Drawing largely from a recent gift of rare album covers, vintage photographs, and other items documenting Cuba’s rich music and cultural traditions, The Wolfsonian–FIU presents Turn the Beat Aroundin view from October 28, 2022 to April 30, 2023. Never again, Turn the Beat Around focuses on the exciting musical fusions that resulted during an earlier era of close diplomatic ties, easy travel, and cultural exchange.
“We are thrilled to be presenting this exhibit that celebrates the Afro-Cuban roots of rumba, conga, Latin jazz, mambo, cha-cha-cha and salsa,” said head librarian and exhibit curator Frank Luca. “Turn the Beat Around examines the visual means by which Afro-Caribbean rhythms were promoted in the US, forever transforming our musical landscape.”
Turn the Beat Around shows how thirty years of intense cultural interaction between Cuba and the United States profoundly shaped the musical traditions of both nations. At the same time that American jazz and big band swing swept the island nation, Cuban musicians and performers in the US, especially in New York City where they were joined by Puerto Rican and New York musicians, created new styles that invested American music. with a distinctive Latin tinge. Meanwhile, graphic artists in the music, film, and tourism industries were hard at work creating the visuals used to package and promote Cuban-inspired music, simultaneously exoticizing and Americanizing their designs.
Many of the works speak to historical issues of race and gender in representing ideas of the tropics and the exotic. Women and the female body played prominent roles, as did acknowledgments of the Latin American and African origins of jazz, rumba, and other popular music and dance genres of the first half of the twentieth century.
The new material on view, adding to previous offerings also made by Vicki Gold Levi, provides the substance to describe the influence of Afro-Cuban music on the American dance music scene. “I’ve been hooked on Cuba for as long as I can remember – I went through high school and never looked back!” said Vicki Gold Levi. “The Wolfsonian has welcomed so much of my collection with open arms and I am thrilled to be publicly sharing many of the objects in Turn the Beat Around for the first time.”
This donation strengthens Gold Levi’s previous gifts of Cuban material to the museum, including collections donated in 2002 and a promised gift in 2016 of more than 3,000 artifacts ranging from cigar labels to music covers. Selections from her gifts are included in Turn the Beat Around, in addition to loans of Gloria Estefan and Tito Puente performance jackets, and other items from the Wolfsonian collection. Florida International University is also home to the cultural treasures of Cuban music, the Díaz-Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American Folk Music and the Celia Cruz Songbook Collection, strengthening FIU’s status as Florida’s premier center for Cuban culture and studies. of the South.
