Deeply engaged with the African diaspora in Cuba, Ayón centered her imagery on the myth of the Abakuá Secret Society, an all-male brotherhood originating in the Calabar region—present-day Nigeria—that arrived in Cuba during the nineteenth century through the transatlantic slave trade. At around the age of seventeen, while in her third year of printmaking studies the Academia de Arte San Alejandro in Havana, Ayón began researching the society’s foundational myth after reading El Monte by Lydia Cabrera. The pioneering Cuban anthropologist’s writings on spirituality and the diversity of African-derived religious traditions in Cuba became a lasting influence on the artist’s intellectual formation.
Created between 1991 and 1998, the works presented here belong to a pivotal period in Ayón’s practice, marked by the recurring presence of Sikán, the central figure in the Abakuá foundation myth, whom the artist reinterpreted in order to challenge the patriarchal structure of the brotherhood. Ayón sought to give visual form to a ritual tradition that had previously lacked pictorial representation, as the Abakuá myth had been transmitted exclusively through oral tradition. At the same time, her work contributed to the reconfiguration of art as a space of resistance in the face of marginalization, fear, and censorship during the crisis of the 1990s, triggered by the collapse of the European socialist system following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an event that profoundly reshaped the global socialist geopolitical landscape.
Top image: Detail of La cena, 1993. Eduardo F. Costantini Collection. La cena, 1993. Colección Eduardo F. Costantini.
