Sometimes the best art happens in your own back yard. In this case the Cuban Links exhibition at the Dorchester Center for the Arts, excellently guest-curated by Jon West-Bey. He is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and a curator, museum consultant, and owner of West-Bey Consulting in Washington, DC. For the Cambridge exhibition he explored Cuban history and culture through the lenses of three contemporary artists. While only one of the male artists West-Bey selected is actually Cuban-born, in the exhibition he aims to explore Cuba’s history through the eyes of these three contemporary artists.

Ceremonia by Lazaro Batista
Acrylic on Canvas 2024 24 × 18

The second artist in the group, Ulysses Marshall, born in Vienna, Georgia, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. Then, he received the Phillip Morris Fellowship and Master of Fine Arts degree under the instruction of no less than Grace Hartigan, Hoffberger School of Painting, also at MICA. He received the Distinguished Whitney Independent Study Fellowship in New York and several Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Awards. 

Samuel “Sami” Miranda grew up in the South Bronx and resides in Washington, DC. He is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and teacher who uses his craft to highlight the value of everyday people and places. He is also the Chairman of the American Poetry Museum in Washington, DC.

Cuban Links invites viewers to embark on a journey through the time and space to encounter the diverse narratives that shape the Cuban experience. By bringing together these three distinct artistic voices, the exhibition aims to foster a deeper understanding of Cuba’s rich and complex history, its enduring impact on the present, and its potential for the future according to Jon West-Bay’s Curatorial Statement.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, handsomely designed by Janet Hendricks, currently Instructional Arts Coordinator at the Dorchester Center for the Arts. Most of the information quoted here can be found in the catalogue and here. The exhibition is open until Saturday, April 26 at the  Dorchester Center for the Arts 321 High Street, Cambridge, MD 21613. Check the website for hours.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County, MD.

I recently attended the opening of the exhibition Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the United Kingdom, where it will be on view through June 1, 2025.

A fellow Dutchman, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) is widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time. Apart from his atmospheric paintings, he also produced more than 300 etchings. Ranging in scale and detail, these etchings exemplify Rembrandt’s mastery of print.

Rembrandt, known by his first name (like modern-day Madonna or Sting) was a master of innovation. As an artist, he constantly sought out new possibilities and new solutions for making art. This is evident not only from his paintings, but also from the more than three hundred etchings that he made in his career. Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum presents the full range of Rembrandt’s etching output, alongside prints by select forerunners and contemporaries. It also demonstrates Rembrandt’s centuries-long impact on the field of printmaking through a select group of etchings by later nineteenth and twentieth-century artists.

A Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, Rembrandt was one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. Today he is widely regarded as one of the two most important printmakers in history, along with Albrecht Dürer. From his earliest etchings, Rembrandt created original compositions oriented towards the specific character of the medium. As a result, his prints range widely from large to small, and from summary sketches to laborious and elaborate works. He addressed an equally varied set of subjects, including Biblical stories, portraits, depictions of exaggerated or characteristic facial expressions called “tronies,” observations of everyday life, landscapes, nude model studies, and even sheets packed with small sketches.

Rembrandt’s printmaking style changed over his career, and he honed his style across a wide variety of subjects. Both his progress and the variety of his output will be traced in a number of thematic sections in this exhibition. These sections will cover everything from Rembrandt’s masterful skills as a visual narrator, his bold exploration of light and dark, and how he used self-portraits to fashion his own visual identity and explore the complexity of aging. The exhibition also includes select comparative works by Rembrandt’s forerunners and contemporaries, including his teacher Pieter Lastman and his pupils, Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck, which will contextualize his work and shed light on his specific innovations, such as his repeated experiments with etching, tonal effects, and the dramatic portrayal of his subjects.

The exhibition is accompanied by a free educational brochure developed by the AFA with an introduction by Epco Runia, Head of Collections at the Rembrandt House Museum, and with me as editor. Following Birmingham, UK, the exhibition will be on view at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (October 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026) and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, OH (February 7 – May 17, 2026).

Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Rembrandt House Museum.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County.

I recently attended the opening of Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, at the University of Miami, FL, where it will be on view through July 20, 2025. This wonderful exhibition is the first two-person exhibition of these closely allied artists, offering a compelling tour through their celebrated careers and into the shadowy depths of the threatened natural world.

The first two-person exhibition of these celebrated artists, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld explores their shared allegiances and sustaining friendship over a period of three decades. Maintaining singular stylistic voices, both Dion and Rockman have achieved international prominence for their own distinctive practices, while their creative and intellectual trajectories have evolved in tandem and often intersected. Together they have embarked on tropical expeditions; published dialogues; and co-edited the pioneering 1996 book Concrete Jungle, on anthropogenic ecosystems. Each has probed our strained relationship with the environment and the consequences of reigning ideologies about nature. Dion and Rockman were among the earliest artists to address, and even anticipate, the epic ecological problems we now face. Indeed, their vision has become increasingly urgent in this time of environmental collapse.

Uniting some twenty-five sculptures and paintings by both artists along with selected works on paper and a major new collaborative piece, this exhibition offers an absorbing journey into the depths of the threatened natural world.

Although working in different media, Dion and Rockman engage a number of like approaches and strategies, including intensive research and fieldwork; borrowing scientific methodology and models; and the use of allegory, dark humor, and popular culture tropes. Both artists employ methods of display found in museums of art and natural history, institutions of alleged authority and objectivity, which they slyly subvert in their works. While Dion’s preferred museological modes are taxidermy dioramas and specimen cabinets, Rockman revels in large-scale landscape paintings, densely populated and replete with didactic keys. Like natural history displays and wildlife illustrations, their works are grounded in science and close observation, but presented in a rhetorical, or even theatrical, manner.

The concept of “underworld” in the exhibition’s title encompasses several germane associations, including the mythic abode of the dead, archaeology, the Earth’s subsurface, and elements of criminality or vice. Within the context of Dion’s and Rockman’s oeuvres, the notion also incorporates unconscious beliefs about nature, invisible micro and macro dimensions, and deep denial of our culture’s harmful course. In the past two decades, during which the environmental crisis has escalated, both artists have expressed increasing pessimism and melancholy about our ecological fate. This gloom has not proved stifling, however, and Dion and Rockman continue to hone creative tactics for staging both the wonder and woe of nature’s condition.

The exhibition feels like a voyage of discovery through various pressing subjects, with the artists’ works serving as enticing guides. Beginning with a section evoking the fieldwork of pioneering naturalists and explorers, visitors encounter field-station tableaux by Dion alongside Rockman’s paintings of fauna and dramatic terrains, often with cross-sectioned views. Ensuing works address such themes as invasive and endangered species, beleaguered aquatic environments, anthropogenic landscapes, and future scenarios evincing effects of climate change and waning biodiversity.

An exhibition highlight is the debut of a grand sculptural diorama, titled American Landscape, created especially for the tour and marking an unprecedented collaboration between Dion and Rockman. This zoological group portrait, set on a golf course, features a cast of scrappy species that, according to the artists, successfully “exploit niches and opportunities generated by a human-transformed landscape” representing “the future global ecosystem.” The exhibition also includes a selection of related drawings and prints by both Dion and Rockman. In addition, participating museums have the option of developing, along with the artists, an adjunct “Chamber of Wonders” display, conceived as a flexible cabinet of curiosities intended to inspire both awe and concern about the natural world. One of the ephemera that caught my attention was Mark Dion’s Decomposition Books, full of his field notes.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County, MD

The accompanying 120-page catalog, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld, written by Suzanne Ramljak, with contributions by Lucy R. Lippard and Patrick Jaojoco, was published by the American Federation of Arts and Hirmer Publishers.

The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of Arts and has toured at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT, 2023), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA, 2024), and The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore (Saratoga Springs, NY, 2025-2025). The tour will conclude at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State (University Park, PA, August 23 – December 7, 2025).

Working at the American Federation of Arts is just about as exciting as an art curator’s job can be, with lots of, yes curating exhibitions, publishing catalogs, and related travel (while living in beautiful Talbot County). Bringing art to a wide public has been the AFA’s mission as the leader in traveling exhibitions internationally. A nonprofit organization founded in 1909, the AFA is dedicated to enriching the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts through organizing and touring art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishing exhibition catalogues featuring important scholarly research, and developing educational programs.  I look forward to regularly contributing to the Spy, either by contributing articles or podcast reviews and artist interviews.

I recently attended the Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism exhibition opening, first at the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, and now on view at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, until May 4th. The AFA-Chrysler organized exhibition will continue on to the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH and lastly to the Seattle Art Museum. Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in fin-de-siècle France. The exhibition showcases the work of artists such as Claude Monet, Eva Gonzalès, Victor Gilbert, Paul Gauguin, and Jules Dalou who examined the nation’s unique relationship with food. The bounty of France’s agriculture and the skill of its chefs had long helped to define its strength and position on the international stage.

This self-image as the world’s culinary capital became all the more important in the late nineteenth century as the country grappled with war, political instability, imperialism, and industrialization. In this climate, France’s culinary traditions signaled notions of its refinement, fortitude, and ingenuity while they also exposed fractures that destabilized national identity. From cultivation to consumption, food was central to notions of glory but also to those of collective pain.

The transformation of the culinary world was a natural theme for artists committed to depicting daily circumstances. Food was the most quotidian of subjects yet also one uniquely suited to considering the state of the nation. Featuring approximately seventy works of art, Farm to Table showcases representations of sumptuous ingredients and severe privation, bountiful meals and agrarian crises. The works highlight the possibilities and precariousness of France’s colonial and industrial projects; the evolving norms of gender and class; the tenuous relationship between Paris and the provinces; and shifting understandings of science and the environment. Depictions of markets and gardens, farmers, chefs, and restaurants expressed cultural anxieties and aspirations. Beginning with the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris (and the resultant food crisis) and continuing through the 1890s, the exhibition spans the age of Impressionism and provides a new way to consider the era’s depictions of modern life at the
intersection of art, food, and social politics.

An accompanying catalog Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, (2024), was edited by curators Andrew Eschelbacher and Lloyd DeWitt, with contributions by Allison Deutsch, Simon Kelly, Marni Kessler, and Shalini Le Gall, Published by Yale University Press in association with the Chrysler Museum of Art and the American Federation of Arts.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County, Maryland.