Cuba Colectiva

The Salón de Mayo (May Salon) was an art exhibition held in Havana, Cuba, in July 1967. It took its name from the Salon de Mai, an artists collective founded during the Nazi occupation of France. the exhibition was organized by Carlos Franqui with the assistance of such artists as Wifredo Lam, René Portocarrero, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.

The Salón de Mayo presented works by more than a hundred artists and represented rival schools of twentieth-century art: early modernists (Picasso, Miro, Magritte); the next generation (Lam, Calder, Jacques Hérold, Stanley Hayter); and the post-World War II generation (Asger Jorn, Antonio Saura, Jorge Soto). Lam wrote to Franqui in anticipation of the event of his hopes:

."..that young painters and sculptors would be able to work in a socialist country such as Cuba and enjoy the spontaneity of creating something so that they would have memories of the pleasure they experienced working in Cuba just for the sake of working. Some artists were invited to create works in Cuba in the weeks preceding the exhibition, with those works donated to the Cuban government to form the nucleus of the collection of an anticipated but never realized contemporary art museum.

Collaborative engagement was a principle theme of the event. On 19 July 1967, over 100 artists and writers contributed to a mural, Cuba Colectiva, in front of the Cuba Pavilion in Havana, adding either images or text inside spiral bands that circled outward from a central image of "rhomboid heads" by Lam.*

*Sims, Lowery Stokes; Cuba and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982.