The encounter formed part of MoCAA’s broader agenda in the Yucatán capital, aimed at strengthening relationships with artists, critics, academic institutions, and cultural organizations throughout the region. Art critic David Mateo and Belkis Martín Mateo accompanied the museum’s representatives during the studio visit and participated in the exchange surrounding the artist’s practice.

The donation carries particular significance for MoCAA. The two works will enter the museum’s permanent collection, expanding its representation of contemporary Cuban printmaking and contributing to an archive committed to documenting the diversity of experiences, generations, and visual languages that have shaped artistic production both on the island and across its diaspora.

Born in Havana in 1972, Tente graduated from Cuba’s National Academy of Fine Arts, San Alejandro, in 1995. He later continued his training through the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de La Habana and the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, two important environments for the development and international circulation of contemporary printmaking.

From the beginning of his career, his work has been distinguished by an intensive engagement with graphic processes, particularly collagraphy and drypoint. Although his practice has also encompassed painting, sculpture, ceramics, design, and illustration, printmaking has remained the field in which he developed his most recognizable artistic language, grounded in technical experimentation and a symbolic vocabulary connected to memory, identity, and personal experience.

In 2002, he founded Praxis Havana, an independent studio and workshop conceived as a space for the sustained development of his artistic practice. The project has continued to evolve alongside the artist and now serves as a platform for creation, experimentation, and exchange in Mérida.

Tente understands art as a territory of freedom, resistant to rigid adherence to fashions or prevailing trends while remaining deeply shaped by questions of identity. The artist has described this cultural and biographical inheritance as his “baggage,” a body of references that accompanies him and continues to transform as his work moves through different geographic and human contexts.

Throughout his career, he has participated in exhibitions, salons, biennials, and cultural projects in Cuba, Mexico, the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Italy, Peru, and other countries. His trajectory includes appearances connected with the Havana Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, the International Biennial of Curitiba, the International Biennial of Asunción, and the Armonk Outdoor Art Show in New York.

His relationship with Yucatán extends back more than a decade. In 2012, he participated in the Second Jaime Castellanos Reyes Printmaking Biennial and in the Yucatán Visual Arts Fair. In subsequent years, his presence in Mérida has grown through exhibitions, urban interventions, university programs, and several editions of La Noche Blanca. His more recent projects include Evolución de piedra y tiempo, Homenaje a Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Conexiones, and the personal retrospective of prints Es lo que hay.

Now based in Mérida, Tente continues to maintain an active studio practice while developing educational and experimental initiatives for younger artists. Among them is El Laboratorio, a project devoted to encouraging research, technical exploration, and creative experimentation in the field of printmaking.

The studio visit offered MoCAA’s representatives an opportunity to engage directly with the artist’s working environment, learn more about his processes, and discuss possible forms of future collaboration. Beyond the donation itself, the meeting reaffirmed the importance of the studio as a place of thought, learning, and connection among artistic communities.

For MoCAA, Tente’s donation represents more than an expansion of its holdings. It also establishes a new point of dialogue linking Havana, Mérida, and Miami through printmaking, memory, and the movement of Cuban artists across borders. Each work entering the collection carries an individual history, but also a broader network of workshops, cities, teachers, migrations, and encounters through which Cuban art can be understood as a living, diverse, and continually evolving field.

Through this gesture, Tente joins the artists who have entrusted part of their production to the museum and who contribute, from different locations, to MoCAA’s mission of preserving, researching, and presenting the many expressions of contemporary art throughout the Americas.