José Bedia
(b. Havana, 1959)
José Bedia graduated from the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts (1976) and the Superior Institute of Art (1981), both in Havana. He is one of the most important figures of the resurgence of Cuban art in the early 1980s. Bedia participated in Volumen Uno, the exhibition regarded as one of the most distinguished of the period, along with Rubén Torres Llorca, Juan Francisco Elso, José Manuel Fors, among other groundbreaking artists. His first solo exhibition Crónicas americanas (Chronicles of the Americas) was originally presented in Havana in 1980, and has since been exhibited globally. Other important solo exhibitions include Persistencia del Uso (Persistence of Use) at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, where he obtained the Grand Prize of the Landscape Salon (1984); Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (A Brief Account of the Indies’ Destruction) at the Carrillo Gil Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico DF (1992); De donde vengo (Where I Come From) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1994); Cosas Redondas (Round Things) Fort Lauderdale Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1995); Entre dos Mundos (Between Two Worlds) at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) in Valencia, Spain (2010); and Transcultural Pilgim at the Fowler Museum in UCLA, California (2012). He also participated in the first four editions of the Havana Biennial, where, in 1986, he won the award for Installation for his work El golpe del tiempo (The Blow of Time). Bedia’s works are part of several collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany; and the Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida, among others.
