Jose bedia tunkashila painting over wallpaper

José Bedia, a Cuban Artist Collecting the Intangible

Since he has been one of the most prominent figures in Cuban art.

Bedia's work reflects his interest in building relationships between the spiritual systems of the African and indigenous diaspora. Alongside his four-decade career, Bedia is an avid collector of self-taught, ritualistic and ceremonial art.

In dialogue with MoMA, the artist explains: "My work and my collection have been together from the beginning.

Jose bedia tunkashila painting over wallpaper images

This happened spontaneously when I began to study art, since, during those years, I was dissatisfied with the fact that art education was oriented towards the history of Western art in all its aspects. The artistic productions of other cultures were not mentioned at all, so I set out to provide myself with this information and make up for this deficit.

At the beginning I focused on the indigenous archaeology of Cuba, to move on to the search for ethnographic ob