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THE
ANNEX
GALLERY
Beginning April 8, 2026, the exhibition brings together a recent body of work that reaffirms his position as one of the most compelling living voices of Cuban abstraction. Born in Artemisa in 1961 and currently based in North Carolina, Mena has developed a visual language grounded in gesture, color, and structural tension, drawing from both urban experience and an internalized emotional memory. With an international trajectory that spans exhibitions across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and inclusion in major collections such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba and the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), his work operates at the intersection of expressive intuition and formal construction. On this occasion, the exhibition expands his practice through the inclusion of ceramics, printmaking, and a selection of textiles, introducing new material registers while remaining firmly anchored in the abstract vocabulary that has defined his career.
A District Showcase of Young Artists
Pineapple on pizza is not to my taste. That does not affect the assessment of this new mural. On March 12, 2026, Pineapple on Pizza was unveiled in Covington, a large-scale intervention executed on the building of The Gruff as part of the national Spray It Forward program, led by the brand Rust-Oleum. The project was selected as one of seven developments nationwide, positioning the city within a network of initiatives that use public art as a tool for visibility and urban activation.
I had the opportunity to read, in the latest issue of The Critic, an article on Sancta, the most recent work by Austrian choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger, one of the most radical figures in the contemporary European scene. It takes as its point of departure Sancta Susanna (1921–22) by Paul Hindemith—already scandalous in its time—and expands it into a hybrid scene somewhere between opera, performance, concert, and a ritual of quasi-satanic affiliation.
Clifton Cultural Arts Center has named visual artist Gabrielle Siekman its 2026 New Woman fellow. The announcement happened earlier this month during the opening reception for “New Woman,” the arts center’s biennial exhibition highlighting emerging women artists in the Greater Cincinnati region.
Persistently, and since the most remote antiquity, the moon has acted as a trigger for the human imagination. It has agitated artists and writers, the deranged of every kind, poets, philosophers, spiritual beings, night wanderers—but above all, lovers. Perhaps because it casts that faint light which outlines the features of the desired body: the point of light, the delicate glimmer that ignites along the maiden’s lower lip...
It takes only a glance at my MSN (Microsoft Start) homepage to think that every day someone discovers something that forces us to rewrite the history of humanity. I imagine historians exasperated, stalled again and again on the first page. One of those stories—always amusing—claims that 'a set of geometric markings engraved between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago on small sculptures and tools is forcing a revision of the history of human communication.'
Cuba, Spirit and resiliencia in the Work of Ivonne Ferrer and Ciro Quintana
Held on the 27th as part of the Pendleton Art Center’s widely attended Final Friday, the gallery welcomed close to one hundred visitors between 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. The public showed particular interest in the political dimension underlying Ciro Quintana’s works and in the reflections on identity and gender presented through Ivonne Ferrer’s ceramic selection.
Entering its final week: Dossier Havana, photographs by Pedro Abascal.
There are cities that return the gaze: they do not yield docilely to the frame, but instead address the viewer directly. They demand a way of looking that does not reduce, that does not close off meaning. Havana, in this Dossier conceived by the Cuban photographer Pedro Abascal, appears as an entity that observes, folds, and tenses itself; it refuses to become a mere setting or backdrop.
Politics as Form in the Work of Kina Matahari
Within Next to Nothing, we will present an exhibition whose name is, precisely—and paradoxically—Next to Nothing. The Annex Gallery will host a pop-up show by the Cuban multidisciplinary artist Claudia Ricardo, known in the Cuban art circuit under the pseudonym Kina Matahari. Next to Nothing explores how tensions between opposites generate new realities—paradoxical thought, an oxymoron that, from within dilemma, produces a result free of ambiguity. Here, contradiction itself becomes the discourse that underlines it.