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CARLOS MANUEL SOTO
Cuban-exile,
Carlos Manuel Soto has been in the United States since August 2001, enjoying
the independence of artistic expression. At the same time, he finds himself
confronting his dislocation, living daily life, and rapidly realizing the
routine of American culture. |
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Clearly Soto’s images reflect upon the themes of exile, culture, and
identity. He explores the manner in which displacement reinforces and
transforms cultural identity. The exhibition includes both work from
his days under totalitarian context, and several selections from the recent
experience of living with an American ideology.
Soto has been active as an
exhibiting artist since the early 1970’s. For more than a decade, as a Cuban
intellectual, he was forced to live with persecution, harassment, and
detentions by the political police of the Cuban government.
He graduated with a
Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the Superior Pedagogical Institute
(Enrique Jose Varona) in Havana City. Then in 1991, from the same school,
he was advised to drop his bachelor studies in fine art, for being a student
whose ideals formed political and aesthetic viewpoints not in accordance
with the institution. As an artist in Cuba, he was increasingly prohibited
(1991-2001) from exhibiting in public facilities funded by the Cuban State
as well as in privately owned galleries.
8/03
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