The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami will present two complementary exhibitions on Afro-Cuban art from May 1 to Sept. 12, 2025, both guest-curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. "El Pasado Mío/My Own Past" features 43 Afro-Cuban artists from the 1820s to the present in an amplified version with 83 works, while "Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection" focuses on early 20th-century Afrocubanista works, including pieces by Wifredo Lam.
These exhibitions matter because they offer one of the most ambitious presentations of Afro-Cuban art in a major U.S. museum, tracing two centuries of artistic production and creating a dialogue between the modernist Afrocubanismo movement and broader Afro-Cuban practice from the colonial period to contemporary times. The show also highlights the Lowe's role in bringing significant scholarship from Harvard to a wider public audience.