Carmen Maria Machado, known for her short stories and memoir "In the Dream House," curated a one-room exhibition of paintings by Cuban artist Rocío García at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. Titled "The Object of Power Is Power," the show features García's large-scale canvases exploring themes of sexuality, power, and migration, and marks Machado's first curatorial project after a decade of collaborating with visual artists.
This collaboration matters because it bridges literary and visual art worlds, highlighting how a writer's thematic concerns with gender, queerness, and power can translate into curatorial practice. It also brings overdue attention to García, a 70-year-old Cuban painter who has long worked against artistic conventions, and situates her work within urgent contemporary conversations about rising fascism and the U.S. embargo against Cuba.