Art Yard

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Bill and I are now part of ArtYard, an arts organization that we are building from scratch with some wonderful friends. Our leader and founder, the amazing Jill Kearney, wrote a post about how ArtYard was born. We invite you to click here to read the post.

Merry Christmas!

Feliz Nochebuena: Recipe for Cuban Macho Guantanamero

For this year's Nochebuena, I tried to invent a new recipe for the customary pork dish, which for Cubans is usually lechon asado.

Started with a pork loin, about 5 pounds, and after trimming all the fat from it, I marinated it overnight is the fridge in the following concoction:

• Sour orange juice (if you don't have it, they sell it at most Hispanic/Latino supermarkets, or just mix 50% lime juice with 50% orange juice).
• A couple of tablespoons of salt 
• A lot of chopped garlic
• A tablespoon of cumin
• A tablespoon of oregano
• A tablespoon of basil
• A tablespoon of black pepper
• A tablespoon of paprika
• 2 chopped up onions

After 24 hours pull it out and stab it with a small knife and stick garlic cloves in the holes all over the loint. You can also stuff the holes with pitted olives. If you have a kitchen syringe, then inject some of the marinade juice all over the pork, and then return to the fridge for another night.

On Nochebuena, preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

While the oven is heating, pull the pork out of the marinade and brown all the sides and edges in really hot olive oil with a dash of salt and pepper in the oil. Make sure that the loin is "sealed" by the browning.

Put the loin in a deep over dish and cover the loin with sliced onions and also add whatever veggies you want around it (carrots, onions, etc.), then blend the marinade in a blender until it is all mixed and thickened and pour over the loin.

Bake until it reaches and internal temperature of around 150 degrees - keep checking, as you don't want to over cook it. When it has reached an internal temperature of 150, pull it out and let it sit for 15 minutes or so.

Macho Guantanamero by Lenny Campello

Then slice at a slight angle and serve with white rice, Cuban blacks beans, yuca con mojo, plantains, and salad, and you have a Cuban Nochebuena!

I call it "Macho Guantanamero", as in Oriente province a pig and pork is called "macho", while in the rest of Cuba and most of the Spanish speaking world it is cerdo or lechon for  pig/pork.

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Carmen Herrera and the world of blue chip artists

This year, at the age of 101, Herrera finally received recognition as a pioneer of 20th-century abstract painting. The Cuban-born, New York-based artist was celebrated in a major survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art this fall; a show of her new paintings christened Lisson Gallery’s New York space in the spring; and she featured in a full-length documentary released on Netflix in September—all of which served to land her name in the press and in the canon like never before. 

At the Whitney, “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” exposed the art world to her formative years, the period of 1948–1978, including many works that had never been on public view. Over these three decades she worked prolifically and ran among prominent artist circles in New York and Paris, with the likes of Josef Albers and Barnett Newman. And she honed her signature style—canvases filled with striking geometric shapes characterized by crisp lines, sharp angles, and bold shocks of color. “We can see in the works in ‘Lines of Sight’ that Herrera was thinking about the painting as an object—using panel divisions and the sides of canvases, and incorporating the surrounding environment—in the early 1950s,” says Whitney curator Dana Miller, who helmed Herrera’s exhibition there. “This is at the same time or before other artists, who have been previously heralded for such developments, first began to undertake similar experiments,” Miller adds. 

While the artist has been active in New York since 1954, and has been exhibited across the world since the 1930s, it was not until 2004 that she sold a work. She has been counted among key forces behind Latin America’s rich history of geometric abstraction, yet not until now has Herrera been properly lauded on the international art-world stage. As Miller put it, “Herrera was, and still is, an artist and a woman ahead of her time, and we are all just beginning to catch up to her.”

Read the above and the rest of The Most Influential Living Artists of 2016 - at least according to the editorial humanoids of Artsy here.

“Blanco y Verde.” Credit Carmen Herrera, Private Collection, New York        

Meanwhile at the New York Times:

At 101, the artist Carmen Herrera is finally getting the show the art world should have given her 40 or 50 years ago: a solo exhibition at a major museum in New York, where she has been living and working since 1954. The show, “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” caps off several years of festivities, many of which have focused on the artist’s centenarian status, including a documentary film, “The 100 Years Show, Starring Carmen Herrera”; a spring exhibition of recent paintings at the Lisson Gallery in Chelsea; and numerous profiles hailing Ms. Herrera as a living treasure and praising her acerbic wit.

“Blue and Yellow” (1965). Credit Carmen Herrera, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden