Los Carpinteros: A Final Good-Bye at the Phillips

Los Carpinteros, the internationally acclaimed Cuban artist collective known for their immersive sculptural installations and large drawings, recently announced the dissolution of the group. After 26 years of collaboration—creating artworks that critique dominant ideologies and power structures with humor and political undertones—the two remaining members, Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez, have decided to split and pursue separate artistic paths. I got to know them years ago when we started to discuss an Intersections contemporary art project for the Phillips. I love that their work beautifully blends playfulness of form and concept with a sense of subtle irony and intentional ambiguity, leaving openness for interpretation. I was fortunate to visit Marco in Havana this spring and Dago in Madrid just a couple of weeks ago before the news went public. We decided to move on with our project as planned and showcase it at the Phillips in fall 2019. Thereby, we reversed the museum’s tradition of celebrating “firsts” this time around to proudly be the last art institution to honor and say good-bye to this wonderful collective.​ Stay tuned for more information about the Phillips’s Los Carpinteros Intersections project.

Vesela Sretenović, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art