On the cover

William Hernández (1971, Perico, Matanzas). A graduate from the Escuela Nacional de Arte (National Art School), William, as he is commonly known in the Cuban art world, began his artistic career in the difficult years of the so-called Special Period in the 1990s, when the Cuban economy and society experienced a deep crisis. In 1997 he obtained the Grand Prize of La Joven Estampa, a national competition of emerging artists working on engraving, sponsored by Casa de las Américas in Havana since 1987.

Like many artists of his generation, William's work reflects on some of the changes that Cuban society experienced in the 1990s, when the island nation became increasingly inserted in global networks of trade and tourism. In Cuba this insertion had a sense of déjà vu, as official narratives had disparaged for decades the social and cultural ills associated with the tourist economy of the 1950s. But as the past became suddenly the future in the 1990s, some artists began to develop a personal catalog of visual references (consider the work of Sandra Ramos, for instance) to capture these contradictions and ambiguities. William did so by cannibalizing—in the best tradition of Latin American art—figures and images from Western masters of the Baroque and the Renaissance that he inserted in compositions of unmistakable Cuban flavor. This flavor is frequently shaped by his roots in rural Matanzas, a place that William holds dear and from which he derives much of his creative energy. Much of his initial woodcut prints were produced at the Taller Nacional de Gráfica in Havana, however, which was then under the direction of Cuban painter José Omar Torres. José Omar captured what the young artist was trying to do. He described William's work by stating that it is as if Albrecht Dürer had been born in Perico.

During the past few years, William has been working and exhibiting in Ecuador, where he obtained the Second Prize in the Third Biennial of Painting in Guayaquil (2012).

William Hernández, La vírgen de los barquitos, 2004, oil on canvas, 47″ × 37″.