Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy, born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba, into a lineage of artistic talent as the grandson of pioneering Cuban modernist Roberto Juan Diago Querol (1920–1955), whose abstract and figurative works influenced the island's mid-century vanguard, began his formal training within Cuba's rigorous art education system, attending workshops and institutions that emphasized conceptual depth and social engagement. He graduated from the Academia de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro in 1990, where he honed skills in painting, engraving, and mixed media, absorbing influences from global art discourses including Thomas McEvilley's writings on self-reflectivity and materiality, which shaped his approach to art as a dialogue between personal history and collective memory. Emerging in the 1990s amid Cuba's post-Soviet economic crisis, Diago aligned with the Queloides collective, a group of Afro-Cuban artists addressing persistent racism through exhibitions like Queloides I (1997) at Havana's House of Africa, where his contributions used gesture and raw materiality to expose societal wounds.
Diago's practice centers on reinterpreting Afro-Cuban experiences, drawing from Santería, Palo Monte, and historical events like the Middle Passage to explore themes of enslavement, discrimination, cultural erasure, and resilience; he portrays blackness as an "invisible condition" marked by queloides—raised scars from slavery extended metaphorically to racial traumas—while celebrating cimarronaje, the fugitive resistance of maroons, as a cry of presence against oblivion. His techniques involve labor-intensive processes: thick layers of black paint slashed or cut to reveal underlying textures in series like Wounds (2015), symbolizing historical lacerations; patched and sewn fabrics equating canvas to porous skin in The Power of Your Soul (2013) and The Skin that Talks (2014), incorporating knots, ropes, and monochromatic palettes of black and white; welded scrap metal evoking the Yoruba deity Oggún's iron domain in Variations of Oggún; and installations like Ascending City (2010), stacking burned wooden crates to mimic precarious urban slums, or De la serie Libertad (2022), using reclaimed wood and wire to question notions of freedom. Printmaking appears in works like S-T (2023), a serigraph blending abstraction with social commentary, while graffiti elements inscribe raw texts like "Cuba Sí! Fucked, Black 100%" to convey anger and defiance.
Gaining prominence through the Havana Biennials from the 8th to the 12th editions, Diago's international trajectory includes participations in the 47th and 57th Venice Biennales, where his installations interrogated cross-cultural narratives; retrospectives such as Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present at Harvard University's Ethelbert Cooper Gallery, surveying his revisionist histories; La Historia Recordada at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, featuring pieces like Entre Lineas/Between Lines (2012) with poetic inscriptions amid linear abstractions; Foraged Materials, Assembled Histories at the Museum of Art and Archaeology in Missouri, highlighting his use of detritus to assemble ongoing legacies of resistance; and group shows like Two Steps Forward: Contemporary Cuban Art at MoCA Westport, alongside exhibitions at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam in Havana, Magnan Metz Gallery in New York, and fairs such as Pinta Miami. His awards reflect institutional acknowledgment, including the Juan Francisco Elso Prize (1995) from the National Fine Arts Museum, the Amédée Maratier Award (1999) from Fondation Kikoïne in Paris, the Abril 2000 Prize in Madrid, and the National Culture Award (2002) from Cuba's Ministry of Culture.
Diago's pieces reside in esteemed collections, including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cisneros-Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, Rubin Foundation in New York, and private holdings worldwide, underscoring his role in amplifying marginalized voices. Based in Havana, he sustains a practice that forages urban remnants to forge new pasts, continually probing the intersections of race, memory, and power in Cuban and global contexts, positioning him as a pivotal figure in the Afro-Cuban cultural movement that demands recognition of enduring inequities while affirming diasporic strength.