"Chicago’s Havana Gallery hopes to support Cuban artists in recession"
by Hollis Templeton
March 1st, 2009. Medill News Service
"Dirijir las nubes" by Luis Saldaña, 2008.
While many Chicago art galleries are exercising caution during the recession, Lincoln Park’s Havana Gallery (1139 W. Webster Ave.) is taking a different tack that it hopes will help the Cuban artists whose works grace the gallery.
“Most of the artists we represent live in Cuba,” explained Gallery Director Allison Hill. “Whatever economic problems we’re having here, the effect is magnified there, so we are more committed than ever to promoting them and helping them succeed.”
Hill is hard at work promoting her artists, all of whom she visited during a two-week trip to Cuba in January. “We planned an ambitious schedule of exhibitions for the year,” said Hill, whose gallery displays contemporary work by 35 artists who work in styles varying from portraiture to landscape to Surrealism.
This year’s exhibitions will include solo shows by Alicia de la Campa, Orestes Gaulhiac, and Isolina Limonta.
Despite ambitious plans for 2009, Havana Gallery is also finding ways to cut back. It’s spending less on advertising, mailing invitations via e-mail instead of postal mail, and cutting back the days the gallery is open from five days a week to only four–Thursday through Sunday.
The gallery is also adjusting to wallet-conscious art buyers. “We want to make it easier for our clients to buy art, so we are offering them flexible payment plans and letting them take pieces home for a week-long trial period,” Hill said.
Havana Gallery has been in business since July 1999 and Hill says this is by far the most serious downturn the gallery has been through.
But the director is hopeful. “I really think that when spring is here people will start to feel optimistic again,” she said. “We’re expecting a great year.”
And a great year for Chicago’s Havana Gallery could become one piece of a broad movement in cultural diplomacy with the island nation. Many artists, gallery owners, art educators and scholars are working to improve cultural relations between the United States and Cuba in hopes that with President Obama in office, an artistic exchange will improve U.S.-Cuba political relations as well. Here’s a look at some of the artwork on display at Havana Gallery.
 "Paz" (Peace) by Sandra Dooley, 2008. |
 "Mesa de Familia" (Family Table) by Pablo Perea, 2004. |
 "La virgen de las estrellas" by Juan Moreira, 2006. |