The Alabama Contemporary Art Center at 301 Conti St. in downtown Mobile is examining the Gulf’s connection to Cuba with “Sister Shores,” an exhibition built around portraits of Cuban residents and their own words about life on the island.
Visitors are greeted by a dozen large-format portraits of Cuban citizens, each paired with conversational excerpts gathered by Eastern Shore writer Lynn Oldshue and printed in both English and Spanish. Photographer Michele Stancil, who collaborates with Oldshue on the magazine The Southern Rambler, shot the portraits, drawing on her earlier reporting trips to Cuba. Many of the quoted subjects speak to economic fragility on the island and the struggle to keep an artistic voice alive; one artist told Oldshue that art helps people understand one another across personal histories.
Near the portraits, a small black-box theater runs a continuous loop of waves breaking along an urban shoreline — a nod to the ocean currents and storms the Gulf Coast shares with the island. On the opposite side of the entrance, visitors are invited to scrawl questions on paper tags hung from draped strings; the queries collected, ranging from “Do you feel free?” to lighter fare, will feed public programming for the center’s larger “Back to Havana” exhibition planned for September 2017.
Paintings line the east wall, including Osmel Herrera’s playful “Estampida,” which mixes imagery from the Altamira cave paintings with a modern soft-drink logo, and Ramon Deanda’s “El Burro,” in which a man tows a donkey cart while absorbed in his phone. Local artists appear as well: Mobilian Amanda Youngblood contributes the woodcuts “Born to Fly, Born to Die” and “Guts and Glory,” while Susan Peele shows four large paintings of archetypal Cuban scenes — cigars, an old car and a guitarist.
Center officials describe the show as an early step in a longer arc of programming. Additional Cuban artwork will arrive in September alongside a film series surveying Cuban directors.