Curator's Statement
Belkis Ayon, showing in the East Gallery, was one of the preeminent artists of Cuba. This exhibit of the collographs of Belkis Ayon is a memorial. Belkis Ayon committed suicide in Sept 1999. The Cuban government declared her art a Patrimony and so none of her work may leave the country at this time. This exhibit is made up of work gathered from collectors in the Los Angeles area. This may be the last comprehensive exhibit of her work for some time. Her work is beautiful and powerful. She works using a theme that is one of the components of Cuban culture, the African contribution: the carabalies; and from them the Secret Society of Abakua, established for men only in the 1830's in Cuba. Sikan was the woman who discovered the secret of Abakua. She dies at the hands of men at the altar so that the secret would remain among them and not disappear. Ayon inserts herself into these images along with the image of Sikan, the two perhaps interchangeable. Though her work was based on Abakua, she began to incorporate herself into the imagery as an observer, then progressed to addressing issues having to do with women (though not necessarily having anything to do with Abakua because the imagery was becoming part of her vocabulary.) Darrel Couturier remembers a piece Ayon did in 1999 that had something to do with a hoped-for relationship with a man that never materialized, much to her regret. The print includes an image of her though not as a "self-portrait." He doesn't think we should interpret this as a cause of her suicide. While certainly political in her narrative the source of her images is grounded in her deeply felt desire to share the vision and poetry she discovered in Abakua, "persistently relating them to the nature of man, with vivid personalities, with feelings which sometimes grips us, feelings we don't know how to define, with these fugitive emotions with the spiritual."

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