Lydia Millhon's Research Trip at the Rafael Soriano Foundation

During the first week of January 2025, I was invited to research at the Rafael Soriano Foundation in Miami, Florida. The daughter of Rafael Soriano, and director of the Rafael Soriano Foundation, Hortensia Soriano welcomed me to the foundation and organized my stay next-door at the original Soriano household and studio in Miami. With various connections to collections, museums, scholars, artists, and universities, and influential board members like Lisa Faquin, the Rafael Soriano Foundation is an interdisciplinary organization that contributes not only to Soriano and his work but the legacy of Cuban cultural production and the visibility of diasporic artists and communities. Through Hortensia’s courtesy and the immersion into her father’s workspace, the Rafael Soriano Foundation brings an innately visceral and human dynamic to research. 

I became interested in the work of Rafael Soriano (1920-2015) because my research grapples with legacies of concrete art in Cuba and Brazil and their nuanced negotiations of race, identity, and nation. Soriano was a member of “Los Diez Pintores Concretos,” Cuba’s first group of concrete artists who exhibited together at Galería Color-Luz in Vedado of November 1959 before disbanding in 1961. Embodying earlier artistic and political experimentations of local, national, transatlantic, and diasporic subjectivities and experiences, concrete artists in the 1950s like Soriano were working within Cuban-specific contexts and still part of transnational exchanges of art practice and identity formation. His adoration for art, family, friends, and spirituality is present throughout his work. Across decades of interviews, Soriano continuously highlights the role of his wife, Milagros and daughter, Hortensia. After training with figures like Juan José Sicre in sculpture and Leopoldo Romañach in painting, Soriano maintained relationships with his instructors and peers throughout his career. Upon graduating with three degrees in painting, sculpture, and drawing from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Soriano became co-founder of the Matanzas School of Fine Arts with José Felipe Nuñez Booth and Manuel Rodulfo Tardo and immediately proposed a faculty position to his friend, Roberto Diago. He makes surrounding worlds, relationships, and feelings not only accessible but more sensitive in his painting. The simultaneous fluidity and rigidness of concrete painting materialize visual and semantic pluralities through a multisensorial praxis like that of Soriano.

Lydia Millhon is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in New Media. She completed her M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and received her B.A. with Honors in Spanish at Wake Forest University. Interested in poetry and visual arts from mid-twentieth-century Cuba and Brazil, Lydia studies concrete art as a vehicle for transnational discourses of modernity, race, identity, and cultural production.