Coordination efforts are under way to bring a significant presence of Cuban art to the commemorative program that the School of Architecture (Facultad de Arquitectura) of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY), in Mérida, will hold in September 2026, marking its 53rd anniversary and two decades of its Visual Arts degree program.
The occasion has deep roots. The School was founded in 1973 and, since the late 1980s, the teaching of photography and the visual-arts workshops that would later give rise to the degree program gradually carved out, within a campus devoted to architecture, habitat, and design, a sustained space for artistic creation. Open to the university community and the general public, the September program brings together academic, cultural, and artistic activities in which the dialogue with Cuban art holds a singular place. Diario de Yucatán
As a special initiative, the Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida will host a representative selection from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCAA), of Florida, curated by its founder and director general, Leonardo Rodríguez. The exhibition will gather works drawn from the history of Cuban painting, printmaking, photography, and poster design, all part of the holdings that sustain the institution—the Rodríguez Collection—which grew out of the project that opened in 2016 as the Kendall Art Center and later became MoCAA. The venue is fitting for an architecture anniversary: the museum occupies the former Federal Post Office Palace, a French-inflected building inaugurated in 1908, and has operated in that structure since 2007; its first floor is devoted to the current tendencies of the visual arts—painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, and installation.
The artist and deputy director of MoCAA, Ivonne Ferrer, will present a solo show of her recent production—gathered in large part in her monograph Recent Works, 2014–2024—accompanied by a talk addressed to the School's students.
The magazine Artcrónica for the Americas and the Caribbean will present several of its print editions, in particular the issue devoted to Cuban architecture, which connects naturally with the host institution. Its director, the critic David Mateo (Matanzas, 1965), a journalist, curator, and editor, will give a lecture on his career and on his work across the cultural media. First emerging in Havana and later relaunched from Mexico with a firm Latin American and Caribbean vocation, the publication has built up an archive of interviews, essays, and thematic issues on the region's art.
The coordination of this Cuban presence rests on ties already in place between the island and Yucatán: the visual artist Enrique Miralles (Tente), who leads the initiative, directs Praxis Havana, a printmaking studio-gallery founded in Centro Habana, now with a branch established in Mérida—confirming that Cuban art already has a foothold in the city that now welcomes it on an institutional scale. DIARIO DE CUBATripadvisor
(Pictured: David Reynaldo Alcocer González, director of the UADY School of Architecture; David Mateo, art critic and editor-in-chief of Artcrónica; and Enrique Miralles (Tente), visual artist and coordinator of Praxis Havana.)
