Artists

Juan Roberto Diago is one of the leading voices in contemporary Cuban art, known for his searing investigations of race, history, and identity within Afro-Cuban experience. A graduate of the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Diago has developed a visual language rooted in cultural resistance—what he terms a kind of modern maroonage, recalling the rebellions of enslaved Africans who created communities of survival and defiance throughout the Americas.

Working primarily with raw and found materials—burnt wood, discarded metal, fabric, and industrial debris—Diago transforms the fragments of everyday life into paintings, installations, and collages that confront the legacies of slavery and the realities of systemic racism. His constructions of fragile houses from reclaimed wood, for example, evoke the precarious conditions of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods while simultaneously serving as monuments to resilience. Text often appears in his work, like graffiti, as blunt appeals for recognition and solidarity.

Diago represented Cuba at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and has since exhibited widely across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. His work is held in major institutional collections including the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; CIFO – Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and the Rubin Foundation, New York. He is a member of the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) and of UNESCO’s International Association of Art. His many honors include the Raúl Martínez National Award (1999) and the Prix Amédée Maratier (1999), awarded by the Kikoïne Foundation in Paris.

Through his use of recycled matter, charged with symbolic weight, Diago not only critiques Cuba’s “official” silences around race but also proposes an aesthetic of memory and survival—art as both testimony and reclamation.