Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban

Printmaker Belkis Ayón

February 6 to September 5, 2021

The JSMA was pleased to host Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of the late Cuban artist. During her short but fertile career, Belkis Ayón (1967-1999) produced an extraordinary body of work central to the history of contemporary printmaking in Cuba and abroad. She mined the founding narrative of the Afro-Cuban all-male Abakuá Secret Society to create an independent and powerful visual iconography. Nkame included forty-eight prints, many of them combined to make large, installation-scale environments, and audiovisual materials that encompass a wide range of the artist’s graphic production. Nkame was curated by Cristina Vives and organized by the Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba, with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, with the tour managed by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles. The exhibition premiered in the United States in 2016, and in 2017 ArtNews magazine named it one of the top ten exhibitions in the world.