The papers of Cuban Americans at the Archives of American Art include the primary source material of painters, sculptors, photographers, collectors, dealers, critics, historians, and curators as well as records of several galleries and a museum. This online exhibition was created in an effort to reveal, through primary source documents, the creativity in the lives of five important and influential Cuban artists: Enrique Riverón, Ramón Guerrero, Humberto Dionisio, Arturo Rodríuez and his wife, Demi, and to provide a sampling of the Archives' Cuban American resources. According to Cuban art historian Giulio V. Blanc:
The Cuban artists of Miami present a mixed bag. Generationally, stylistically, thematically, there is much diversity. It is an art of irony and anxiety, containing anger, resentment and frustration at the regime on the island. It addresses the problems of exile as well: psychological pain at leaving the homeland behind and having to adopt to a new bi-cultural reality, anxiety caused by family divisions, and the pain of nostalgia for the past.
The collections highlighted here were collected under the Latino Art Documentation Project, begun in 1996 to identify and document significant primary source material in the South Florida region. It was developed to identify the artistic production in the area by Cuban artists and to promote scholarship through the broad dissemination of information about our unique sources for the study of Latino and Latin American art.