and Drawing, Isla de Pinos, Cuba, and at the Art School of Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany. His paintings have been exhibited at solo and collective exhibitions in Europe and Latin America. Lives and works between Havana and Berlin.

Hamlet Lavastida (Havana, 1983). Graduated from ISA and the Art of Conduct Workshop led by contemporary artist Tania Bruguera in 2006–2008. His work has been centered in the relations between stencil, animation, and the visual Hamlet’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Artium Museum in Spain, the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art in Poland, and the Liverpool Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art. The monograph Manual para un mínimo alfabeto proletario (Rialta, 2021) by Gerardo Muñoz on his work was published this year.

Victor Fernandez (Havana, 1985) is a filmmaker by profession, and worked in the ICAIC archives. He is now the editor in chief of Mujercitos Magazine.

Greta Vidal (Havana, 1994) is a music producer, DJ, and experimental music creator. She graduated from the School of Music ENA and lives in Havana.

Victor & Claudia from Mujercitos Collective

Further reading on Mujercitos Collective

1. “¿Quién es Mujercitos?”, Hypermedia Magazine, julio 2020: https://www.hypermediamagazine.com/columnistas/megatiburon-vs-pulpo-gigante/quien-es-mujercitos/

2. Gerardo Muñoz & Elena Molina. “Por una nueva toxicidad: apuntes sobre la imagen-gesto”, Ficción de la razón, marzo de 2021: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2021/03/08/gerardo-munoz-y-elena-molina-por-una-nueva-toxicidad-apuntes-sobre-la-imagen-gesto/

3. Gerardo Muñoz. “Four Theses on the Mujercitos Collective.”, Infrapolitical Reflections, marzo 2021: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2021/03/06/four-theses-on-the-mujercitos-collective-notes-for-a-brief-gallery-talk-march-2021-by-gerardo-munoz/

4. Gerardo Muñoz & Elena Molina. “Una juventud invivida: los dibujos de Claudia Patricia”, Artishock Revista, mayo 2021, Forthcoming.

5. Maeve Kelly. “Lehigh professor hosts ‘Firing Line,’ a series highlighting Cuban artists and uprisings”, Brown & White, April 2021: https://thebrownandwhite.com/2021/04/21/lehigh-professor-hosts-lecture-series-highlighting-cuban-artists-and-uprisings/

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Elena V. Molina

A goal-driven cyborg with a sense of humor ;) I run Arthaus Artist Residency space in Havana, Cuba. https://linktr.ee/elenavmolina