Belkis Ayón was a Cubanprintmaker who specialized in the technique of collography. Ayón is known for her highly detailed allegorical collographs 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. She was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967 and took her own life in 1999 with a fatal shot to the head. In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.
Education
Ayón attended the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, and joined its faculty after graduation.
1986–91: Bachelor's Degree in Engraving, Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana
Influences
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 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 female figure in the religion, Princess Sikan. According to a central Abakuán myth, Sikan once accidentally captured an enchanted fish, which imparted great power to those who heard its voice. When she took the fish to her father, he warned her to remain silent and never speak of it again. She did divulge the information, however, to a leader of another tribe. Her punishment was a death sentence. This story comes in the form of imposed silence in her work, a major theme. The concept of imposed silence is evident in the lack of mouths in all of her figures. Belkis Ayón demonstration of Sikan’s betrayal in her collographs may be considered a transgression because, ironically, Ayon, a female artist, gives voice to the main antagonist Sikan, a woman, in Abakua mythology which traditionally prohibits women. In this way, Belkis rebelled against the sexist and patriarchal culture argued to be ingrained in Cuban society by highlighting the religion’s feminine presence. To date, Ayón has been the only prominent artist to create an extensive body of work based on the Abakuán society. Because the society itself had created very few visual representations of its myths, Ayón had great freedom to visually interpret their myths for herself. Numerous Abakuán rituals are represented in her collographs, many of which draw on Christian as well as Afro-Cuban traditions. Abakuán beliefs existed in sharp contrast to the atheistic anti-religious position of the Cuban government at the time.
Style and technique
Ayón dedicated herself to collography, a printmaking technique for making works on paper. After the fall of the Soviet Union, supplies became difficult for artists to find. She painstakingly attached materials of widely differing textures to a cardboard substrate, painting over the matrix to create dimension. Finally, running the resulting elaborate collage through a hand-crankedprinting press. She often painted or carved the resulting prints, creating intricate patterns and areas of embossing that added even more depth and texture. Her works masterfully combine figuration and areas of abstract patterning, which sometimes complement and, at other times, camouflage the forms of her figures. Towards the end of Ayón's career, she worked on a large scale, sometimes joining as many as 18 sheets together to construct a single image, or attaching oversized prints to an armature that would give them architectural volume, towering over viewers. Ayón is best known for working mainly in black, white, and shades of gray. In these prints, stark and haunting white figures are dramatically contrasted with dark images and backgrounds. The prints feature both animals- such as snakes, fish, and goats- and human forms, references to art history, and religious iconography. Notable examples include Longing, Resurrection and Untitled . She did, however, use vibrant colors in some of her early works and in studies for prints. A notable example is La Cena, a large-scale print for which she created a study in bright pink, red, yellow and green. Other examples of full-color work include Nasako Began, Syncretism I, and Careful Women! Sikan Careful!!. Ayón sometimes mixed images from the Abakuán and Christian religions, as in Giving and Taking. In this work she depicted a Christian priest or saint with a white halo and a red robe next to an Abakuán figure clothed in black, with a black diamond behind his head. She sometimes replaced male figures with female figures, as in La Cena, where she portrayed some of the disciples at the Last Supper with ambiguously gendered figures. She also replaced Jesus with the image of Sikan. By disrupting the male-dominated Abakuán mythology through the creation of a more egalitarian iconography, Ayón defied the society's norms, and perhaps also those propagated by the Cuban government.
