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; d. 1991, Miami) studied art at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana and art history at the University of Havana, before arriving in the United States on the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and settling in Miami. In 1983, he was included in the pivotal group exhibition of Miami’s Cuban exile painters, The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban-American Artists (Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture). 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 Sculptures (1987–89), the 41st Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings (Corcoran Gallery, 1989), and The Decade Show, co-curated by Herzberg (1990). His final solo exhibition in his lifetime, Carlos Alfonzo: New Work, was held at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (September 27–November 11, 1990). He passed away of AIDS-related causes in February 1991 at the age of forty. His death occurred a little over a month before the opening of the 1991 Whitney Biennial (April 2–June 30), in which he was included, a crowning achievement in a career cut tragically short. César Trasobares (b. 1949, Holguín, Cuba) is an artist who works in collage, installation, and performance. He resided in Mexico City and Miami between 1965 and 1996, and has lived in New York City ever since. His work is included in the collections of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, and the Metropolitan Museum and Art Center (both in Coral Gables, Florida).
During the conversation, Alfonzo discusses his approach to painting, its connection to life and death, and his love of music, poetry, and dance; he thinks there are many different artists inside himself. The artist was called by his doctor in the middle of the interview, who informed him that his white blood cell count was dangerously low. This text appears in the exhibition catalogue for his retrospective titled Triumph of the Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo, A Survey 1975–1991, which opened at the Miami Art Museum in 1998 with Olga Viso as guest curator.
