ABSTRACT
The aim of taste—the effort to advance revised and reformed aesthetic practices in early 19th-century Havana, Cuba—consumed the city’s Economic Society of the Friends of the Country as evidenced in the society Memorias and other accounts. In 1818, members of the society sought to advance the “fine arts” by founding a drawing school to be led by French expatriate artist Jean-Baptiste Vermay, who had arrived to Havana from New Orleans in 1815. The reglamentos (rules or guidelines) of the Academia gratuita de dibujo y pintura de San Alejandro (The free academy of drawing and painting of San Alejandro) record an effort to implement artistic practices in the mode of European fine arts academies in an Atlantic port city dominated by painters and sculptors who likely learned their trade in workshops and many of whom were people of African descent. The Havana academy, as suggested by its reglamentos, would impose a spatial and temporal discipline on artistic practices in Havana by incorporating an academic curriculum and a late 18th- and early 19th-century conception of Western art. This effort to improve the taste of Havana and its artistic practices conceals a darker agenda to produce an “enlightened” echelon of cultural production that, in the context of the Caribbean city, meant the segregation of artistic practices and pedagogy. The drawing school becomes a form of colonial exclusion in a project to suppress populations of African descent in an era of shifting demographics brought about by the development of racial plantation slavery in the Spanish Caribbean. This essay considers the “coloniality of aesthetics” in early 19th-century Havana through the academy of San Alejandro and, as such, how fine arts academies could perform the work of colonialism in American port cities.
