Spelman’s Andrea Barnwell Brownlee readies for Havana Biennial debut

• Dustin Chambers
• Andrea Barnwell Brownlee in the Spelman Museum of Art galleries

On May 11, the Havana Biennial will open its 11th edition in Cuba. For the first time in its 28-year history, an American curatorial team will be part of the official program. That team is made up of Atlanta’s Spelman Museum of Art director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In 2008, the pair co-curated and presented Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970, which assembled 48 works by 44 black women film/time-based media artists in a smart examination of an overlooked group of art-makers. The show took home a Best of Atlanta award from CL that year for “Best art exhibit in a museum,” and was nominated for an Association of International Art Critic’s award in digital media and video. Havana Biennial director Jorge Fernández was also a fan and invited Brownlee and Oliver to revisit the exhibit for the 11th event. Brownlee and Oliver spent five months retooling the show - renamed Cinema: Remixed and Reloaded 2.0 - to include 8 works by Maren Hassinger, the collaborative artist team Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Lorna Simpson, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. Brownlee discusses her time in Cuba and the “Why now” of involving an American curatorial presence in the Biennial’s (one of the longest-running in the world) official program.

How did the opportunity arise to be one of the first American curators in this Biennial?
The project really started many, many years ago. Valerie Cassel Oliver senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and I worked on the exhibition, Cinema: Remixed and Reloaded. From everything we could see, there were so many examples where black women artists were just not included in the dialogue about this fundamental and important medium, and we set about the task of really examining that and looking at the works that had been created using various platforms, various mediums.

I took a group to Havana last year and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who was in that first show, was our guest host, and it was amazing. We had the opportunity to do a lot of behind-the-scenes things, like meet artists and do studio visits. She introduced me to a number of people, one of them being Jorge Fernández who is the director of the Biennial. We remained in touch and had a number of conversations and received an invitation to submit a proposal. For a number of reasons that were primarily based on logistics, organizing a large retrospective didn’t seem to fit the bill. But we certainly wanted to have a longer conversation about this project, Cinema: Remixed and Reloaded, which he loved. The opportunity to revisit that project came about, and we explored a number of ways that it could be in alignment with this sort of larger framework and theme of this biennial.

So how are you adapting it?
We had 44 artists in the original show, and certainly taking all of them and presenting all of their work would have been amazing; it would have just been phenomenal because we didn’t feature anyone in that show that we weren’t really passionate about their work and believed in it. But the reality of finances and space hit us very, very hard. We did a number of things in terms of our first pass. We looked at things ranging from the reaction of viewers in our respective spaces (it was first presented here and at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston); narrative, because we wanted this to be accessible, we didn’t want to include narratives that were not going to be understood. I can think of three examples of works that I am very, very passionate about but it wouldn’t have the same reception in Cuba because of the amount and the details of the narrative that were included.