José Bedia
b. 1959, Havana, Cuba
CV
José Bedia has studied the ritual art of the world's tribal cultures, believing that there is a universal language of cosmos and existence. He is a priest of Palo Monte, an African religion practiced in Cuba, and has immersed himself in the religion's history and rituals. The eternal cycle of life and death, the sacred nature of plants and animals, and shamanistic transformation rituals are common themes in his work.
José Bedia was an integral part of the 1981 exhibition Volumen Uno at the Havana International Arts Center, which radically transformed Cuban Art and serves as a milestone in the history of visual arts in Cuba. He participated in the first Havana Biennial in 1984 and was later selected to represent Cuba at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Two years later, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in New York.
Current museum exhibitions include a solo exhibition, Viaje Circular (Circular Journey), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), MX, and a group exhibition, Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
Important solo exhibitions include Persistencia del Uso (Persistence of Use) at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, where he obtained the Grand Prize of the Landscape Salon (1984); Magiciens de la Terre, Centre Pompidou (1989); Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (A Brief Account of the Indies' Destruction) at the Carrillo Gil Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico DF (1992); De donde vengo (Where I Come From) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1994); Cosas Redondas (Round Things) Fort Lauderdale Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1995); Entre dos Mundos (Between Two Worlds) at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) in Valencia, Spain (2010); and Transcultural Pilgim at the Fowler Museum in UCLA, California (2012).
Bedia's works are part of several collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; and the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida; among others. Bedia works and resides in Miami, FL.
SELECT EXHIBITIONS
José Bedia
Simetria Natural
April 18 - May 20, 2023
José Bedia
Poner el Universo en Orden Otra Vez
February 20 - March 26, 2022
José Bedia
Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond at MoMA, NYC
Through September 9, 2023
Chosen Memories brings together contemporary works by Latin American artists who have been investigating history as source material for their work. “History is a living organism,” said the Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó, one of the 40 artists featured in the exhibition. Bringing together videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures made over the past four decades, the exhibition reveals how some of today’s most relevant art is conceived through investigating and retelling history in new ways.
Anchored by a transformative gift of works from trustee Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and shown in dialogue with other Latin American works from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition presents work by some of the region’s most important artists. From reframing long histories of colonialism in the region and exploring the different ways in which artists revisit undervalued cultural heritages, to looking at the ways in which kinship and belonging are strengthened, the exhibition offers us new ways of looking at the past to better understand, and shape, our current moment.
Click here for more information
José Bedia
Viaje Circular at MARCO, Monterrey, MX
January 27 - July 2023
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey presents José Bedia,Viaje Circular, a retrospective that proposes a journey through the artist's own production and the ancestral cultures that influence him. The exhibition, curated by Taiyana Pimentel, director of MARCO, and José Bedia Fuertes, director of the artist's studio, brings together 102 works of art, mostly paintings, drawings, and installations.
The title of the exhibition refers to an introspective journey in terms of culture and identity since Bedia's art blurs the borders between the original peoples of Latin America from the symbolic, the primal, and the sacred, making the past act as an active value in the present. In this way, the artist generates a symbiosis between primitive cultures and contemporary art.
Click here for more information
José Bedia
Munanfinda at Meridians Sector, Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
The work titled Munanfinda ('the forest') is derived from the colloquial Kikongo language, which dates back to colonial times in Cuba. It aims to recreate a wild and untamed landscape, anthropomorphized by the profile of a great figure that occupies the primary space. The relationship between the flat figures on the wall and the three-dimensional figures are informed by how they join within this kind of 'diorama' in an angular form. The resulting monochromatic and three-dimensional drawing represents a living and intangible power that manifests within the wilderness.
Click here for more information
Interview of Fredric Snitzer at Fredric Snitzer Gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, celebrating his 20th participation in the fair and his gallery’s 45th year of operations.
This video interview was produced in collaboration with ScreenPartners.
A festival of art in Miami: Art Basel
Wendy Guerra walks through a living museum in Miami during the days of Art Basel. A visual, contemporary, and colorful journey where galleries, artists, collectors, and works are set in motion.
José Bedia
Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s at Lowe Art Museum
March 17 – June 12, 2022
Radical Conventions is not a survey exhibition; it does not attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of the cultural production of Cuban-born artists living and working in the US during the 1980s. Instead, it provides a counter-narrative to the prevailing discourse on Cuban American art (which tends to examine this material through the reductive lens of exile and displacement) and locates the cultural formation and artistic practice of its featured artists in nuanced social and political contexts. By dispensing with the more typical binary-identity focused approach, the works reveal the impact of other identities. Beyond biculturalism, issues related to sexuality, gender, religion, class, and political positionings—especially vis-à-vis Cuba and Cuba/US relations—are addressed within the wider aesthetic frameworks of the American avant-garde of the late 1970s and 1980s. Radical Conventions also places the works on view in dialogue with the most pressing issues of this pivotal decade: HIV/AIDS, identity politics, culture wars, postmodernism, Mariel, and Reagan-era conservatism.
PUBLIC WORKS
