Käthe Kollwitz, whose artistic career began with rousing scenes of peasant revolts and ended with images of grieving, world-weary mothers, was quoted in a recent MoMA retrospective: “I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they are like in reality.” Artists have often been attracted to revolutions, eager to put their talents to use for a noble cause. And often, it seems, they are doomed to be disappointed—either co-opted by their enemies, as Kollwitz sometimes was by the Nazis, or else silenced or betrayed by the revolutions they championed once the initial optimism and fervor degenerates into doctrinaire repression. Three concurrent exhibitions at the Cranbrook Art Museum—A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design, Marc Castillo: The Hands of the Collector, and Cuba Dispersa—display early idealistic efforts by Cuban creatives to support the goals of the Castro revolution through innovative modernist furniture and graphic design. It also marks the slide into dictatorship and the suppression of artistic freedoms in the island nation, particularly under Decree 349, which mandates that Cuban artists secure approval from the Ministry of Culture before displaying their work.

        Cranbrook Educational Community is something of a utopian vision itself, though not exactly a populist one. A private school located on 300-plus wooded acres in the tony Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, it’s been called an American Bauhaus. The campus was designed by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero), with help from his student apprentices, Charles and Ray Eames. Cranbrook boasts objects and architecture by the Eameses, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Milles, Harry Bertoia, and many other storied early twentieth-century creators. A show of mid-century modern furniture, then, feels right at home at the Cranbrook Art Museum, though one wonders if the leftist ideals of the designers featured in A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design might not have ruffled the feathers of millionaire newspaper tycoon George Gough Booth, the founder of Cranbrook.

 

        Two government-run companies are represented in the first gallery: Dujo Muebles, founded in 1966 to produce furniture mainly for export; and the later EMPROVA, that focused on furniture for domestic use. Dujo’s designs meld modern trends from Europe with Indigenous influences, and utilize local materials such as mahogany, palm fiber, and animal skins. Lead designer Gonzalo Córdoba’s “Petaloide” chair resembles axe heads used by Cuba’s native Taíno people, while Antonio Peralta’s “Tambor” chair evokes Indigenous drums. (Both pieces were designed for use at Guamá, a Batista-era resort commandeered for use by revolutionary leaders.) Dujo designs were displayed internationally, including at a 1967 furniture salon in Paris–at which they were the sole representatives of Latin America. Arrayed in the gallery as they might have been seen at such an expo, Dujo furniture demonstrates clean lines and simple design per the modernist sensibility. But with reddish wood and pale wicker, supple leather, and the occasional deep green marble or spotted goat skin, these pieces also feel warm and inviting in a way that austere modernist furniture often does not.

 

        Córdoba went on to work with EMPROVA–creating furniture with María Victoria Caignet, such as the brightly-painted “Lotus” tables which utilized plywood rather than more precious materials and modular designs for easier construction. Similarly efficient designs for household furniture were drawn up by the government’s Light Industry Group in the early 1970s. Those designers planned to use laminated particle board made from refuse sugar cane pulp to create simple, colorful furniture that could be flat-packed and easily assembled by the owner (a new concept then, familiar now to anyone who’s ever shopped at IKEA). Sugar cane crop shortfalls mostly derailed the project, but not before it spawned some intriguing prototypes, such as María Teresa Muñiz Riva’s stackable “Sphere” lamps; and Heriberto Duverger’s fire engine red, cube-shaped chair with interlocking panels inspired by the “Yab Yum” position from the Kama Sutra!

 

        Recreations of the Light Industry Group’s brightly colored prototypes are displayed among several equally vivid propaganda posters produced by OSPAAAL (the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Distributed internationally, the posters employ a range of styles, from slick Japanese modern graphic design to rainbow-striped psychedelia. Each espouses support for anti-imperialist causes around the world. Rafael Enríquez Vega, in a print from 1983, depicts a man crucified on a dollar sign, with “IMF” (for the International Monetary Fund) replacing the usual “INRI” above his head. Another by René Mederos Pazos shows a jagged bird of prey with the head of Richard Nixon tearing at a flaming wound in the center of a map of southeast Asia. There’s even a collaboration between Cuban artist Lázaro Padrón and Emory Douglas of the Black Panthers, in support of Black liberation in the United States.

 

        Firearms and other weapons abound in these images; one stylishly minimalist poster opposing colonialism in Zimbabwe features an arrow vertically piercing a pith helmet. Another features silhouettes of submachine guns arrayed behind a sword-wielding African sculpture. Even Jesus, in the spirit of liberation theology, is depicted with a rifle slung over his shoulder. The presence of weaponry in revolutionary agitprop is unsurprising, though it makes for an odd juxtaposition with the cheerful furniture elsewhere in the room. (On the other hand, looking at trippy images of Che Guevara superimposed Op Art-style over a map of South America, or with streams of color emanating from the star on his cap, recalls “Che Chic” and the pop-ification of the guerrilla leader’s image on t-shirts sold to American youths, many of whom have perhaps only a vague idea of who the man was.)

        Much of the furniture on display here comes from the collection of artist Marco Castillo, who has in turn created sculptures inspired by the designs of Dujo and others that comment on the erosion of artistic freedom under the Cuban government. The first of his pieces on view in the second of the three exhibitions here, The Hands of the Collector, are a number of book-like objects. Carved out of the front covers of the books are abstract angular and curvilinear shapes.  The shapes burrow through the pages, changing gradually until they emerge on the back covers not as abstractions, but as letters spelling out dictadura — “dictatorship.” Castillo seems to see some hope, though, via the work of Cuban artists of the past. In a piece named for Dujo’s chief designer, Córdoba, a circular rattan chair seat seems to morph into a Communist star, then back to a circle again. Elsewhere, Castillo displays 16 reproduction “Yab Yum” chairs, each rotated and reconfigured, perhaps suggesting the possibility of variation and individuality even within the chair’s four-square design. On another wall, rows of what might be segments of Dujo chairs, all warm wood and graceful lines, reveal themselves to be rifle butts, stripped of (or maybe waiting for) the mechanical parts that would turn them into instruments of destruction.

 

        Marco Castillo is now in exile from Cuba. Some of his fellow exiles are featured in the last part of the exhibition, Cuba Dispersa, which comprises six newly commissioned artworks by Cuban ex-pats, some of whom were even imprisoned for a time for their artistic activities. They all draw on Cuban history to comment on the current state of the nation. Ernesto Oroza displays two Corrected Chairs: cheap plastic lawn chairs, their flimsy legs shored up with sticks of the same precious (and now virtually extinct) wood used in Dujo furniture.

 

        A video by Celia González Álvarez, Una Operación Especial, accompanies a 1960s military manual that informs soldiers about plants they can exploit to survive in combat zones around the world; Álvarez’s video gives voice to the plants, who resist being weaponized and assert their autonomy. A pair of short documentary films tell the stories of two artists—Hamlet Lavastida, now in exile, and Luis Manuel Otero, currently facing prison time—who ran afoul of Decree 349, a willfully vague 2018 law that allows the government to punish speech that “violates the legal provisions governing the normal functioning of our society with regard to cultural matters.” Lavastida was confined to prison for three years for merely suggesting an idea for a work of protest art in an online chatroom; here he provides a wall-sized bird’s-eye view diagram of a prison, allowing us to essentially “watch the watchmen.”

 

        The final piece in the exhibition is a gut-punch of a short film by Castillo entitled Generacíon. Produced in 2019, it features a group of young contemporary Cuban artists, dressed as their counterparts from the 1970s in flared pants and paisley dresses. Milling happily around a mid-century apartment, the friends play guitar and spin-the-bottle, read to each other, dance and takes photos as a romantic song plays on the soundtrack. Finally, they all walk single file up the apartment’s floating staircase to the flat roof—and step off the edge into the ravine below, leaving only a few artifacts and the tinny echo of the music behind. The film was a harbinger; many of the artists featured, as well as the filmmakers, have since been compelled to flee their homeland. The song that plays over the film, recorded in 1978 by celebrated Cuban singer Beatriz Márquez, is “Pólvora Mojada”—“Wet Gunpowder”—about a love that refuses to ignite. Taken as a commentary on the current situation, the lyrics are pessimistic: “you’re asking me for love and I can’t give you anything”…“You asked is there hope, I told you no, none.” From the start, Cuban artists and designers have lent their hearts and talents to the causes championed by the revolution. Until the government there can reciprocate and support its creative community, the future of the arts in Cuba will remain in limbo.

 

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.