Abel Gonzalez Fernandez

Abel González Fernández is a writer and curator focusing on mid-century art and design and global contemporary art practices. González Fernández is Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), where he is currently working on the first solo museum exhibition of the artist duo ASMA, formed by Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá. He graduated in 2023 from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, where he focused his thesis research on contemporary Latinx art. Prior to joining MOCAD, González Fernández curated exhibitions in Havana, Berlin, Tokyo, and New York. In 2019, he was awarded a grant by the Prince Claus Fonds Next Generation program. In 2022–23, he curated Sin Autorización, Contemporary Cuban Art at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. In 2024, he co-curated A Modernist Regine: Cuban Mid-Century Design, the first exhibition in the United States on Caribbean mid-century modernism, at Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit. He was a contributing writer to and advisor for Latin American Artist: From 1785 to Now (Phaidon, 2023) and contributing writer to and editor for the monograph Roberto Jacoby, Art from the End of the World: Six Decades of Sound and Fury (Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in association with CCS, 2023).

Arquitectura de espacios cerrados (The Architecture of Closed Spaces)

Essays / By Abel Gonzalez Fernandez

Within the framework of Cuban modernism from 1930 to 1970, Cuban women played a significant role as generators of modernism’s planning and organizing ideology. Their work expanded into design, architecture, abstract painting, and political and spatial thinking. At this stage, the role of women artists was consolidated as that of protagonists in the production of artistic and social ideology supported by public and private institutions. Focusing on the work of Clara Porset, Amelia Peláez and Loló Soldevilla, this essay questions the notion of “innocence” often imposed on modernist women subjects in terms of the social and artistic ideological production they proposed and reclaims their role as agents of change.

Abel Gonzalez Fernandez

Arquitectura de espacios cerrados (The Architecture of Closed Spaces)

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