The Right to Have Rights: Cuban Artists Confront the State

This event is not available for extra credit.

Note: This event is not available for attendance tracking, and there will be no event recording available through Lectures.

Coco Fusco's lecture will accompany the exhibition Arte Cubano on view in the Brunnier Art Museum. Arte Cubano highlights contemporary Cuban artists whose art has been shaped by the great diversity of the island and the cultural blending of African, European, and Latin/Caribbean influences. The art also represents a unique view point of artists whose existence was heavily shaped by the 1959 revolution and the repercussions that informed life on the island into the 21st century.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts Award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. She is a Professor of Art at Cooper Union.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.

Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).