Cuban Humberto Dionisio was born in Camaguey in 1950 and trained as a graphic designer in Havana'sConsejo Nacional de Cultura. He fled Cuba on the much publicized Mariel boat lift of the 1980s along with an unprecedented number of refugees seeking a better life in the U.S.

Dionisio lived and worked in Miami where he experimented with different media including oil paint, collage, and graphite. Although his artistic career was just emerging, he showed much promise.

His papers reveal the altered relationship of a Cuban family separated by exile. Along with details of Cuban politics and culture, his mother's informative and candid letters reflect a mother's longing, good will and love for her son. Humberto Dionisio died in 1987 at the age of 36.

Guerrero was born in Camaguey, Cuba in 1946 and came to the United States in 1962 as a young man. Like many children and youth who were allowed to leave communist Cuba, he was reunited with his parents in the U.S. a few years later. After a brief stint in New York, where he worked as a photographer's assistant at the Mayo Studios, he returned to Miami in 1976 and opened his own studio. Guerrero is known for his series of still lifes and nudes that explore themes of life, death, time, and religion, as well as portraits of notable Cuban American artists, a veritable "who's who" of the Cuban art world in Miami. He died in 1993.

Photograph by Ramón Guerrero of María Martinez-Cañas, August 18, 1988. 8 x 10 in.  © Maria Guerrero. Reproduced with permission.
Ramón Guerrero Papers and Photographs, Archives of American Art.

The Miami Generation artists received wide exposure across the country through such traveling shows as Cuba-USA: The First Generation in 1991. While many were trained and live in Miami, others are scattered across the U.S. and Europe. As art historian and curator Giulio Blanc notes, "The contribution to art of these Cuban Americans who came of age in the 60s and 70s is incalculable. Children of exile, their work raises questions such as 'How Cuban are they?' 'Do they reflect the schizoid reality of a bi-cultural existence?'"

Enrique Riverón, a patriarchal figure now in his nineties, has been an artist throughout his life. He was one of the few artists of the Cuban vanguardia to work with abstraction and non-representational imagery. By the 1930s he had come to an understanding of international modernism different from the nationalistic representational trends of Cuban art of the period. He received his early training in the Villate Academy in Havana and traveled and studied for three years under a scholarship in France, Italy, Belgium and Spain, where he attended the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid.

For many years, Riverón was a contributing cartoonist for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Cine-Mundial, a Spanish publication printed in New York for all Latin American countries, as well as publications in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico. He is represented in the Wichita Art Museum and private collections in this country and abroad.

The Enrique Riverón Papers, 1918-1994, contain correspondence, writings, and diary entries, scrapbooks, printed materials, and photographs documenting Riverón's amazing career as an illustrator, cartoonist, painter and sculptor in the United States and Cuba.

Demi was born in Camaguey, Cuba. Her paintings focus almost exclusively on children. She paints haunting images of babies flying to heaven and groups of lost children done in pointillist, confetti-like swirls. Her work is a direct result of traumatic experiences in revolutionary Cuba and years of deprivation and loneliness in exile. Despite their somber subject, her paintings manage to transmit a message of the transcendence and joy which art provides. An interview of Demi conducted by Juan A. Martínez in 1997 (in Spanish) for AAA's Oral History Project is available online. 

Demi's husband, Arturo Rodríguez, is an artist whose artistic career, like Demi's, is also self-directed. He describes his paintings as a combination of expressionism, realism, surrealism, abstraction and a pessimistic vision of the human condition. His sharp draftsmanship and command of oil techniques are the result of self-disciplined, independent study. Born in Cuba, Arturo Rodríguez emigrated to Spain at the age of fourteen, arriving in Miami in 1974. His years in Madrid and subsequent stays in Spain have contributed tremendously to his artistic growth. Rodríguez's passion for oil painting and his preference for the figure is due in part to his direct contact with works by El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, and the Venetian school in the collection of the Prado Museum, where Rodríguez visited often as a young man. He is one of the more talented and consistent artists of the first generation of Cuban American artists who arrived in the US at the end of the 1970s. His paintings are a very personal synthesis of what he calls ‘expressionism and the fantastic' with roots in various traditions. An interview of Arturo Rodriguez conducted by Juan A. Martínez in 1997 (in Spanish)  for AAA's Oral History Project is available online.  

Photograph of Arturo Rodríguez painting his mural The Great Theater of the World in the courtyard of the Norton Gallery of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, for the exhibition Walls: Glier, Rodríguez, Wojnarowicz, October 11- November 30, 1986. Arturo and Demi Rodríguez Papers, Archives of American Art.