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José Rodríguez Fuster was born in Villa Clara in 1946. He paints, engraves and sketches and is also one of Cuba's most original ceramists. He began his artistic career in 1961 at the age of 14, when he went to the Sierra Maestra to teach in the Literacy Campaign. He studied at the Art Instructors School from 1963 to 1965. He then started working as a ceramist at the Cubanacán Ceramics Workshop in Havana in 1966. He has participated in contests, exhibits, and art symposia in Cuba and around the world. In August, 1996, in honor of his 50th birthday, the National Fine Arts Museum opened a major exhibit of his ceramics, tiles, drawings and paintings in the Castillo de la Fuerza museum in Havana. He had a very successful personal exhibition conducted in November 2009 at the Y Art & Framing Gallery, where he sold all of his paintings during the first night of exhibition. His home studio in Jaimanitas, just outside of Havana, is known throughout the world. What started as an experiment in his own home -- adding ceramic tiles to every wall, filling the small lawn in front of his tiny home with ceramic palm trees, a huge table under a ceramic roof, a sculpture dedicated to anti-machismo, adding two more stories to the home and filling those with sculpture, ceramics and wall paintings -- has extended to dozens of buildings within the town. He started with the community's "medico de la familia" (family doctor) residence, in 2001-- you can see it here: http://www.josefuster.com/fuster/works/interv/mfam/default.asp -- and then began painting and adding ceramics to every home willing to accept his art. Most recently he unveiled a monument to the five Cubans who have been in prison in the United States for ten years. Considered political prisoners (they infiltrated right wing Cuban exile groups and reported on their planned terrorist activities), the "Cuban Five" have received worldwide support, but probably no single gesture has been more imaginative than Fuster's. The monument can be seen at Fuster's own web site: http://www.josefuster.com/fuster/works/interv/5h08/default.asp Fuster is the subject of a recent Reuters profile that documents his work in turning his seaside home village of Jaimanitas into a living work of art. In Jaimanitas, he has drawn on his expertise as a ceramist to create a Gaudí-like environment that recalls that of the Barcelona artist and architect in his famous Parque Güell. Fuster himself says he has been influenced more by Brancusi than by Gaudi, however. As Jeff Franks writes in his Reuters profile, Fuster’s “home and studio are the epicenter of a work in progress in which [he] has adorned houses on two streets with Picasso-like paintings and playful ceramic figures of the palm trees, roosters and crocodiles that reappear in all his art.” A product of the Revolution, Fuster claims to have discovered the source of his art while teaching literacy skills in the Sierra Maestra as a young man. “I found art in the Sierra Maestra,” he said. “The Sierra Maestra was what gave me the inspiration to do art. There I found a world I’ve never abandoned -- the palm trees, the peasants, the rooster, the horse.”
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