Glexis Novoa, born in Holguín, Cuba, in 1964, is a Cuban-born artist whose practice encompasses painting, graphite drawing, site-specific installation, performance, sculpture, film, and curatorial research. Raised in Havana, he studied at the National School of Art from 1980 to 1984 and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1998. Novoa emerged during the second half of the 1980s as one of the most incisive figures of the Cuban art revival. He was a founder of Grupo Provisional, whose performances, collective actions, and political interventions tested the limits imposed upon artistic expression by Cuba’s official cultural institutions.
Novoa first gained recognition through the bodies of work known as Etapa Romántica and Etapa Práctica. These paintings and installations appropriated the appearance of Socialist Realism, Soviet design, revolutionary insignia, mass spectacle, and official propaganda while refusing to deliver a stable or legible ideological message. Rather than reproduce the language of political authority, Novoa constructed fictitious symbols, indecipherable alphabets, invented leaders, and ceremonial structures that exposed power as a theatrical system dependent upon repetition, scale, and visual persuasion. His monumental 1989 installation Sin título (La etapa práctica), now in the collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami, remains one of the defining works of this period.
Following increasing institutional tensions, Novoa left Cuba permanently in 1993, lived in Mexico for two years, and settled in Miami in 1995. During the late 1990s, his practice underwent a decisive formal transformation. The saturated colors and propagandistic theatricality of the earlier paintings gave way to meticulously rendered graphite drawings on canvas, marble, paper, and directly upon architectural walls. In these works, real and imaginary buildings, monuments, towers, surveillance structures, religious sites, financial centers, and political symbols accumulate along distant horizons or occupy isolated, apparently vacant spaces.
Architecture became both Novoa’s principal subject and his method of examining power. His cities are generally devoid of inhabitants, yet they remain charged with the evidence of systems that organize collective life. Monumentality, surveillance, memory, ideology, commerce, and belief are condensed into structures whose functions remain deliberately uncertain. His graphite technique permits these invented environments to appear simultaneously archaeological and futuristic, as though the viewer were observing the ruins of a civilization that has not yet been built. The physical support is also essential. Marble evokes permanence, commemoration, and official history, while his temporary wall drawings acknowledge that even the most imposing structures and political systems remain vulnerable to erasure.
Novoa’s major solo exhibitions and projects have included presentations at the Miami Art Museum, now Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame; Locust Projects; the Worcester Art Museum; the Lowe Art Museum; Cheekwood Museum of Art; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana; the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College; and The Bass. His 2003 installation Worcester, Gold and Smoke extended approximately 166 feet across the walls of the Worcester Art Museum, combining local architectural history with imagined monuments and ideological symbols in a continuous graphite-and-gold-leaf landscape.
His work has also appeared in exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Today Art Museum, and Pérez Art Museum Miami. His works are held in public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation; the Lowe Art Museum; and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam. In 2025, the National Gallery of Art acquired his 2013 graphite-on-canvas work Wat (Temple).
Alongside his studio practice, Novoa has pursued sustained archival, curatorial, and scholarly research into the development of performance and process-based art in Cuba during the 1980s. He began this investigation in 1998 and later co-curated Killing Time: An Exhibition of Cuban Artists from the 1980s to the Present at Exit Art in New York. This work as an artist, researcher, curator, and witness situates his practice within a broader effort to preserve histories that official narratives have often fragmented or suppressed. He has received grants and distinctions from organizations including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, and the South Florida Cultural Consortium. Novoa lives and works in Miami while maintaining an active artistic and cultural connection to Havana.