José Bedia Valdés

Biography

At twenty-three José Bedia was initiated into the secret rituals of Palo Monte. This Afro-Cuban religion has its roots in Central Africa, and for the artist it means more than a subject: in it he found a way to speak of where he comes from.

José Braulio Bedia Valdés was born on 13 January 1959 in Havana. He studied at the San Alejandro National School of Fine Arts (reference works give 1976), then at the Higher Institute of Art in Havana, where he completed his studies in 1981. The sources differ on the name of the last institution: some call it the Institute of Art, others the Higher Institute of Art.

From 1978 he took part in group exhibitions with other Cuban artists. In 1978 he showed work in the Havana magazine Moncada together with Rubén Torres Llorca and Manuel González Daza. In 1980 his drawings were entered in the Joan Miró International Drawing Prize in Barcelona. He joined the group Volumen I, and the exhibition “Los novísimos cubanos” was held at The Signs Gallery in New York. In 1982 he won the first prize at the “Salón Paisaje ’82” at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. He was selected for the first and second Havana Biennials (1984 and 1986), and won a prize at the second. In 1988 the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba awarded him the critics’ prize at the biennial, and the Cuban Council of State gave him a distinction for his contribution to national culture. In 1989 his solo exhibition “Final del Centauro” was shown at the Castillo de la Real Fuerza in Havana, timed to coincide with the third Havana Biennial.

In 1990 he took part in the Venice Biennale.

He left Cuba, by some accounts in 1990 and by others in 1991; he settled first in Mexico, and in 1993 moved to the United States. In the same year, 1993 (by other accounts, 1994), he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The main theme of his exhibitions in these years is named in the title “De donde vengo”, meaning “Where I Come From”. An exhibition with that title was shown in 1992 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and in 1994 at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1994 he showed work at “InSite94: A Binational Exhibition of Installation and Site Specific Art” at the San Diego train station, and at the São Paulo Biennial.

He works in painting, printmaking, drawing and installation. Scholars write that he sets the ancient against the modern, the natural against the artificial, the spiritual against the physical. His works draw on the oral stories, proverbs, jokes, customs and beliefs of African, Native American and Cuban traditions. I would add that in his drawings the figures and signs of Palo Monte are presented as personal experience, not as ethnographic illustration, but this cannot be checked against the texts of the articles.

Later exhibitions took place in Badajoz (the MEIAC museum, 2004), in Santo Domingo (the Lyle O. Reitzel gallery, 2008) and in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach (2009). The retrospective “Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia” was at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 18 September 2011 to 8 January 2012. In 2013 he took part in Santiago de Cuba in an exhibition in homage to Grupo Antillano, and in 2019 in the group show “The Gift of Art” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

His works are held by the National Museum of Fine Arts and the Wifredo Lam Center in Havana, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, and other collections in the United States, Europe and Latin America.