With the stepping down of Fidel Castro, there’s a certain timeliness to “Cuba: Through My Eyes,” a show of black-and-white photographs by Javier Machado, running through March 7 in the Rothman Gallery of the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College. Photographs of street life show “the idiosyncrasies of the survivors of an underground economy in the Cuba of the last decade,” as Machado writes. Machado’s gaze takes in all sorts of people, young and old, artists and tradesmen, worshipers and fortune-tellers, artists and tradesmen. Several photos are set in small, blue-and-yellow painted frames, and others are incorporated into installations. In one instance, a wooden frame supports a TV with a smashed screen framing a photo of Castro, on top of which is an old lamp with more photos mounted on the shade. Two photographs show the Cuban countryside. (Read more about the show here.)
There are still a few days left, if the weather permits, to catch “Double Personality: Mixed Media Works,” an installation by Saxon Williams ‘08 in the Sally Mather Gibson Curriculum Gallery downstairs. It’s worth a visit; accompanied by music on Chinese instruments composed by Williams himself, you enter the show through two successive inverted V’s of fabric, one white, one black. The show effectively plays two contrasting artistic styles against each other. Chinese art is shown in brush painting and calligraphy on sheet-like banners suspended by coarse twine from the ceiling. Calligraphy also sprawls across the wall and over stands, some white-on-black, some black-on-white. The other style is graphic, hard-edged, narrative and influenced by pop art: ink drawings, colorful paintings and pencil drawings showing humans, mermaids, fish and other, less identifiable creatures. These opposites, control and freedom, monsters within and trancendence without, operate in tandem; Williams alludes in his brief artistic statement to moving freely from one style to the other “without much friction.” Two works hung side by side on the landing outside the gallery seem to illustrate this: a cloth banner covered with dense calligraphy, and next to it a long work in attached sheets of paper covered with images in a Chinese-landscape style, only done in bright colors, and overlaid with fantastic pen-and-ink drawings of fish and elephants, tiny man-like creatures and more.
The museum is located in the Steinman College Center on the Franklin & Marshall campus. Hours are Tuesday through Friday, 11:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday, 12:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
