CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/14/2017

Tria Giovan to launch The Cuba Archive at Artbook @ MoMA PS1

Sunday, December 17 from 3 - 5 PM, the Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Book Space presents Tria Giovan, signing and celebrating the release of The Cuba Archive: Photography from 1990s Cuba.

Reared in the Virgin Islands and based in New York, Tria Giovan first traveled to Cuba in 1990. Taken over the course of six years and across the weathering face of a revolution, she spent what amounted to a year broken up over twelve trips, traversing the island numerous times and making more than 25,000 images. Looking for Cuba’s history, literature, and politics reflected in the interiors of homes and businesses, city streets, rural landscapes, and, most importantly, the faces of Cuba's people, Giovan amassed a body of work that exposes the subtleties and layered complexities of a day-to-day Cuba drifting away from her revolutionary rebirth in the bubbling wake of globalization.

These travels first resulted in Cuba: The Elusive Island, published in 1996 – now a collector’s item – which combined 100 images with a selection of writings by some of Cuba’s most important intellectuals and artists. Twenty years later, Giovan re-edited the images, while working to preserve the original 6 x 9 color negatives. Through this intensive re-examination, a new, more complex view of the historical importance of this work emerged, and images previously disregarded or missed have gained significance as a record of a culture that no longer exists, and of a Cuba, ravishing and singular, turning her face to meet a new millennium.

The selected images featured in The Cuba Archive, many of which have never previously been shown, reveal Cuba at a pivotal point in its fascinating history and bear witness to an inimitable, resilient, and complex country and people.

This event is free and open to the public! If you can't make it, e-mail booksmomaps1@artbook.com to order a signed copy of Tria Giovan: The Cuba Archive!

ARTBOOK @ MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave.)
Long Island City, NY 11101