This essay by Julia Herzberg overviews Carlos Alfonzo’s artistic trajectory from 1982 to 1991, outlining the biographical details of his life and analyzing multiple artworks included in the exhibition. Working mainly in a Neo-Expressionist painting style—but also in welded steel sculpture and public murals—Alfonzo’s abstracted figurative images address life, death, homoerotic desire, emotional experience, and alienation. He also often uses symbolic images including body parts, arrows, nails, daggers, cubes, and spirals, which are informed, in part, by his interest in different religions including Catholicism, Afro-Cuban Santeria, and the occult Rosicrucian order. Alfonzo draws from a range of art historical sources including Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism, as well as from poetry and dance. His later work brings to light his struggle with his own mortality after being diagnosed with HIV in 1989. His final phase of work, completed in the last year of his life and known as the “Black Paintings,” represents an in-depth meditation on death.

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she  was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

Carlos Alfonzo (b. 1950, Havana, Cuba, 1950; d. 1991, Miami, Florida) studied art at the Academia San Alejandro in Havana and art history at the Universidad de La Habana before arriving in the United States on the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and settling in Miami. His first ink and mixed-media drawings of 1981–82 were followed by a shift to working in acrylic on paper, canvas, and other supports between 1982 and 1983. After a year spent in Los Angeles in 1983, he began painting on tarps. That same year, he was included in the pivotal group exhibition of Cuban exile painters The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban-American Artists (Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture). In 1984 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and in 1986 he installed his first major mural, Ceremony of the Tropics, in a Miami Metrorail station. He gained widespread renown in the United States in the late 1980s after his inclusion in the two-year touring exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors (1987–89) as well as the 41st Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings (Corcoran Gallery, 1989) and The Decade Show, co-curated by Herzberg (1990). His final solo exhibition, Carlos Alfonzo: New Work, was held at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (September 27–November 11, 1990). In February 1991, shortly after having been chosen as one of ten artists to watch in the 1990s by ARTnews Magazine (1990), he passed away of AIDS-related causes at the age of 40. His death occurred a little over a month before the opening of the 1991 Whitney Biennial (April 2–June 30, 1991), in which he was included, a crowning achievement in a career cut tragically short.

This essay was written by curator Julia P. Herzberg for the catalogue of the exhibition Carlos Alfonzo: Extreme Expressions, 1980–1991, held at the Freedom Tower in Miami from December 7, 2006 to January 31, 2007. The exhibition featured forty-five works by the artist, many shown for the first time, a video documentary on Alfonzo made at the end of his life, and an interview with him by Herzberg. The exhibition highlighted Alfonzo’s historical role at the forefront of the “Miami Generation” and his significance as a leading Cuban-American artist of the 1980s.