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).
The artists mentioned in this review are (in order of appearance): Alexandre Arrechea (b. 1970, Trinidad), Tania Bruguera (b. 1968, Havana), Liset Castillo (b. 1974, Camaguey), Carlos Garaicoa (b. 1967, Havana), Alexis Leyva Machado (Kcho) (b. 1970, Isla de Pinos), Yoan Capote (b. 1977, Pinar del Río), all from Cuba; Lluís Barba, (b. 1952, Barcelona, Spain), Dan Halter (b. 1977, Zimbabwe; lives and works in South Africa), Patrick Hamilton (b. 1974, Louvain, Belgium; lives and works in Chile), Eduardo Villanes (b. 1967, Peru), Darío Escobar (b. 1971, Guatemala), Sue Williamson (b. 1941, United Kingdom; lives and works in South Africa), Claudia Aravena (b. 1968, Chile), Ananke Aseff (b. 1971, Argentina), Yong Soon Min (b. 1952, South Korea; lives and works in the United States), Chen Xiaoyun (b. 1971, China), Cai Guo-Quiang (b. 1957, China; lives and works in the United States), Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937, Germany; Uruguayan/lives and works in the United States), Máximo Corvalán (b. 1973, Chile), Guillermo Gómez Peña (b. 1955, Mexico; lives and works in the United States), León Ferrari (1920–2013, Buenos Aires, Argentina), and Antonio Martorell (b. 1939, Santurce, Puerto Rico).
This review provides considerable documentation of the 10th Bienal de La Habana, which took place from March 27 to April 30, 2009. Founded in 1984, the first edition of the biennial was dedicated exclusively to Latin American and Caribbean artists. Since its second edition (1986), however, it has included artists from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and North America as well, and has gained a reputation as an expansive venue for gathering and exhibiting contemporary non-Western art and art from the Global South. Since its third edition in 1989, it has been organized around broad themes. For the 10th Bienal de La Habana, the organizers announced an open concept that lifted the restrictions on only inviting artists from the so-called Third World. It was curated by Margarita González, Nelson Herrera Ysla, José Manuel Noceda, Ibis Hernández Abascal, Margarita Sánchez Prieto, José Fernández Portal, and Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda. It included 323 artists from seventeen countries, and had several catalogues—its most ambitious undertaking yet. [As a complementary reading, see in the ICAA Digital Archive Herzberg’s review of the 9th Bienal de La Habana in Arte al día Internacional, “Havana Biennial: A Cultural Phenomenon” (doc. no. 1344007).]
