"CUBA: My Revolution" Exhibition
Kentler International Drawing Space
This event has ended.
CUBA: My Revolution The Making of the Graphic Novel and Related Drawings by INVERNA LOCKPEZ & DEAN HASPIEL
In a volume that could easily be compared to the essays in the classic anti-Communist anthology The God That Failed, cartoonist Dean Haspiel has collaborated with Inverna Lockpez to create Cuba: My Revolution, a new graphic work that transforms her true life story into a fictionalized account of her extraordinary journey from idealism and political illusion to political freedom, political reality and a hard-won self-realization. While the book is presented as fiction and names have been changed throughout, the story on which it is based is true and vividly realized, and will very likely take its place among other harrowing personal accounts of brutal disillusionment with the Cuban revolution.
Originally published in 1949, The God That Failed offered the personal stories of such 20th-century literary giants as Arthur Koestler and Richard Wright and their own circuitous routes from being political acolytes to eventually having a grasp on the monstrous nature of the Communist regimes they once had admired. Lockpez’s account is much the same, and thanks to the drawings of Haspiel and the book’s strategic use of limited color—the vivid and allegorical use of red throughout by the acclaimed colorist José Villarrubia—the story she tells in Cuba: My Revolution is brought brilliantly to life in a visual re-creation of her hopes, imprisonment, repression and disappointment as well as her eventual escape to America and freedom.
In the book, the full chromatic range of red serves as both an integral part of the narrative and a powerful symbolic aura that plays across Haspiel’s rich and kinetic gray-scale drawings. More than simply a color, red becomes an emotional veil that tints and enriches our perception of the action on the page. Red is, of course, the color of the Communist Party; but it is also the color of blood and suffering and of passion and commitment . Throughout the book its use underscores the varying ways in which red figures in the lives of the characters and in the broader fate of the Cuban people—from the bloody battlefields of the Bay of Pigs to the propagandistic self-deification of Fidel Castro to the horrific scenes of torture and degradation suffered by the protagonist at the hands of the regime.
Media
Schedule
from October 02, 2010 to December 12, 2010
Artists' Talk with Moderator Calvin Reid: Oct. 2, 4pm
Opening Reception on 2010-10-02 from 17:00 to 19:00