2015 Update: This year's Common Ground 2015 Art Biennial Trip to Cubawill feature The Art of Fire Project! The Art of Fire Project (Proyecto Arte del Fuego) was a ceramic residency project bringing together professional clay artists from Cuba, the US, Canada, Europe and Central and South America. The project ran from 2002-2008. The project artists were cultural ambassadors sharing artistic techniques and ideas. The program's goals were to : 1) Promote Peace and Friendship through the universal language of art; 2) Place technical expertise at the service of art in order to provide a working environment that facilitated the creative process; and 3) generate educational programs that would reach out to sectors of the community often excluded from the mainstream.
There were a number of exhibits and residency programs during the six years of the program. The culminating exhibit for the project was at the Fullercraft in Massachutes in 2009. There is still Cuban artwork for sale from this project.
Read about the extensive project and Cuba's unique artist culture below in the Boston Globe's article Forging a New Dialogue
Forging a new dialogue
"G vs. E" by Paul Andrew Wandless is part of "Beyond the Embargo: Cuban and American Ceramics" at Fuller Craft Museum.
By Cate McQuaid Globe Correspondent / June 19, 2009
BROCKTON - In all of Cuba, there is not a single ceramic supply store. So says Catherine Merrill, curator of “Beyond the Embargo: Cuban and American Ceramics’’ at the Fuller Craft Museum, a show as intriguing for its story as it is for its art.
Rather than buying clay, Merrill said in an interview, artists visit mines. “I’ve heard stories of midnight raids,’’ she said. If “Beyond the Embargo’’ is any indication, Cuban ceramicists are thriving, despite dramatic economic disadvantages. They stage regular encuentras (Spanish for encounters), where clay artists from around the world gather, share technical expertise, and collectively stoke the creative flame.
“Foreign artists will bring brushes and glazes and chemicals,’’ Merrill explained. But they still work on Cuban potters wheels jiggered from auto parts, and use local glazes mixed from pulverized stones, ground up television tubes, car batteries, and eggshells. The US trade embargo hasn’t helped the situation. Travel restrictions tightened during the Bush administration have made it tough for Americans to attend the encuentras. But there are loopholes. Merrill, for instance, has been granted visas for research projects. Likewise, it’s not easy for Cuban artists to visit the United States. Merrill invited Cuban Antonio Lewis to speak on a panel in California in 2003, and he was declined on the grounds that he was “a specialist in ceramic technology in all its applications,’’ according to Merrill. The Obama administration has eased some economic and travel restrictions on Cuba. In this show, all the Cuban work is smallish, because it was carried here in suitcases. Read more
Arte y Fuego / Art And Fire Project (English Translation)
Arte y Fuego was conceived as a project in 2002 by the American ceramist Catherine Merrill and her Cuban counterpart Antonio Lewis, and in the very essence of its genesis a search for peace and friendship was proposed through cultural exchange and the artistic creation of clay through the realization of workshops, master classes, conferences, residencies and exhibitions that involved the rapprochement between artists and the peoples of their respective countries, beyond political differences and barriers.
In the artistic and humanist sense of this project, which has been sponsored from Cuba by the Caguayo Foundation, Estudio Galería Los Oficios, and Casa Fundación Taller Pedro Pablo Oliva, a concern is also expressed for transcultural phenomena and respect for the contributions of the other from an interaction that seeks balance and harmonic fusion of identities and knowledge of those who join their actions uniting without barriers creators from different latitudes of the world and promoting new talents from the very space of their community.
Santiago de Cuba, Pinar del Río, Isla de la Juventud and the City of Havana, in Cuba; San Francisco and San Diego, in the United States, and Vancouver; in Canada, these have been some of the cities that have hosted previous editions and interventions of the project, while Matanzas has just hosted the most recent of its experiences. The fifteen years of existence of the Varadero Ceramics Workshop, the recognition achieved by several artists of this province in national and international events as well as the development of the handcrafted ceramics movement, led by the Correa Family Workshop in Jovellanos, stimulated the founders of Arte y Fuego to summon national and international creators from the so-called Athens of Cuba to turn the act of creating on clay into happiness, pleasure and meditation once again.
In the artistic and humanist sense of this project, which has been sponsored from Cuba by the Caguayo Foundation, Estudio Galería Los Oficios, and Casa Fundación Taller Pedro Pablo Oliva, a concern is also expressed for transcultural phenomena and respect for the contributions of the other from an interaction that seeks balance and harmonic fusion of identities and knowledge of those who join their actions uniting without barriers creators from different latitudes of the world and promoting new talents from the very space of their community.
The Varadero Ceramics Workshop, the Correa Family Ecological Farm, the Pedro Esquerre Gallery, the Provincial School of Art, the Community Project of the popular neighborhood La Marina and the Provincial headquarters of the ACAA were spaces for the main actions of creation, debate, instruction and exhibition of the works of Art of Fire. Techniques such as raku and primitive hollow burning, work in electric and wood-burning ovens, use of industrial and natural pigments, academic, anthropological figures or informalist strokes nuanced the diversity of creative exchange. Confraternity and unbiased contribution to the hierarchies also melted into the vessels and dishes of a connoisseur like Miranda, or experiments on the material of painters like William Hernandez and the Duany brothers, or very young like Yhamara Cruz and Walberth Lizano. A major truth of the event was its facilitation to a surrender to art as its essence demands: expression with freedom of ideas and aesthetics linking from its most arduous historical manufacture, its philosophical relationship with spirituality, its utilitarian and decorative capacity to the incorporation of its modernist thought of sociological commitment.
For that reason many of the pieces achieved besides traveling in the personal patrimony of each artist, will occupy spaces within the matancera cultural life. In addition to the impressive exhibition now on display at the ACAA Provincial Branch Gallery, a large mural in process will take a wall from the University, other works will be integrated into the environments of the ACAA Branch itself, the Provincial Art School, the Indio Hatuey Scientific Research Institute, and an auction of some vessels will raise funds for the new headquarters of the Provincial Council of Plastic Arts and its new gallery. For her part, Catherine Merril will return once again to the United States carrying some of them in her hand luggage, thus enlarging the study and promotion of the value of Cuban ceramics as an example of inventiveness before the limitations of resources and contextual creativity willing to merge with the other of good will.
Catherine Merrill Receives the Jose Maria Heredia Medal of Honor for her Contributions to Cuban Ceramics
On May 17 2005, in Santiago, Cuba, prominent San Francisco Bay Area ceramic artist, Catherine Merrill, was awarded the Jose Maria Heredia Medal of Honor for her "Significant contribution to Cuban Culture (cultural development)." This is the highest arts award in the province of Santiago de Cuba. Merrill is the second American to ever receive this significant honor. Rodolfo Vaillant, a prominent Cuban composer and director of the Cuban Union of Artists and Writers, presented the award to Merrill.