Currently based in New York, Mariño emerged in 1990s Cuba with a series of large-format paintings that critically questioned the nature of race, class, and representation. “Mariño skewers art historical stereotypes with witty subversion and satire, with a ‘ready-made’ vocabulary of racialized signs,” noted curator Franklin Sirmans. “[He is] engaging in a sustained and thoughtful exchange of visual dialogues. Black culture in the Western cultural canon is historically based upon the opposite side of the exchange, as in Picasso taking from African art to make Modernism. This cultural cannibalization and coopting of imagery finds its foil in Mariño’s works” (“Change the Joke, Slip the Yoke,” Armando Mariño: “In Utero,” exh. cat., Gary Nader, Coral Gables, 2001, n.p.).

The power dynamics of cultural appropriation are provocatively centered, and parodied, in Los centinelas. A Picasso self-portrait, illuminated behind a velvet rope, is flanked by two muscular men of color who stand barefoot, their ensembles—beads and cuffs, spear and feathers—modeled on Afro-Cuban and indigenous sources. Mariño troubles the conventions of subject and object here, asking implicitly about what (and who) deserves to be protected, and venerated, within society today. “By cannibalizing images, styles, techniques, references, and inherited material,” he explained, “I have tried to make visible the stereotypes and erroneous concepts that underlie certain narratives and discourses practiced by the Western world, and their relationship to the excluded ‘other’” (quoted in Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection, exh. cat., Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, 2007, p. 126).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park