“My work and my collection have been together since the beginning. This happened spontaneously while I began studying art, back then I felt dissatisfied with the fact that art education was oriented solely toward the history of Western art in all of its aspects. Artistic production from other cultures was not mentioned at all, so I decided to provide myself with information and make up for that deficit.” - Jose Bedia
José Bedia Valdés (born 1959), a Cuban-born artist now based in Miami since 1993 after defecting via Mexico in 1991, channels Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions like Palo Monte and Santería alongside indigenous North and South American mythologies into expansive paintings, installations, and drawings populated by elongated figures, hybrid beasts, and symbolic diagrams that map existential journeys, cultural displacements, and ritualistic transformations. Emerging from Havana's 1980s Volumen Uno collective amid post-revolutionary ferment, his work interrogates transcultural identities through raw, linear forms and muted palettes, earning Guggenheim and NEA fellowships while featuring in biennials from Venice to Havana; into the mid-2020s, he sustains a prolific output with 2024-2025 exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, Fondation Opale, and Miami Dade College, probing themes of migration and animism in an increasingly fragmented world.