JUAN ROBERTO DIAGO. Contemporary AFRO-CUBAN ARTIST. Artist's Book / Exhibition Catalog.

COMIENDO CUCHILLO - Exposición de JUAN ROBERTO DIAGO. Catalog for the exhibition that took place at the Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes, [Buenos Aires, Argentina], in 2002. First edition, limited to 1000 copies signed by the artist.

Boldly SIGNED by DIAGO and hand numbered 233 on the inside front cover.

GOOD condition, there are relevant margin marks and notes, in Spanish, on the four introductory pages of text, otherwise tight, bright and clean.

An unusual and wonderful CONTEMPORARY CUBAN ARTIST'S BOOK, consisting of a fabric collage / construction overlay by the ARTIST, wrapping around the softcover catalog, turning this book into a work of Art.

About JUAN ROBERTO DIAGO (from several Internet sources):

******Juan Roberto Diago was born on February 23, 1971, in Havana, Cuba. Diago studied art at San Alejandro Academy. He is a recipient of various awards including: Juan Francisco Elso Third Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Havana, Cuba (1995), the Raúl Martínez National Award (1999), and the Amédée Maratier Award in Paris, France, given for the first time to a Latin American artist by the Kikoine French Foundation (1999). The artist resides in Arroyo Arenas, Havana, Cuba.

A leading member of the new Afro-Cuban cultural movement, visual artist Juan Roberto Diago (b. 1971) has produced a body of work that offers a revisionist history of the Cuban nation. His "history," a term that he frequently inserts in his works using the visual language of graffiti, is not the official narrative of a racially harmonious nation... but a nation built on pain, rape, greed, and the enslavement of millions of displaced Africans, a nation still grappling with the long-term effects of slavery and colonialism. To him, slavery is not the past, but a daily experience of racism and discrimination.

The moving and spiritual work of Roberto Diago draws on elements of his Afro-Cuban religion in treating race, religion and slavery. Blending the old and the new, the rustic and the refined, the primitive and the urbane, Diago reminds of both his roots and his reality.******