Belkin ayon biography template

Cuban visual artist (1967–1999)

Belkis Ayón (23 January 1967 – 11 September 1999) was a Cubanprintmaker who specialized in the technique of collography. Ayón created large, highly detailed allegorical collagraphs based on Abakuá, a secret, all-male Afro-Cuban society. Her work is often in black and white, consisting of ghost-white figures with oblong heads and empty, almond-shaped eyes, set against dark, patterned backgrounds.

Early life

She was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967. From 1979 to 1982: 20 she attended de Octubre Elementary School of the Arts, in Havana. For four years from 1982 to 1986 she attended San Alejandro Academy, Havana. From 1986 to 1991, Ayón attended the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana where she gained a bachelor's degree in Engraving, and joined its faculty after graduation.

Career

A central theme of Ayón's art is Abakuá, a secret, exclusively male association with a complex mythology that informs their rites and traditions. The fraternal society began in Nigeria at Cross River and Akwa Ibom and was brought to Haiti and Cuba through the slave trade in the 19th century.

Ayón researched the history of Abakuá extensively, with special emphasis on the most prominent and only female figure in the religion, Princess Sikan. According to a central Abakuán myth, Sikan once accidentally captured Tanze, an enchanted fish which imparted great power to those who heard its voice. When she took the f

Ayón’s goal was never to perpetuate the Abakuá myth but to subvert and transgress it. For me, she exhibits a practice of remix: “religious ritual that removes demons of fear and releases imagination”, a concept borrowed from Binyavanga’s lyric essay on the artist Wangechi Mutu. Black artists across the diaspora have long grappled with issues of displacement and temporality to conjure new visions. While Ayón’s work certainly reflects historical narratives, it is also highly metaphorical and autobiographical. “I see myself as Sikán, in a certain way as an observer, an intermediary, and a revealer. As I am not a believer, I create her imagery from my studies and experiences. Sikán is a transgressor, and as such I see her, and I see myself,” she is quoted in her Reina Sofia retrospective. “I think that these engravings could be a spiritual testimony if you will, not lived in my own flesh, but imagined”, she elaborates in her 1991 “confessions” letter published by her estate. In essence, Ayón employes Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation”; “by playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by representing the sequence of events in divergent stories from contested points of view […] to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account.”

Ayón’s work was not without burden, which became evident when the artist took her own life at the young age of 32. The chiaroscuro of her collograph, lightness and darkness, become metaphorical to the threats that surrounded her as she delved into contentious terrain in post-Cold War Cuba. “Sikán, a woman who prevails in the works presented because she, like me, lived and lives through me in uneasiness, insistently looking for a way out”, Ayón shares in a 1998 letter. Sikán had become her alter ego, with features based on Ayón’s own body. Recurrent themes of restlessness, betrayal, and longing reveal the deeply troubled st

by ESTER BARKAI

It is not unusual for artists to create their own visual language. But Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967 – 1999) went one step further and developed her personal iconography while telling the story of a secret society she could never join. The artworks on view in Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón relate to the origin story of the Abakuá, a Cuban all-male secret society.   

The first thing that strikes me is the manner in which figures are portrayed — without ears, noses or mouths. The only facial features depicted in Ayón’s work are eyes. Figures are mostly rendered as white shapes drawn in outline or as black silhouettes; they inhabit a ghost world from which they stare out at the viewer. 

It is, at first, a bit unsettling. 

According to the exhibit, Abakuá is a secret mutual aid society. It functions, at least in part, to protect its members and is believed to have been brought to Cuba in the early 1800’s by enslaved Africans originating from the Cross River region in southeastern Nigeria. The founding myth of this all-male group begins in the hands of a woman, Princess Sikán. She accidentally traps a fish who calls out to her but because women are not permitted to hear mystical voices, Sikán is sworn to secrecy. Unwilling to abide by this injunction, she tells her fiancé and is condemned to death.  

Like Princess Sikán, upon initiation to the Abakuá society members are sworn to secrecy. The origin myth describes the unfortunate fate that befalls those who fail to obey this oath. The princess’s fate inspires the silence that informs Belkis Ayón’s prints. 

Ayón was a Cuban teacher and printmaker who specialized in collagraphy, a technique that combines collage and printmaking. Collagraphy enabled her to incorporate a variety of textured materials into her artwork by adhering them onto cardboard and then running the board through a press. Her fin