The worlds of José Antonio Aponte

Aponte Projects

José Antonio Aponte was a free black carpenter and artist in Havana in the early nineteenth century. He was also the mastermind of an ambitious, if thwarted, conspiracy to end slavery in Cuba in 1812.

In the course of their investigations into the conspiracies, Spanish authorities discovered an unusual book of painting created by Aponte. It included dozens of images of the most diverse subject matter: from the history of Havana, Rome, Egypt, and Ethiopia to scenes from the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology. There were images of Black men defeating white ones, of Black in positions of power, as kings, emperors, priests, and generals. Aponte was made to explain each image in his book before authorities, who decided to condemn him to death by hanging. Sometime after Aponte’s execution, his Book of Paintings disappeared. All that remains of it is the testimony he gave under oath and under enormous pressure.

I wrote about Aponte, about his conspiracy and his Book of Paintings, in chapter 7 of my book Freedom’s Mirror. But I felt like there was still so much more to learn and know about this important figure. Since then I have been involved in two related curatorial projects about Aponte.

The first is a digital humanities website, Digital Aponte, dedicated to Aponte and his Book of Paintings. There, viewers can learn more access Aponte’s testimony about the book, browse through a simulation of the library he kept in his home, encounter Aponte’s “visual world” through a gallery of images typical of his time and place, and see some of the sites in Havana that appear in his Book of Painting or that he was connected to in real life. I co-curated the site with the late Linda Rodríguez, an art historian trained at Harvard and a post-doctoral fellow at NYU.

The second project is a contemporary art exhibit, Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom, which I co-curated with Haitian American artist Edouard Duval Carrié. We asked a group of contemporary artists from the Cuba, Haiti, the Caribbean, and the United States to delve into Aponte’s trial testimony, to grapple with his descriptions of his paintings, and then to interpret them in their own way for today’s world and today’s struggles. The exhibit first opened in Miami at the Little Haiti Cultural Center in December 2017. It then traveled to NYU, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, Havana’s Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, and Santiago de Cuba’s Galería Arte Soy.

Finally, in 2022, I embarked on a collaborative project to turn the history of José Antonio Aponte into a modern opera. The opera will bring to life the fascinating story of Aponte and the timeless relevance of revolution and social justice. Teresita Fernández, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, and Ada Ferrer reinterpret Aponte’s story for our present, beginning from his own words—about his art, his humanity, his revolution, his world. It connects—as Aponte himself strove to do—the work and passion of making political and social change with the redemptive power of art and the imagination. The creative team currently includes Teresita Fernández (Visual Artist); Yosvany Terry (Composer); Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz (Art Historian); Ada Ferrer (Historian); Jessica Lanay (Librettist); and Ian Askew (Librettist). The project is supported by Creative Capital.