Cuban born-American artist José Bernal (1925-2010). Born in Santa Clara, Cuba, Bernal excelled at both music and visual art as a child and, after receiving his Master’s Degree, began his teaching career while continuing to produce his personal artwork. A student of art and art history nearly his entire life, his early work reflects the influence of the great masters and impressionists such as Diego Velázquez, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the modern art of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Wifredo Lam.

In 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion Bernal was arrested, charged with unpatriotic behavior for refusal to work in the sugar cane fields. After this incident, Bernal and his wife Estela secured visas for themselves and their three children to leave Cuba for America and, by 1962, relocated to Chicago. After arriving in the United States, Bernal began to explore new mediums including collage and assemblage. In these later works the knowledge of Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg is visible - but the independent voice and vision of Bernal’s obra de arte is distinctly his own. As Cuban contemporary art curator Corina Matamoros notes in her essay José Bernal: Style at a Distance, “This group of objects and assemblages illuminates a kind of zona franca, a space for him to exercise his freedoms, a personal corner where he could talk to himself alone and not be obliged to be what was expected of him; a territory where he could mock and make fun of himself, everyone else and all art of the present and future.”