On the Cover

Ángel Delgado, Límite continuo XII. 2009. Digital print, wax pencil and dry pastel on canvas, 39" × 78".

Born in Havana in 1965, Ángel Delgado is a multifaceted and multidisciplinary artist who, since the early 1990s, has created a vast body of work around one central theme: freedom. Angelito, as he is familiarly known among colleagues and friends, will be forever remembered in the history of Cuban art for his imprisonment in the infamous Combinado del Este prison in 1990, an action that showcased the hopelessly repressive nature of the Cuban regime. In Hope Is the Last Thing That We Are Losing, Angelito staged a performance in which he defecated on a copy of Granma, the official daily of the Cuban Communist Party, while surrounded by a circle of little prints with green bones. Many Cubans at the time actually used Granma in lieu of nonexistent toilet paper and joked that this was the newspaper's main purpose, but state security officials failed to appreciate the multiple layers of Angelito's artistic intervention and sent him to jail for six months.

Prison would provide themes, visual cues, and an appreciation for certain media and materials that stayed with him ever since. It was in prison that Angelito began to sculpt in soap, a material that was available and that has remained important in his creative work. He also began to draw on handkerchiefs, another medium he continues to use. "Prison was like a school to me," Delgado has stated. "The Elementary School of Plastic Art, [the Academy of] San Alejandro, the Instituto Superior de Arte, and prison. Materials were those appropriate to my extreme circumstances."

From this experience, the artist also drew a catalog of personal reflections and visual references that have come to dominate most of his work. He has become something of a complement to Michel Foucault's studies on punishment, knowledge, and surveillance. Angelito provides visual deliberations of what Foucault called the history of the "soul on trial," of how bodies are constituted by modern technologies of power and of the transformation of offenders into serial pathological subjects who become legible and visible to the state. His faceless, generic subjects are the creation of modern disciplinary regimes. He paints Foucault's panopticon and its creatures.

A prolific and renowned artist, Delgado has participated in countless collective and solo exhibitions, and his works are part of numerous public and private collections all over the world. Recent collective public exhibitions include New Vision (Till Richter Museum, Germany, 2013), Citizens of the World: Cuba in Queens (Queens Museum, New York, 2013), La Revolución no será televisada (Bronx Museum, New York, 2012), Cuban Video (Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2011), Arte no es vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 (Museo del Barrio, New York, 2008), Killing Time (Exit Art, New York, 2008), and Cuba Avant Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection, which has toured extensively around the country. Recent solo exhibits include Revision (Aluna Art Foundation, Miami, 2015), Constancy, (Amanda Harris Gallery, Las Vegas, 2014), Uncomfortable Landscapes (Nina Menocal Gallery, Mexico City, 2013), and Inside Outside (Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, 2011).

Additional information on Ángel Delgado's work can be found in José de la Fuente's edited volume Ángel Delgado, 1990–2007 (Ciudad Real: Colección La Balsa, 2008) (available at https://www.artnexus.com/StoreView.aspx?id=469).