The Long Beach Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic, is a career-spanning retrospective on the work of this influential Cuban-born painter who passed away in 2015 at the age of 94. As a member of the group Los Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters) in the 1950s, Soriano was a practitioner of a brand of geometric abstraction that represented optimism and modernity in this rapidly changing nation. His career was interrupted for a number of years after he fled Cuba in 1962 and resettled in Miami. When he began painting again in the late 1960s, his style had developed into what he called “Oneiric Luminism,” characterized by a more organic abstraction focused on light, shadow, and space. Featuring over 90 works, the exhibition presents the full scope of his career that spanned six decades and two countries.


In conjunction with the show, the museum will be hosting a panel discussion, Rafael Soriano and His Generation, that will focus on the Cuban avant-garde and their relationship to revolution and displacement from their homeland. The panelists include Hortensia Soriano, director of the Rafael Soriano Foundation, Dr. Elizabeth Thompson Goizueta, curator and professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College, and Dr. Roberto S. Goizueta, professor of Catholic Theology at Boston College.