Three Nudes in the Manner of Matisse, 1966, Oil on canvas, 48 x 60.5 inches

Emilio Cruz (b. 1938, New York - d. 2004, New York): A poet and writer as well as a visual artist, Cruz was educated at Art Students League in New York, the University of Louisville and the New School for Social Research in New York. He founded Spectacle, Inc., a multi-media theater production company and taught at a number of higher education institutions, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, the Pratt Institute and New York University. For his expressionistic work, Cruz won numerous awards and fellowship from institutions such as the Walter Gutman Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Artemercato Internanzionale Accademia Italia, the Fulbright program and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. He is represented in several permanent collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Studio Museum in Harlem. (Cintas for art, 1965-66)

3906, 1966, Montage, mixed media (oil on board, stencil on white canvas), 34.5” x 26”

Julio Girona (b. 1914, Manzanillo-d. 2002, Havana): In his long career as a painter, graphic artist and sculptor, Julio Girona has worked in a range of styles, from figurative to symbolic abstraction. He was also a writer whose published books include the poetry collection La corbata roja. His first works – caricatures – appeared in 1927 in the magazine Social. He participated in the XXVI Venice Biennial, the exhibition American Painting 1945‑1957 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the LXII American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the XX Biennial International Watercolor Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and in the I and II Havana Biennials. Girona won the sculpture prize of the Paris Biennial in 1961 and of Cuba’s National Plastic Arts Prize in 1998. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museo de Bellas Artes de La Plata in Argentina, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the New Jersey State Museum, and the University of Dortmund in Germany, among others. Girona studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana, the Academie Ranson in Paris, the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City and the Art Students League in New York. He taught Engraving Techniques at Werkkunstschule, Kufel, F.R.G. and Spanish at the Center for Cuban Studies in New York. (Cintas for art, 1965-66)

Rolando López Dirube (b. 1928, Havana-d. 1997, Puerto Rico) A sculptor, painter and engraver, Dirube left Cuba in 1960 and, after traveling throughout the United States, Europe and parts of Latin America, settled in Puerto Rico. He taught painting and design at the University of Puerto Rico and the Universidad Interamericana in San Juan and was founder and professor of the Escuela Taller de Artes Plásticas y Galería at La Romana in the Dominican Republic. Dirube studied at the Havana School of Architecture, the Art Students League of New York, and the Art Workshop at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He participated in many solo and group shows in the United States, Latin America and Europe, including the Outside Cuba exhibition, and won the Iberia Airlines award for wood engraving and the I Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte in Madrid. His works are in several major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas, the Miami-Dade Public Library, the Philadelphia Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (Cintas in art, 1964-65, 1965-66)

Solomon Mikowsky (b. 1936, Havana): A lifelong music educator, many of Mikowsky’s pupils have been top prizewinners in international competitions, including the Rubinstein in Tel Aviv and the Tchaikovsky in Moscow. Mikowsky has been a member of the piano faculty at Manhattan School of Music in New York for more than 40 years and until 2013 was also a member of the Artist Faculty at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. He has been a juror in more than 20 international competitions. Mikowsky is the author of a book on 19th Century music, Ignacio Cervantes y la danza en Cuba. He received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Juilliard and a PhD from Columbia University. (Cintas for music, 1965-66)  

Joconde Tropicale #3, 1973, Acrylic on canvas, 40” x 31.875”

Jorge Pérez Castaño (b. 1932, Havana-d. 2009, Paris) Even though he lived in Paris since 1959, the style and themes of Castaño’s paintings stayed close to his Cuban roots. He regularly exhibited his work in Europe and the United States, and participated in group shows such as the 1998 exhibitions Three Cuban Painters in Paris at the Galerie du Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and Far from Cuba at the Musees des Tapisseries et Pavillons de Vendome in Aix-en-Provence. His work is in the permanent collection of the Miami-Dade Public Library. (Cintas for art, 1965-66)

Isel Rivero (b. 1941, Havana): Widely published in Latin America and Spain, Rivero’s first book, a collection of prose poems titled Fantasías de la noche, was followed by La marcha de los hurones, Tundra: Poema a dos voces, which was translated to the French language, El banquete: Poema and Night Rained Her: Poems, with drawings by Carol Henderson, and Las noches del cuervo.  Rivero gave poetry readings during the 1980s in Africa and in the early in 1990s in Central America, as she combined her vocation as a poet with her professional life as an international civil servant.  She was a contributor to Sisterhood is Global, the history-making women´s world anthology prepared in 1985 by the American author Robin Morgan, and has written for MS Magazine.  As director of the United Nations Information Centre in Madrid, she sponsored several activities related to women´s human rights and poetry.  (Cintas for literature, 1965-1966)