Since the late eighties, Glexis Novoa has produced art in many different media, including painting, installation, performance, and, most recently, graphite drawings on marble—a medium and material that has become his focus. He also creates site-specific wall drawings that exist on the border between ephemeral art and architecture. He often draws fantasy worlds, images of places stopped in time, such as his native Cuba, and the fragility on which we build our worlds. Many of his images reflect a feeling of a longing for a place you can never return.
Novoa was born and grew up in Havana and received a degree from the National School of Arts in 1984. He is currently based in Miami. He has been awarded The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant Program and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants among others. Novoa’s work is featured in numerous international museums and many other venues.
His work, while intimate and personal, repeatedly turns to the architecture of power and politics as its main subject. Using his work as an instrument of social and political criticism, Novoa collects images that symbolize power and demonstrates how they eventually lose their power and all that they represent. He was part of a group of artists in the 1980s that were able to visit other communist countries such as the Soviet Union. His work eventually became censored and he fled Cuba.
Glexis Novoa's residency at McColl Center is sponsored by Bank of America.
