SMoCA Presents Critically Acclaimed Exhibition By Cuban Printmaker

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art will host Nkame, a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967-1999), who, during her short but fertile career, produced an extraordinary body of work central to the history of contemporary printmaking in Cuba and abroad.

The exhibition has received critical praise worldwide since its premier in the United States in 2016. In 2017, it was named one of the "Top Ten Exhibitions in the World" by ARTNews magazine, and one of the "Top Ten Exhibitions in New York City" by The New York Times.

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón opens Oct. 13, 2018, and runs through Jan. 20, 2019. The exhibition presents 48 prints and audiovisual materials that encompass a wide range of the artist's graphic production from 1984 until her untimely passing in 1999. Ayón mined the founding narrative of the Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal society called Abakuá Secret Society to create an independent and powerful visual iconography. She is highly regarded for her signature technique of collography, a printing process in which a variety of materials are collaged onto a cardboard matrix and run through a press. Her deliberately austere palette of subtle black, white and gray, adds drama and mystery to her works, many of which were produced on a large scale by joining multiple printed sheets.

"Ayón's masterful collographs gave the Abakuá legend, which has been trans­mitted orally, a powerful iconography it did not previously have. But it must be said that her intention was not perpetuation of the myth, but rather transgression of it," said the Cuban-based independent researcher and art critic Cristina Vives, exhibition curator. "Her treatment of the myth requires sharp, active and critical engagement by the viewer. Unfortunately, during her short life, her work was not always afforded such rigorous understanding."

Ayón's choice of subject matter - the history and mythology of Abakuá - was a direction she took in 1985 while still a high school student at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. This brotherhood arrived in the western port cities of Cuba in the early 19th century, carried by enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria, and since then became a nucleus of protection and resistance for its members.

A brief synopsis of the founding myth of Abakuá begins with Sikán, a princess who inadvertently trapped a fish while drawing water from the river. She was the first to hear the unexpected and loud bellowing of the fish, the mystical "voice" of Abakuá. Because women were not permitted this sacred knowledge, the local diviner swore Sikán to secrecy. Sikán, however, revealed her secret to her fiancé, and because of her indiscretion was condemned to death. In Ayón's work, Sikán remains alive, and her story and representation figure prominently.

"Belkis Ayón's work evolved from a stage of repre­sentation of the myth during her years as an art student, to a later mature artistic moment in which the myth served as a vehicle for the post-modern travesty which characterized young Cuban artists in the 1990s, after the collapse of European socialism," according to Vives. "Beyond the legend, her work manages to ex­press the profoundly social and liberating message to which she aspired, and which is contained behind the veil of a myth."

The exhibition is accompanied by the most recent book on Ayón, Behind the Veil of a Myth, written by Vives and edited by the Estate of Belkis Ayón; The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston; and the Estudio Figueroa-Vives in Havana, Cuba. This fully illustrated publication considers the most significant moments of the creative process of the artist, following a virtual tour of the exhibit Nkame. The approach interconnects the artist to the Cuban and international context, and to the unmistak­able signals of the present, as well as the universality that her work commu­nicates from its deep social and liberating vocation.

"Nkame is not simply an homage to Belkis Ayón but a possibility to dialogue with her work in quest of that affirming message of life and future that humanity needs," Vives said.

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967-1999) is curated by Cristina Vives. The exhibition was organized by the Estate of Belkis Ayón, Havana, with the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition had its premiere in the United States in 2016 at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been presented at El Museum del Barrio, New York; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. Upcoming venues include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and The Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. The museum tour is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles.

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