Cuban Mid-Century Design: A Modernist Regime

Exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit, 15 June 2023 - 22 September 2024

Design and architecture played an important role in shaping Cuba's identity and cultural expression in the post-revolutionary era. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, a prolific cohort of artists, designers and architects embodied the ideology of their time and chronicled the country's journey from revolutionary promise to authoritarian retreat.

This exhibition catalogue is the first work devoted to Cuban design in the mid-twentieth century. It brings together almost 100 works, including some fifty pieces of furniture, and key functional design objects, architectural renderings, speculative prototypes of the 'design for all' ethic, and examples of art and graphic design, much of which has never been exhibited outside the island or published.