Artists Osmievy Ortega and Alejandro Aguilera enrich the community as Artists-In-Residence at Cleveland Institute of Art: the Cuba Project.

Dr. David Hart, Chief Organizer of the Cuba Project, and Artist-In-Residence, Osmievy Ortega, attend the Sculpture X-2 Conference held at CIA on October 15, 2011


Cuban Artists-In-Residence Osmievy Ortega and Alejandro Aguilera have made this a memorable semester for students and faculty at the Institute. Personable and outgoing, they have become vibrant additions to the Institute's community. Both have produced substantial artwork while here. Aguilera recently completed a large-scale painting in his Institute Studio while Ortega has been busy in the Print department producing large-scale relief prints and working with master printer Karen Beckwith. Their remarkable works have provided inspiration for the students working in close proximity with them.

Their personal styles have as well made them exciting visitors for area school children when they recently traveled to Villaview Community School and Hope Academy-East. While there Aguilera and Ortega spoke with young people about their own careers as artists and their homeland of Cuba. Students peppered them with questions about subjects as diverse as "Where did you get their ideas from?" and "Who is the president of Cuba?". Before leaving Cleveland they are looking forward to other such opportunities to engage the public in general and young people in particular.

Plans are currently being developed to exhibit the works of the Cuban Artists-In-Residence near the end of the project and there is still the spring semester ahead when the Institute will welcome its second round of artists. (An exhibition was held at the start of the program at MOCA - Cleveland which presented existing works by artists from the Cuba Project).

The Alejandro Aguilera and Osmievy Ortega will speak publicly at the Institute as part of the Lunch on Fridays series:
Friday, November 18, - 12:15 pm
CIA's Gund Building

Profiles of Aguilera and Ortega:

Alejandro Aguilera is an artist and Cuban émigré to the U.S. Born in 1964 in Holguín, Cuba, he received his BFA from Escuela de Arte (in Holguín) and his MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte (, ISA,) in Havana. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia settling there after a period of living in Mexico because of his interest in the region’s history and in its burgeoning Latin community.

Over the last ten years Aguilera’s work has increasingly responded to a number of personal experiences and circumstances including rethinking Cuban identity and the creation of work that engages the conditions of the place he lives in. Working through sculpture, installation and drawing, and employing mechanisms of improvisation, Aguilera explores his relationships to art and its history as it is directed through his condition as an immigrant. The ideas and themes that inform these works are often directed by modern and contemporary works that critique the long history of primitivism in Modernist art. Aguilera has said of his own work, “I intend to expand upon the idea that artistic forms constantly permeated by notions of religiousness, freedom and beauty are never historically definitive.”

Cuba Art NY: Alejandro Aguilera


Osmievy Ortega was born in 1980 in Havana, Cuba. He lives and works in Havana, Cuba.

Rooted in the significant lithographic traditions such as the Cuban “tobacco stamps”, Osmievy Ortega revitalizes the print medium to represent scenes of subcultures, social margins and identity. Ortega recontextualizes the implicit beauty in the natural world through the exquisite handling and execution of his work. The linoleum reduction prints in the Cuba isla Pintoresca series recreate this inherit aesthetic in the rich colors and textured fibers of their organic and animal-like forms. In the series Puntos Cardinales, a labyrinth of lines form floating heads that come into contact with their local and dominating environments, creating a sense of torment and confusion.

Shown extensively throughout Cuba at the Biennials, Instituto Superior de Arte, and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam, Ortega has also been a part of several group shows in the USA, Mexico and at the Grechen Biennial in Switzerland. In recognition of his superior print making skills, Ortega was the recipient of the Joven Estampa (Young Printer) in 2009.


Both artists participated in the first Cuba Project Symposium held at the Institute alongs side scholar Alejandro de la Fuente.

Works by Osmievy Ortega:







The Cuba Project is supported by funds from The Cleveland Foundation's Creative Fusions Grant.

Workshops and school visits by the artists are part of CIA's Arts + Achievement Program which is supported through the Key Foundation.