Gina Pellón Papers

Gina Pellón is a Cuban artist, educator, and poet. She was born on December 26th, 1926 in Cumanayagua, Las Villas in the province of Cienfuegos, Cuba. She studied fine arts at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes "San Alejandro" in Havana, and graduated in 1954. She then taught children for three years, from 1954 to 1957 at the Velado Polytechnic Institute. Of her few years of teaching, Pellón said that she “allowed children to express themselves freely, to tell their stories through colorful strokes of the brush. My painting is just that, a kind of multicolor graffiti. I believe that every artist has preconceived innate ideas; but when an artist goes into the world, the universe unfolds before them.”

In 1959, she applied for a scholarship to obtain a visa to study in Paris. She was one of the finalists, but didn’t receive the scholarship. Undeterred, she reached out to a steamship company to find a means to travel to Europe. They offered her a free ticket if she brought them the twelve scholarship recipients. In the end, she brought 50 people. Pellón arrived in Paris in 1959 and did not return to Cuba after her 3-month visa expired, drawing the ire of Cuban cultural attache in Paris, Roberto Fernandez-Retamar. She ended up living out the rest of her life in Paris, working as a successful artist and displaying her work around the world, as well as publishing collections of poetry.

In 1961, she had her first solo exhibition at Gallery Kasper in Lausanne, Switzerland. She noted that, “When I arrived with my tropical colors to the sober and gray tranquility of Scandinavia, it was as if I had brought the sun to them.” In Europe, she interacted with the surrealists in Paris, and then joined the COBRA group, a European movement of innovative abstract expressionism. Her work was also displayed in many exhibitions in cities in Europe and Scandinavia, including Paris (1968, 1986, 1990, 1999), Lausanne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Silkebour and Copenhagen (Denmark), Larvik (Norway,) and Spinea-Venezia, Italy in 2002, and Albisola Marina, Italy in 2003, as well as major cities in the Americas, such as Miami (in 1981, 1991, 1994, 2001) New York, and Caracas (1975).

In 1978, she received the Order of Arts and Letters in France and won a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in New Jersey, United States in the same year. Pellón was a prolific painter, using intense colors, abstract forms, and often painting figures and faces of women. She noted that “I paint every day… from sunrise to sundown. In this process, I have the need to create, to portray emotions, and once I am about to complete a work, I get the urge to attack another.” She also made collages and prints. Her work has most recently and also posthumously included in collections and catalogs by Cernuda Arte gallery in Coral Gables, Florida. She died on March 27, 2014 in Paris, France.