By ELISA TURNER
Special to The Herald

BREAKING BARRIERS: Ana Albertina Delgado's The Rotten Apple (above, 1989).

True to a diaspora, this art is not at home.

Perhaps it's fitting that a show dedicated to the extraordinarily creative outpouring of Cubans in exile should go on display outside the city that's home to Little Havana.

Breaking Barriers: Selections From the Museum of Art's Contemporary Cuban Collection opened Saturday at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale. (It travels to the Tampa Museum of Art in 1998 and to the Snite Museum of Art at Indiana's University of Notre Dame in 1999.)

A profound sense of displacement -- articulated with feisty, sometimes violent vigor or with bittersweet melancholy or with just plain manic humor -- moves through much of the work in this exhibit. For younger artists, especially, ever more remote from 1959 when Fidel Castro came to power and spawned the revolution re-creating Cuba as well as Miami, the theme of exile becomes less pronounced as it blends with broader, timely topics like identity, gender and the fragility of life in an era ravaged by AIDS.

It's possible to see this show, a collection of photographs, paintings, sculpture, video and installations, most done in the 1990s, as part of a wider tradition in which artists reclaim distinctive parts of their cultural identity.

The installations on display in the experimental, contemporary section of Points of Entry, an exhibit at the Miami Art Museum exploring issues of immigration, are an example. Manipulated photographs by Maria Martinez-Canas -- handsome mosaics redolent with themes of travel and map-making -- appear in both Points of Entry and Breaking Barriers. Family photos, documents and letters are fodder for the identity-conscious work of Albert Chong, Gavin Lee and Young Kim, who share an Asian background, as they are for Cuban exiles Juan Ballester, Glexis Novoa and Mario Petrinera.

The expatriate urge to insert parts of the past into a new, uncertain present can also be seen in the work of Haitian-born artists who've settled in the United States, such as those included in a small survey mounted three summers ago at ArtCenter-South Florida. Andre Juste's rickety plywood sculpture slathered with hot colors made a compelling if uneasy coupling between two forms of expression that would seem impossibly distant: the crisp angles of a cool Minimalist grid and the vibrant, saucy paintings on a Haitian Tap-Tap bus.

In this often wrenching process of leave-taking, personal and public mementos may get recast into barbed political commentary. Its sting echoes throughout Breaking Barriers, although it's often more subtle than strident.

Many dimensions

Breaking Barriers brings together 157 works by 91 artists. It's not only a multimedia but a multigenerational survey, stretching the usual meaning of contemporary art by including artists whose years of birth range from the 1920s to the 1960s. Many live in South Florida, but others hail from San Francisco, New Orleans, Atlanta, Boston, New York, France, Spain and Belgium.

The range is astonishing, even if such a large show is inevitably marred by patchy and uneven spots, with a number of colorful, expressionist works verging on the decorative.

On display are muscular abstract paintings by Hugo Consuegra and Guido Llinas, members of the important avant-garde 1950s group ``Los Once''; a lushly detailed trompe l'oeil surrealist landscape by Lydia Rubio; a droll and satiric video by Coco Fusco critiquing the myth of the savage ``other''; and an installation by Jose Bedia. Stark and dramatic, Bedia's art deftly meshes Afro-Cuban imagery with newly symbolic items like a toy airplane and violin in this shrinelike sculpture, A Violin for the Guardian Angel.

An advocate for exiles

The exile artists of Breaking Barriers find a dedicated advocate in the museum's curator of collections, Jorge Santis. Since he assumed his position in 1991, he has mounted a series of solo shows highlighting the art of his compatriots. For the past four years, he has been acquiring the works on display in Breaking Barriers. Without funds to purchase the art, Santis has relied on the kindness of collectors, dealers and the artists themselves to donate works.

Santis insists, as do other museum officials reliant on gifts, that ``these are not leftovers. I was very difficult with the artists. I was not just collecting whatever came into my hands, but things that would have a dialogue with each other.''

Unlike two other large surveys of Cuban art in the last decade, Breaking Barriers maintains a heavy focus on the nature of ``exile art'' now, with its primary focus on recent artwork.

Touching on broad themes like loss and childhood, the show doesn't divide the artists into age groups like the traveling Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba of 1987, organized by Rutgers University and the University of Miami. Nor does it strive for the historical and geographical sweep of the 1996 Cuba 20th Century, organized by museums in the Canary Islands and Spain, which brought together work by exiles as well as artists who maintain Cuban ties.

Breaking Barriers becomes a unique take on the various, prolific, even contradictory strands of recent Cuban art. A prominent portion of the show presents work by those who left the island as children, forming their careers in the United States, with that of the internationally admired `` '80s generation.'' The latter artists grew up with the revolution, often worked in a more conceptual mode and mined Afro-Cuban sources, and emigrated in the 1990s. Delicate nostalgia for an interrupted life surfaces in the valiselike objects of Ernesto Pujol and Mario Petrinera, who arrived in the United States in the 1960s. This art contrasts mightily with the abrasive and sensual sculpture of recent exiles Florencio Gelabert and Ricardo Rodriguez Brey.

Politically charged art, as noted, is generally subtle. The scatological drawing by Tomas Esson, merging genitalia with the Cuban flag, is a prominent exception. And Arturo Cuenca's well-known photo montage, Science and Ideology (Che), shows a backward, nearly anonymous view of a towering Havana sign touting a revolutionary icon's likeness and creed.

On the second floor, a collection of photography and drawings is especially fine and resonant. They include Glexis Novoa's Te fuistes (You Left), a quietly evocative wall installation with pencil drawings and collage. Floating bits of script, plucked from letters to the artist from his grandmother, span the gulf between coasts of Cuba and Florida, depicted as architectural jungles.

Landscape as a locus for longing, and the body -- or bodily traces, like handwriting -- as an emblem of loss also figure in drawings by Juan Abreu and Carlos Macia and poetic photography by Abelardo Morell, Ana Mendieta, Mario Algaze and Tomas Lopez. A subtle surprise of the show is the pairing of a smoky subway scene by Gustavo Ojeda and Luis Mallo's crisp photos of hands belonging to subway riders, more bodies in transit.

`Project of a lifetime'

It's a collection that hits the high notes, with works by established artists including Augustin Fernandez, Juan Gonzalez, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Maria Brito, Carlos Alfonzo, Tony Labat and Andres Serrano. Obvious omissions are works by painter Julio Larraz and the late conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Gonzalez-Torres declined to be included in the collection, says Santis, and a painting by Larraz hasn't yet been made available to the museum.

Despite the show's shortcomings, the result is a truly admirable feat. No wonder Santis says, ``I consider this the project of a lifetime. I will never have so many sleepless nights for anything else that I do in my life.''

Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald