Ella Hepner

90: the distance in miles that separate Miami and Cuba.

I approach this project as a scholar and artist, but also as someone who had the opportunity to live and study in Cuba for four months. Leading up to the semester I spent there, I had worked with a CMU professor, studying and conducting research on Civil Society in Cuba. Whatever investigations I had done into the island could do nothing to prepare me for living there. I spent four months walking, watching, sweating,

            I sat for hours at a time in the kitchens of my friends’ mothers, listening to them explain to me their personal and communal realities, and in sticky, stagnant classrooms under desperately pumping fans listening to professors explain to me a Cuba that they had been taught to teach, and hearing the undertones of their opinions emerge through the socialist narratives. And on the porch of the apartment where I lived for what seemed like days, my host, Modesta, by my side, calling out to the world as it passed by.

            I returned to the cold after four warm months and painted this work for a show by the same title as the page. Cuba has continued to make its way into my work as I've returned several times over the last couple months. 

Link to the an ongoing written piece about exploring themes of current social and cultural realities of Cuba: https://impressionsofcuba.wordpress.com/