W&L Presents ‘Selections from The Lindsay Webster Collection of Cuban Posters at Wofford College’ The show will be on display in Wilson Hall’s Lykes Atrium in conjunction with Esteban Ramón Pérez’s solo exhibition “Distorted Myths,” which will be on view in the Staniar Gallery Oct. 10 through Nov. 2. 

By Kelsey Goodwin
October 10, 2022

The Department of Art and Art History at Washington and Lee University presents “Selections from The Lindsay Webster Collection of Cuban Posters at Wofford College,” a new exhibition featuring works created in Cuba from the 1950s Cuban Revolution through the 2000s. The show will open Oct. 10 and be on view in Wilson Hall’s Lykes Atrium through Nov. 2.

Lindsay Webster is the parent of two recent alumni, Lily Webster ’22 and Will Webster ’20. The Lindsay Webster Collection of Cuban Posters features approximately 350 works created in Cuba by various artists and organizations. Clover Archer, Staniar Gallery director, said W&L will install approximately 35 pieces from the collection.

Many of the posters focus on Cuba’s efforts to spread messages intended to inspire others in the fight against oppression stemming from the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. The collection also features posters focused on Cuban national pride and culture.

Andrea Lepage, Pamela H. Simpson Professor of Art History, is the faculty member responsible for W&L’s U.S. Latinx and Latin American curriculum. She first learned about the collection from Karen Goodchild, who is the Chapman Family Professor of Humanities in Art History at Wofford College, as well as the parent of Theo Goodchild-Michelman ’25.

After seeing the installation of “Hostile Terrain 94” on view in Leyburn Library during a campus visit, Goodchild was impressed by the popularity of art history at W&L and the strength of the university art collection installed across the campus.

“I was delighted Karen reached out about the Lindsay Webster Collection because it fits into the university’s U.S. Latinx and Latin American curriculum in multiple ways,” Lepage said. “W&L is grateful to Wofford College College and Wofford Museum curator Youmi Efurd for their generosity in facilitating the loan.”

The opportunity to exhibit the posters inspired several connections across campus. Lepage has developed an hour-long workshop about the collection that she will conduct with the students enrolled in her Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean Studies course and with students enrolled in two intermediate politics classes, The Material Culture of Politics and Latin American Politics.

Preparation for the installation has also led to a rich research and translation project for an undergraduate student. Medaly Cardenas Retamozo ’25 originally set out to conduct research about each poster, and that initiative transformed into a Spanish translation project. Cardenas Retamozo will translate the labels that Katie McCorkle (Wofford Class of 2019) wrote in order to develop a bilingual presentation of the posters.

“It’s exciting to collaborate with Wofford College in this unique way,” Lepage said, “and of course we’ll send the label translations back with the works in hopes that they might be of use or even travel with the posters to some other venue one day.”

The posters are presented in conjunction with Esteban Ramón Pérez’s “Distorted Myths,” a solo exhibition of works by the Los Angeles-based artist, which is on display in the Staniar Gallery. In his interdisciplinary works, Pérez often incorporates materials such as leather and embroidery, paying homage to his experience growing up in his father’s upholstery shop. Drawing on his West Coast Chicanx experience, his practice can be seen as an expression of rasquache aesthetics, an approach to artmaking based on a theory developed by Tomas Ybarra- Frausto to describe “an underdog perspective, a view from los de abajo [from below].” Pérez describes his work as “an interrogation and excavation of my subjective memory, spirituality, fragmented history, and social political reality.”

The Staniar Gallery and Lykes Atrium exhibition schedules can be found here. For more information, please call 540-458-8861.