Havana’s Apartment-Galleries since the 1990s: The Emergence, Consolidation, and Expansion of an Alternative Artistic Circuit offers the first comprehensive study of domestic dwellings in Havana transformed into exhibition venues and spaces for talks, workshops, residencies, research, and other activities.

Since the 1990s, apartment-galleries have addressed significant gaps in Cuba’s cultural infrastructure: limited commercial opportunities for artists; the absence of residency programmes; the exclusion of certain subjects and epistemologies from the educational system; and restricted opportunities for international visibility and participation. They have also created spaces for open debate, artistic experimentation, independent thinking, and research outside state-owned institutional structures. Beginning with Aglutinador, founded in 1994, the book examines more than a dozen initiatives and their consolidation from 2010 onward into an alternative artistic circuit with its own working methods, alliances, hierarchies, and routes of international circulation. The volume also places Havana’s apartment-galleries in relation to earlier and related forms of domestic display, including cabinets of curiosities, nineteenth-century Cuban tertulias, and apartment exhibitions in socialist and post-socialist contexts. It also studies apartment-galleries’ development in relation to different editions of the Bienal de La Habana since its founding in 1984.

Havana’s Apartment-Galleries since the 1990s will interest scholars and students of art history, contemporary art, museum and curatorial studies, visual culture, and Latin American and Caribbean studies.

Analays Álvarez Hernández is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal, Canada.