Ferrara Showman Gallery announced the selection and participation of artist Paul Villinski for the 15th Bienal de la Habana taking place in Havana, Cuba from November 15, 2024 to February 28, 2025. Celebrating its 40th anniversary since its founding in 1984, the Havana Biennial is a contemporary art event organized by the Wilfredo Lam Center.
The biennial’s fundamental purpose is contributing to increasing awareness and dissemination of the visual arts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, and their diasporas. It is considered “the first biennial of Latin American art.”
This year’s theme, Shared Horizon, will create an important locus for confrontation and reflection within the international art scene. This edition will feature over 250 artists who have been selected from 71 countries. Villinski is one of only three American artists selected to participate.
Paul Villinski is a nationally recognized artist whose work has been featured in numerous museums, contemporary art centers, biennials and public art commissions. An avid pilot and sailor, metaphors of flight and soaring often appear in his work. With a lifelong concern for environmental issues, his work frequently re-purposes discarded materials, effecting surprising and poetic transformations.
For his installation at the Havana Biennial, Migración, Villinski will employ aluminum butterflies created from discarded cans collected from the streets of New York City. Sure We Can, a Brooklyn reclamation center which facilitates the work of homeless canners, supplies Villinski with his raw materials, which he then painstakingly transforms into realistically-shaped butterflies and moths representing nearly 50 actual species.
Over the course of the five days preceding the opening of the Biennial, Villinski installed more than 1000 of these colorful Lepidoptera on exterior walls, signposts, fences, doorways and other locations in the city’s streets creating a mile-long installation along the historic Malecón in Havana.
“For Migración, I am starting with refuse from the streets of New York – littered cans – which metamorphose into butterflies in my studio,” Villinski said. “They will migrate from the quiet of my studio to the streets of Havana, alighting here and there as small surprises for passersby. Most will be installed within reach, inviting people to ‘collect’ them and bring them into their homes, gradually completing the project. The intent is to create cycles of transformation and migration as the butterflies move from the public space of New York’s streets – into the private space of my studio – back into the public spaces of Havana – and finally into the private spaces of peoples’ homes.”