Farber Foundation Announces Grantees in Second Round of Cuban Cultural Funding

It supports the work of U.S.-based nonprofit cultural organizations by providing strategic funding for initiatives that explore Cuban art and culture and present it to broad audiences.
“We are thrilled with the way that U.S.-Cuban cultural exchange has taken off in the past year,” said the Foundation’s co-founder, art collector Howard Farber, “and are especially pleased at the impact that Foundation-funded projects have had on this changing cultural landscape.” Highlights of the Foundation’s 2010 funding initiative include its support of the groundbreaking ¡Si Cuba! festival, which followed a successful New York run with an encore engagement in Los Angeles; the award-winning documentary film Unfinished Spaces: Cuba’s Architecture of Revolution; and the residency of noted Cuban artist Eduardo Hernández Soto at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
Grantees in the Farber Foundation’s 2011 grant cycle include:
Fundación Amistad. For the museum exhibition Things That Cannot Be Seen Any Other Way: The Art of Manuel Mendive. Internationally acclaimed as a visual and performance artist, Manuel Mendive is a leading proponent of the “Afro-Cubanismo” tradition in modern art. His work, however, has rarely been shown in the U.S. The New York-based Fundación Amistad is the lead organization in a collaboration that includes the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the California African American Museum (CAAM) and the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles, the Florida University Frost Museum in Miami, and the University of Miami. The exhibition will debut in 2012 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, continue to CAAM, and close its tour at the Frost in 2013.
El Museo del Barrio. For publication of the catalogue accompanying the museum exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World. Presented by El Museo with the Queens Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, Caribbean: Crossroads examines the visual arts and aesthetic development across the Caribbean. The 500-page catalogue will be a major resource in this significant but underexplored field. It will be co-published by El Museo and Yale University Press.
The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. For production of a monograph on Cuban artist Raúl Martínez by Corina Matamoros, curator of contemporary art at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. The Rubin Foundation is acting as U.S. fiscal agent for the project, a bilingual 220-page book that will include 150 color and 100 black-and-white illustrations. It will be published by Madrid-based Ediciones Vanguardia Cubana in 2012.
California International Arts Foundation. For continued development of Cubanacan: A Revolution of Forms, an opera about the creation of the National Art Schools (Instituto Superior de Arte, or ISA). A joint U.S.-Cuban project, the opera features music written by Cuban composer Roberto Valera, based on Afro-Cuban musical traditions such as the rhumba, son, danzon, and bolero. Farber Foundation funding will support the recording of a 30-minute sample, to be produced at Egrem Studios in Havana under the direction of Zenaida Romeu, founder and director of the Cuban chamber orchestra Camarata Romeu.
The Farber Foundation also made two discretionary grants in 2011:
Cuban Artists Fund. In support of Alexandre Arrechea’s participation in the 2011 Venice Biennale as one of four artists in the Biennale’s first Cuban Pavilion. Funding supported the shipping of artwork and related expenses.
Women Make Movies. For last-minute finishing costs on the film Unfinished Spaces: Cuba’s Architecture of Revolution, a 2010 Farber Foundation grantee.

For more information about the Howard and Patricia Farber Foundation and its grantees, contact The Farber Foundation at farberfoundation@aol.com.