Carlos Alfonzo (Havana, Cuba, 1950–Miami, Florida, 1991) was a Cuban American painter and sculptor whose work holds a significant place in the history of contemporary Cuban art and the artistic life of Miami. He graduated from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in 1973 and earned a degree in art history from the University of Havana in 1977. Active as an artist and teacher in Cuba throughout the 1970s, he participated in Pintura fresca in 1979, an exhibition associated with the emerging experimental generation. Increasingly constrained by political repression and the persecution of homosexuality, Alfonzo left Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and settled in Miami. The experience of displacement, together with his search for personal and artistic freedom, became central to the work he developed during the following decade.
Across painting, drawing, ceramics, public murals, and welded-steel sculpture, Alfonzo created a distinctive language in which the body and its emotions take symbolic form. Eyes, tongues, knives, spirals, teardrops, and fragmented figures recur within compositions animated by dense lines, shifting spaces, and forceful color. His imagery draws on Afro-Cuban Santería, Catholicism, and Rosicrucian thought, bringing spiritual traditions into contact with the formal possibilities of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. These sources became vehicles for exploring desire, exile, violence, protection, and mortality. His experience as a gay man and his confrontation with the AIDS epidemic gave particular urgency to questions already present throughout his practice. In the late paintings of 1990, his palette became increasingly restrained, and the figures acquired a somber, concentrated presence, giving visual form to vulnerability, grief, and spiritual introspection.
Alfonzo received a CINTAS Foundation fellowship in 1983–1984 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1984. His growing recognition included participation in Hispanic Art in the United States and the 1991 Whitney Biennial, which opened after his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of forty. His achievement was subsequently examined in Triumph of the Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo, A Survey, 1975–1991, presented at the Miami Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1997–1998, and in Carlos Alfonzo: Late Paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2022. His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others. Through its emotional intensity and complex spiritual vocabulary, his art continues to connect the particular history of Cuban exile with broader questions of belonging, human fragility, and transcendence.