Humberto Calzada

Biography

On 11 October 1960 Calzada's family left Cuba. He was sixteen. In Miami he finished high school in Coral Gables, and painting was not yet on his mind.

He was born in Havana on 25 May 1944. At the University of Miami he trained as an industrial engineer (degree in 1966) and then took an MBA in finance there (1968). It is worth keeping these two degrees in mind when looking at his pictures: his buildings are always constructed like a drawing, with a clear structure, even when they are in ruins.

In 1976 Calzada decided to take up painting in earnest. Already in 1973 he had received an honorable mention at the Pan American Art Exhibition at the Miami-Dade Public Library, in 1977 first prize at the South Miami Art Festival, and in 1978 the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in Washington acquired one of his works.

His subject is almost always the same: the architecture of Cuba, above all the colonial and neoclassical houses of Havana. He painted them from memory, and the artist himself, judging by descriptions of his work, divided it not into periods but into groups of subjects to which he returned over decades. The early “anecdotal” pictures draw on personal recollections: a family home, familiar places, trips around the island. Then came the “surreal theatrical scenarios”, in which elements of Cuban architecture find themselves in an unexpected setting, and “meta-art”: in the walls of such pictures he included his own earlier works. There were the “Gardens”, with ruins and unfinished buildings, a brief period of still lifes made of architectural details, and the “Years of…” series of flooded houses into which the ocean has come. Water he treated as an image with a double meaning: destruction and rebirth. Separate from these are the night views, the dusk pictures (“La Hora Azul”) and the “Tributes to other painters”, in which another artist's picture hangs on the wall of the interior shown.

Two late series are built on expectation of the future. In the “Cuba circa 2025” pictures, houses in good repair acquire swimming pools. In “Reconstructing Havana” a greatly enlarged photograph of present-day buildings is partly “completed” in paint: what once stood there is painted in, and what may one day return.

From 1975 his solo exhibitions were held in Florida, Panama, El Salvador, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala and Puerto Rico, among them a fifteen-year survey at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. In 2006 the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami showed a thirty-year retrospective, “Humberto Calzada: In Dreams Awake”. His group shows took in both Latin America and the United States: the Medellín Biennial (1981), the Latin American Graphics Biennial in San Juan (1983), the Domecq Ibero-American Art Biennial in Mexico City (1986), and exhibitions of Cuban and Cuban-American art in museums in Fort Lauderdale, Washington, New York and other cities.

His works are held by the Lowe Art Museum, the Bass Museum of Art, the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panama, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Meadows Museum in Dallas, the collections of Florida International University and others. In 2010 the director Eduardo Montes-Bradley made a documentary about him, “Calzada”.

Calzada lived in Miami to the end of his life and died there on 17 August 2025.