NYC:Cuban Art Space 30th Anniv Exhibit Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit For Immediate Release - May 8, 2002 Contact: Sandra Levinson: 212-242-0559 CUBAN ART SPACE 124 West 23rd Street, NYC CENTER FOR CUBAN STUDIES CELEBRATES 30 YEARS WITH EXHIBIT "Thirty Years: A Work in Progress" opens today at the Cuban Art Space The Cuban Art Space in Manhattan has opened a fascinating exhibit -- the first it has presented that has almost nothing to do with Cuban art. On its several walls are an amazing array of photographs, flyers, letters, articles, pamphlets, brochures and calendars documenting the 30 years of an unusual New York City institution, the Center for Cuban Studies. The exhibit will be open to the public until June 21; the hours are 11 am to 7 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. The Center for Cuban Studies opened its doors on May 19, 1972 in a loft in Greenwich Village, with a showing of Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's acclaimed movie, "Memories of Underdevelopment." It opened with the support of a wide-ranging number of well-known sixties writers, artists and other intellectuals, among them authors Carol Brightman, Noam Chomsky, Julio Cortazar, Paul Cowan, Ivan Illich, Hans Koning, and Susan Sontag; publishers Richard Grossman, Andre Schiffren, Richard Seaver, John J. Simon, and Robert Silvers; cartoonist Jules Feiffer, journalists Laura Bergquist, Jim Higgins, Lee Lockwood (the Center was his idea), Jack Newfield and Robert Scheer; filmmaker Saul Landau, playwright Jack Gelber, poet Adrienne Rich, actor Rip Torn and many academics, among them political scientists Richard Fagen and Sandra Levinson, physicist Walter Gilbert, economists Wassily Leontief and Arthur MacEwan, biologist Mark Ptashne, Latin Americanists James Cockcroft, Tim Harding, José Moreno, James O'Connor, James Petras, Ivan Schulman and John Womack. This organizing group hoped to put together a complete research center on Manhattan's upper east side. But it soon became clear that Cuba was not on any major donor's agenda: no foundations and few large contributors were interested in helping open the not-for-profit whose unthreatening purpose, as stated in its initial brochure, was "to make available to interested people a comprehensive collection of documents and study materials about revolutionary Cuba." The plan had to be re-written: Ivan Illich's suggestion was "Just open, somewhere, in a loft, a basement, anywhere. The people will come, you'll see." He was right. The Village loft was soon found. Sandra Levinson, then teaching politics at Brooklyn Polytechnic and the New York editor of Ramparts magazine, agreed to take off a year to get the Center started. Books, magazines and artworks were collected from friends who had visited Cuba, and the Center itself launched a program of travel to Cuba, becoming the first of many groups to plan trips for academics, journalists and other researchers. The Center offered Spanish classes, launched a lecture and film series, and like most non-profits, struggled to survive. . It almost didn't make it: on the evening of March 28, 1973, just after the Spanish class had left and while Levinson was working alone in the Center, a huge plastique bomb destroyed every part of the Center except the area around Levinson's desk. The rabid Cuban exiles who planted the bomb were never caught, although a counter-revolutionary group took credit for the attack. Center supporters rebuilt the Center and reopened to the public (although the landlord refused to renew the lease and the Center moved a year later to East 23rd Street and later to its current headquarters on West 23rd Street). Levinson declared herself willing to remain at the Center "until we have normal diplomatic relations with Cuba." It was, she thought then, a four-year commitment at most, until Richard Nixon was out of office and a saner U.S. policy toward Cuba would prevail. "I am still shocked that our policy has remained basically unchanged through all these years and all of these presidents," declares Levinson. For her part, she has led the Center through the ups and downs of that policy, sponsoring conferences and seminars on U.S.-Cuba relations, importing Cuban books and magazines to stock the Center's Lourdes Casal Library, publishing a magazine devoted to Cuba, CUBA Update; when Jimmy Carter lifted the travel ban, the Center began to sponsor an expanded program of travel to Cuba, which included opening a Spanish language school in Havana and taking large delegations to the Havana Film Festival each year. When the Reagan administration shut down the school and re-imposed the ban the Center sued the State Department on the theory that a citizen's right to travel to Cuba is a right protected by the U.S. constitution (and lost 5-4 in the Supreme Court). With the Clinton administration came a whole series of new travel regulations forcing the Center to adjust many of its programs in order to provide legal travel for its constituents and members. When Congress passed the Berman Amendment in 1989 which allowed for the importation of informational materials from Cuba, the Center began distributing Cuban books and magazines to the general public. But Levinson noted a gaping hole in the Treasury Department's description of "informational materials" -- although reproductions of Cuban art could be imported, as could posters and photographs, original art could not. She proposed a suit against the Treasury Department, eventually gaining the support of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and an impressive group of art critics, collectors and other art professionals. That suit was won in 1993, making it legal to import original art from Cuba, and opening the way to one of the Center's most successful current programs, the Cuban Art Space gallery, which opened in September 1999 and regularly offers exhibits of Cuban art, even sending exhibits throughout the U.S. Current Center programs include the Abeja Obrera (Worker Bee) program which takes brigadistas to Cuba each year to work in construction, and the Artists and Writers Committee for Normalization of Relations with Cuba, which includes supporters Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover (who did a benefit for the Center last year in Avery Fisher Hall) and dozens of other well-known artists, including David Byrne, Mike Farrell, Barbara Goldsmith, Lois Gould, Randa Haines, Buck Henry, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, Norman Mailer, Paul Mazursky, Susan Meiselas, Sydney Pollack, Bonnie Raitt, Tony Randall, and Alice Walker. The goal of the committee is to make it possible for artists of both countries to work freely in Cuba and the U.S. "30 Years: A Work in Progress" chronicles many stages in the Center's history and invites its members and supporters to add to the exhibit until it closes on June 21st. Although the shape of the exhibit will no doubt change, its substance will remain essentially the same: a graphic chronology of one small institution's fight for recognition of the worthiness of its goals. It has much to teach us. For further information, go to our web sites: http://www.cubanartspace.net and http://www.cubaupdate.org ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytnyc-05.09.02-04:49:23-32731