The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas mourns the passing of Luis Miguel Valdés Morales, the Cuban painter, printmaker, sculptor, teacher, and cultural promoter whose work moved with remarkable freedom between graphic tradition, architectural imagination, and the new technologies that began to reshape artistic practice in the late twentieth century.
Valdés was born in Pinar del Río in 1949 and developed a long career that joined artistic production with teaching and institutional work. He trained at the National Art School in Havana and later worked at the Instituto Superior de Arte, where he helped shape the education of several generations of artists as a professor and head of the Printmaking Department. His formation also included a scholarship at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris, one of the most important laboratories for modern printmaking.
His artistic language was unmistakable. Across printmaking, painting, drawing, sculpture, and digital experimentation, Valdés returned again and again to the image of Havana. Its arches, towers, columns, façades, and stone surfaces became mutable presences, charged with sensuality, memory, and a deep attachment to the city. In his work, architecture often ceased to be background and assumed the vitality of the human body itself.
In 2000, Valdés founded La Siempre Habana, a printmaking workshop and edition project that became an important meeting point for artists from Cuba, Mexico, and beyond. The workshop extended his own devotion to printmaking into a generous cultural enterprise, making room for collaboration, technical exchange, and the circulation of graphic work by a wide range of artists.
The first messages following his death have remembered both the artist and the friend. Filmmaker Juan Pin Vilar, who maintained a friendship with Valdés for decades and regularly visited him at La Siempre Habana, recalled the warmth of those encounters in his public farewell. The Embassy of Cuba in Mexico also expressed its sorrow, recognizing Valdés as a distinguished figure in Cuban visual arts and underlining the importance of the workshop he created.
For MoCAA, Luis Miguel Valdés leaves the example of an artist who understood printmaking as a field of invention, discipline, and cultural continuity. His work carried Havana across borders without reducing it to nostalgia. It remained a living architecture of line, body, stone, fantasy, and memory.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas extends its deepest condolences to his family, friends, colleagues, students, and to the many artists whose paths crossed his through La Siempre Habana.
Brief Biography
Luis Miguel Valdés Morales
Pinar del Río, Cuba, 1949 – Mexico, 2026
Luis Miguel Valdés Morales was a Cuban painter, printmaker, sculptor, and educator. He studied at the National Art School in Havana, later received a scholarship at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris, and developed a sustained career in printmaking, painting, sculpture, drawing, and digital art. From 1969 to 1991, he was associated with the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana as a founding professor and head of its Printmaking Department. In 2000, he founded La Siempre Habana, a printmaking workshop that brought together artists from Cuba, Mexico, and other countries. His work, marked by its recurring reimagining of Havana’s architecture and the human figure, forms part of public and private collections in Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and Europe.
