Rachel Weiss is a writer, educator, and lapsed curator, currently Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weiss has published extensively on contemporary art in journals, magazines, and newspapers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Major publications includeMaking Art Global: The Third Havana Biennial (Afterall Books), To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (University of Minnesota Press), Por América: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: co-author and editor), and On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias by Luis Camnitzer (University of Texas Press: editor). Major curatorial projects include Global Conceptualism 1950s–1980s: Points of Origin (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: co-director with with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver), Ante América (Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, and traveled in South, North, and Central America: co-curator, with Gerardo Mosquera and Carolina Ponce de León), and The Nearest Edge of the World: Art and Cuba Now (traveled throughout the US: co-curator with Gerardo Mosquera).
To Build the Sky: To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art
“The new Cuban art grew up in the supercharged and conflicting currents of revolution, sometimes tracking to its optimism and at others scalded by it,” writes educator and author Rachel Weiss in the introduction to her 2010 book, To and From Utopia: The New Cuban Art, published here as context for the exhibition Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950.