I create sculptural hairstyles using my natural hair as a material. I add some extensions, and shape it with thread and wire. A sculpture can take me from 30 minutes to more than six hours.
The Bandera Cimarrona, a flag conceived at the first edition of the International Summit of Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico in 2022, stands as a symbol of the resistance, the pursuit of freedom, and the strength of Afro-descendants on the island and throughout the Americas.
Bridget Finn describes her experience leading up to Art Basel Miami Beach as exhilarating and gratifying, emphasizing the unique feel of Miami during the off-season. She enjoys local exhibitions and the community, which are essential to the show's success.
A few blocks from Revolution Square, in a former shantytown in Havana, Dr. Omitsa Valdes holds her consultations. It's a dusty, dilapidated place where she tells patients they must bring their own syringe and medication from home. But if a general checkup is needed, including urine and blood tests, Dr. Valdes is even more direct: If you can get it done yourself, I'll write the order.
Cuba has long been under the effects of a perfect storm that shows no signs of abating. In addition to constant power outages, the high cost of living, persistent unsanitary conditions in the streets, and a tangled economic crisis that Cuban authorities seem incapable of resolving, there are now direct threats from Donald Trump's administration, aimed at the Castro regime which has been in power for nearly 70 years.
Michelle Paulin dances while instructing youth at the Dulce Tricolor Venezolano dance group at the Ariel Dance Studio in Campbell on Jan. 25, 2026. Dulce Tricolor, a Bay Area Venezuelan dance group founded in 2019, teaches children traditional folk dances while preserving culture, building community and offering a sense of home amid Venezuela's ongoing political and economic crisis. (Josie Lepe for KQED)
Sixty-seven years have elapsed, and Havana still remembers the triumphant entry of Fidel Castro and his bearded revolutionaries. After departing from a military academy in the morning, a convoy of trucks advances at midday from the Malecon, traversing the city along the same original route. Riding atop the olive-green trucks are young men and women with red flags, raised fists, and shouts of Long live Fidel!
"I rarely use the term collecting and collector," Hsu-Tang says. "We both see ourselves as messengers... I don't own these works of art. I'm here to be a temporary steward of these messages, and to pass on-it's my duty to connect the past, the present and the future."
An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.
The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's family fled in 1970 and where Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"
The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's ­family fled in 1970 and where ­Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"
Otherworldly forms greet you at the entrance to the exhibition, transporting you into a kaleidoscopic, dream-like space. A voice speaks in the background as projected images dance across the forms, animating the space. "It's been really beautiful to see her work come alive, become a landscape ... where you can traverse and kind of get lost," curator Fabiola R. Delgado says of Lisu Vega's "The Uncertain Future of Absence (El Futuro Incierto de la Ausencia)" (2025).
Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.
If, like me, you'd rather be in Puerto Rico slathering mashed banana on your semi-nude body than braving the forthcoming cold front in New York City, just know you're not alone. "TROPICALIZE ME!" (2025), pictured above, was performed by Matthieu Laurette at the 3rd Gran Bienal Tropical in December, where the artist took home one of five "Golden Coconuts" along with Poncili Creación, Ángela María Domínguez, Miguel González, and Aldo Álvarez Tostado.
This is the site of the Florida state historical marker commemorating Arthur Lee McDuffie, a Black insurance broker and former US Marine whose 1979 beating death at the hands of Miami police ignited one of the most consequential uprisings in the city's history. A plaque unveiled in February 2024 at the site of his attack finally acknowledged the violence that fractured McDuffie's skull and the community-wide outrage that followed.
Although this truism is typically offered as a negative, it can also be read as a positive that provides comfort and stability amid new environments. In I Bring Home with Me, Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo recreates his Accra studio in an architectural reproduction within Roberts Projects ' Los Angeles gallery. Boafo is known for his stylized portraiture of Black people, whose skin the artist renders in swirling gestures made with his fingers.
Redolent of African basketry, hairstyles, headwear, and pottery, Donté K. Hayes ' abstract ceramic sculptures may be interpreted as poetic vessels, even though they lack traditional openings. While we easily associate clay pots and round woven forms with ideas related to storage, protection, and even spiritual significance, they also nod to the human head as a holder-a kind of receptacle for culture, language, personal expression, and dreams.
