The Cuban American Phototheque of Miami Presents Ivan Canas' Artist Talk Next Saturday February 15 at 7 PM with Ileana Fuentes and Willy Castellanos

Miami, FL, February 08, 2014 --(PR.com)-- The Cuban American Phototheque will hold an Artist Talk next Saturday, February 15 at 7 p.m., the occasion of the current exhibition Ivan Canas: A Retrospective. Cuban Art specialist Ileana Fuentes and Willy Castellanos will be talking with artist Ivan Cañas providing diverse viewpoints about the photographer’s work and his role in the Cuban Art made in and outside the island. The photographer will be available to answer the public questions and share his memories with the audience.

The Cuban born photographer Ivan Canas began his professional career in the 60s, but the protagonists of his personal work were never the leaders of the so called Cuban Revolution that produced thousands of images published all around the world. Although the photographer took with expertise the images requested by the editors of the magazine he worked on, the creator kept always some film to satisfy his personal vision of the everyday life in Cuba.

Canas documented the ordinary individuals and their surroundings with a direct style of communication that bonded the photographer with the persons in front of his camera. Ivan operated in a very simple- almost naïve- approach, where the characters looked directly into the lens, in a method that avoided any photographic trick. He managed to synthesize in two photo-books the character, personality, and soul of the Cubans during the tumultuous time from the'60s to the '80s, which images we present in this exhibition.

Ivan Canas, b.Havana, Cuba, 1946
Earned a degree in Journalism and became a photographer for Cuba International magazine from 1968 to 1980. His photographs were part of Salon 70 in Havana and have been exhibited in Cuba, Mexico, the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland and Hungary among other countries. He has earned several national awards. Cañas lives and works in Miami.

Ileana Fuentes, b. Havana, 1948 Came to the US in Operation Pedro Pan. Holds a BA degree in History from Fordham University. Her fields are Cuban culture and arts; Cuban and women's history, gender and leadership, and Cuba . She was co-director of the Cuban Cultural Center of NY; Unveiling Cuba Journal; and was director of the Office of Hispanic Arts at Rutgers University where she launched the Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba arts and literature project (1985-89). A Governor James Florio appointee to the Commission for a Free Cuba State of New Jersey, she came to Miami in 1995 and is presently Cultural Consultant at the Cuban Museum, which will open in 2015. A guest columnist of El Nuevo Herald, she is coauthor of Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba: Contemporary Visual Artists; Dengue: La epidemic secret de Fidel Castro; and author of Cuba sin caudillos: Un enfoque feminista para el Siglo 21.

Willy Castellanos

Art historian, curator and photographer, Castellanos, is the co-founder –together with Adriana Herrera – of Aluna Art Foundation in Miami, a non profit institution created to promote the artistic practices that challenge the hegemonic or those that do not find a space within Main-Stream art. His thesis “The nude as an object and corporal strategy of photography in Cuba (1982-1993)” is a pioneer study about the human body and its representations in the art of the island of the period. His articles have been published in magazines like Arte al Día International, the Alante MagazIne/The Sun Sentinel, Letraurbana.com, Fotovisión, and Nagazine Magazine. Castellanos wrote with Herrera, the introductory essay of the book “Raúl Cañibano” published in the PhotoBolsillo collection of the Editorial La Fabrica in Madrid. He is currently working in the production of a book on Cuban photography of the 90s, as well as the publication of his photo essay “Exodus: Alternative documents”.

From the Focus Locus space – an Aluna Art Foundation Project for the photographic image – Castellanos & Herrera, Aluna Curatorial Collective, have curated or presented different exhibitions with both Cuban and Cuban-American photographers; amongst them: Raúl Cañibano, Alfredo Zarabia, Cristóbal Herrera, Ernesto Oroza and María Martínez-Cañas. Castellanos also curated “Prayers for Saints and Orishas”, an exhibition on Cuban photography for The Spanish Cultural Center of Miami (CCE) in 2007.