Showing 7539 results

Arthur Vining "Art" Davis, May 30, 1867–November 17, 1962, was an American industrialist, investor, and philanthropist. He was a trustee of the University of Miami from 1953 to 1962.

Arturo Artalejo was a Cuban actor and radio personality. As one of the earliest popular radio figures to leave Cuba following the Cuban Revolution, he became a founding voice of Cuban exile radio in Miami. He became a political commentator on WMIE in Miami, where he was one of a very small number of early exiles who argued that the Castro regime would last more than a few years.

Anita Arroyo de Hernandez was a journalist, professor, and historian born in Italy in 1914 to Cuban and Puerto Rican parents. She graduated from the University of Havana and worked as a journalist and was also a prominent writer for Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura. She left Cuba for Puerto Rico after criticizing the post-1959 Castro government in her column in the newspaper Diario de La Marina. She was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan.

She wrote a number of publications, including: Un deber ineludible (1942), Las artes industriales en Cuba: su historia y evolución desde las culturas precolombinas hasta nuestros días (1943), Razón y pasión de Sor Juana (1952), about the Mexican nun, Superación y aporte de la mujer norteamericana (1959). América en su literatura (1967), El pajaro de lata: Cuba para Sus niños (1973), Raíces al viento (1974), Narrativa hispanoamericana actual: América y sus problemas (1980), the children’s book El grillo gruñón (1984), El hombre palabra (1985), José Antonio Saco: Su Influencia En La Cultura y en Las Ideas Political De Cuba (Colección Cuba y sus jueces) (1989), Las pequeñas muertes (1992), a novel about living in exile, and Cuentos del caribe (1992.)

She died in Puerto Rico in 1994.

Nicolás Arroyo Márquez (1917–2008) and Gabriela Menéndez García-Beltrán (1917–2008) were architects from Havana, Cuba, who are remembered as pioneers of modernist Cuban architecture of the 1940s and 1950s. Additionally, Arroyo, who was known as "Lin," served in the government of Fulgencio Batista as Minster of Public Works from 1952 to 1958, and was also the Ambassador to the United States in 1958 before Fidel Castro rose to power. Arroyo and Menéndez both obtained their degrees in architecture from the University of Havana in 1941; Eduardo Castellanos, cousin of Arroyo, stated that "the two were students who disputed the top positions of their class, because they both had outstanding intelligence and passion for the architecture'' (quoted in Cancio Isla). Though rivaling each other in academic vigor, the pair fell in love and married in December 1942, staying together until they died just three days apart – Gabriela on July 10, 2008, and Nicolás on July 13, 2008 – leaving behind one son, Nicolás E. Arroyo.

After their marriage in 1942, Arroyo and Menéndez formed their architectural firm, Arroyo y Menéndez, described by Florencia Peñate Díaz as “one of the most prestigious of the Republic” (79), thus initiating the beginning of their irrevocable impact on the landscape of contemporary Cuba. As a team and as individuals, Arroyo and Menéndez’s legacies transcend merely the buildings they left behind. The couple both participated in the Technical Group of Contemporary Studies (Agrupación Técnica de Estudios Contemporáneos, ATEC), which eventually led to Cuba’s incorporation into the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). The congress was founded in 1928 with the purpose of creating a space for the cross-fertilization of ideas pertaining to architecture as both an art form and a field of academic study; it disbanded in 1959. Victor Pérez Escolano relates, “In Cuba, the creation of the Technical Group of Contemporary Studies (Agrupación Técnica de Estudios Contemporáneos, ATEC) reflects how architects who had innovative ideas, but were looking for an alternative to the more severe avant-garde groupings, could gather” (88). According to the late architect Nicolás Quintana, who worked on an urban planning initiative created by Arroyo as a part of the Junta Nacional de Planificación (Board for National Planning), “Arroyo’s [and no doubt Menéndez’s] influence was decisive in putting Cuba on the CIAM map” (quoted in Cancio Isla) from 1947 onward when Arroyo attended the 6th CIAM congress held in England.

Despite leaving Cuba in 1959 when Fidel Castro came to power, the couple had already left their mark on the landscape. Most notably, in collaboration with Los Angeles architect Welton Becket, in 1958 the pair designed what was then known as the Havana Hilton Hotel, currently Habana Libre-Guitart. Towering over El Vedado, the “capital’s modernist emblem,” (321) as described by Giuliana Bruno in “Havana: Memoirs of Material Culture,” is the twenty-seven story building that occupies an entire city block. At the time it was built, it was the tallest building in Latin America and the Caribbean and attracted flocks of celebrity guests. The building was designed and built under the guidance of Fulgencio Batista, as Peter Moruzzi, author of Havana Before Castro writes, “Batista considered the Habana Hilton among his proudest achievements, its huge blue-lit rooftop ‘Hilton’ name announcing to the world that the eminent Conrad Hilton had confidence in Cuba’s future – that the country was a safe place in which to invest – and that tourists could now find in Havana the modern comforts they expected in a top international resort” (quoted in Perur). However, the hotel’s status as the unrivaled touristic site of modern Havana was not to last as Castro moved into the building and nationalized and renamed it in 1960. Bruno narrates, “The hotel still features in the lobby evidence of the passage of Fidel, who turned a touristic site into home while choosing a mobile home for a revolutionary symbol” (321). For three months, Continental Suite 2324 was his main headquarters and on January 19th, 1959 he gave his first press conference in the hotel’s ballroom.

In addition to the Havana Hilton Hotel, which was the last building designed in Cuba under the Arroyo y Menéndez banner, the pair of architects left behind other notable buildings before departing the island for good. In 1954 Cuba’s first modernist church, named San Pablo, was completed; despite the fact that it is currently used as a warehouse, at the time the building was notable for its bell tower clad in concrete lattice work. In the same year building work began on the National Theater of Cuba, which was a Cubist concrete design; the structure, however, remained unfinished and did not open to the public until 1979. The 1955-1957 Sport’s Palace, or “Coliseo,” (Coliseo de la Ciudad Deportiva) is a circular arena designed to accommodate fifteen thousand spectators. Tony Perrottet describes the building as “A circular covered arena whose Jet Age design resembled a white flying saucer” (317). Also, though never built, the 1956 “Las Palmas” Presidential Palace was designed by José Luis Sert and his team alongside Menéndez for Batista’s “Plan Piloto.” The Presidential Palace, alongside Menéndez’s other important designs and the fact that during the time Arroyo was serving as Minister of Public Works she ran the company office, led Victor Deupi to say that her and other female architects’ work “stands on its own” (quoted in Delson). Deupi’s comments are an important acknowledgment of the implicitly male-dominated industry that female architects were operating in. Díaz notes that while Menéndez was referenced in Álbum de Cuba and the magazine, Arquitectura, this mention was because she was working alongside her husband (72). However, her work also evinces how these conditions, at least for the women in question, did not prevent them from producing valuable work.

After 1959, the couple left for Washington, D.C., where they would stay for the rest of their lives, continuing to practice as architects for residential as well as commercial projects. In addition, Arroyo served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1971 to 1976. Aside from the visible legacies they left behind on landscapes in both the U.S. and Cuba, their work features prominently in Eduardo Luis Rodríguez’s 2000 The Havana Guide: Modern Architecture (1925-1965). More recently, the couple’s work is featured on a digital map of twentieth-century Cuban architecture made, in the words of the co-creator Josef Asteinza, “for documenting and conserving the historic fabric of the twentieth-century city.”

Kevin Arrow (b. Mineola, NY 1962) is a multi-faceted artist and museum professional living and working in Miami, Florida. His work has been widely exhibited in South Florida since the mid 1980s. He has exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Miami Art Museum (PAMM); and the de la Cruz Contemporary Art Space. His work takes on various forms, including drawing, painting, film, and audio-based projects, merging his interest in obsolete media, archival tendencies, the ephemeral object, and humor. Through his art projects, he is continually seeking to find the sublime within the mundane and the mundane within the sublime experience, in addition to investigating the interchangeability of both.

For the last thirty years, Arrow has been collecting 35mm slides and diverse printed matter and has amassed an archive of approximately 100 thousand 35mm slides related to a wide range of topics. Arrow’s interest in the medium grew, and he began finding and collecting 35mm slides shot by others. He collected orphaned slide material from commercial photo-labs, universities, thrift stores and yard sales. Eventually people began finding and donating 35mm slides to his personal archive. Acquisitions have increased through Arrow’s activity in the community as an exhibiting artist.

In 2019, Arrow established Media + Archival Studies (M.A.S., Miami) based in the Bakehouse Art Complex. M.A.S. is an artist-run media archive focused on connecting artists and the general public to Miami’s unique archives and collections as a source of information and inspiration. Located in the Bakehouse Art Complex, M.A.S. is open as a media resource, research center, and an art, photography, and film reading room. - Biographical Note by Kevin Arrow, 2020

Ricardo Arregui is an adman and entrepreneur born in Havana, Cuba, in 1919.

Arregui has been active in both Cuba and Miami’s advertising scene since the 1950s and 1960s. Along with his brother Tirso and his friend Tony Fergo, he opened Arregui-Fergo Advertising in Cuba, which became one of the top five agencies in the country within ten years. When the Arregui brothers left Cuba in the early 1960s, they founded Arregui International Advertising, the first Hispanic advertising agency in South Florida. Their clientele has grown with the Hispanic community of South Florida. Arregui’s most well-known campaigns have been spots for Café Pilón, Sedano’s Supermarkets, and Navarro Discount Pharmacy.