Matthew Casey: Cuba’s Special Period
How are Cuban artists navigating restrictions on free speech and expression? How do they reconcile a global market-oriented artworld with their desire to produce work that is meaningful both personally and nationally?
Matthew Casey will draw on his research into race, labor, and migration in Latin America and the Caribbean to interpret the artwork of Back to Havana in the context of Cuba’s Special Period, when nationalism in arts and culture received renewed attention at a time of political and economic crisis.
Matthew Casey joined the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi in 2012 after receiving his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He is an assistant professor in the Department of History, where he also serves as the director of undergraduate studies and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Gulf South.
Casey is a recipient of the Nina Bell Suggs Professorship and the 2017-18 Lucas Endowment for Faculty Excellence Award. In 2015 he was named Humanities Teacher of the Year for Southern Miss by the Mississippi Humanities Council. He is the author of Empire’s Guest Workers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US Occupation, published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press.
Generous funding for Back to Havana is provided by Wind Creek Hospitality and also by The City of Mobile, Mobile County Commission, Alabama State Council on the Arts, The Hearin-Chandler Foundation, The Daniel Foundation of Alabama, The Crampton Trust, The Sybil H. Smith Charitable Trust, Visit Mobile, The Support The Arts License Tag, and The Community Foundation of South Alabama.
We are also grateful for the support of our media partners: IHeartMedia, Alabama Public Radio, and Alabama Coasting. Back to Havana features a number of works graciously loaned by the collection of Terri and Steven Certilman – Discoveries in Art and is a P.S. Satellite, a project of Prospect New Orleans.
Image: Work by Ramon Vargas Artiz currently on display in Back to Havana. Photo: Keneisha Lewis.