ART

   Nestor (Nez) Zarragoitia was born in Havana, Cuba and migrated directly to New York City during the Cuban Revolution. He received his BFA from Hunter College, NYC and MA/MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

During the 1970s and 80s he resided in New York City’s West and East Village neighborhood, a mecca of creativity during that period. Involved extensively in the 1970s’ gritty East Village music scene (the global epicenter of the Punk Rock/New Wave cultural revolution), the experience cemented a world view of an alternative perception of everyday life. Additionally, wide-ranged living and travel throughout the United States and spending extended periods of living in Denmark and Sweden, have left an indelible mark on him and his work.

Select Exhibitions

“Familiar Anomalies” - solo exhibition, El Museo, Buffalo, New York

“Art on the Hyphen: Cuban American Artists of Western New York State” 

Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY

“Amid/In Western New York“ Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

“Exposición Bienal de Artistas Norteamericanos” – Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba ["Biennial Exhibition of North American Artists" – Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba]

Memorial Art Gallery (MAG), Rochester, NY - Hispanic Heritage Celebration

Link Gallery, City Hall, Rochester, NY - featured Hispanic artists

“Metonymy” solo exhibition, A.R.C. Gallery, Chicago, IL

“National Small Works Exhibition” - Chuck Levitan Gallery, New York, NY 

– Juror: Marisol

“15th Annual Juried Exhibition” - Pleiades Gallery, New York, NY 

– Juror: Donald Kuspit

“The Blues” – The Attic Gallery, Vicksburg, Mississippi

“Metamorphosis” – The Ice House Cultural Center, Dallas, TX

“Connections” Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas, TX

“Frank and Me” –Inaugural Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace dedication opening, Madison, Wisconsin | solo exhibition - Artbite artist collective

Artist Statement

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."

Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) | “Of Beauty”

Publications

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center Amid/In WNY 2022

Curated by John Massier, Kyle Butler, and Rebecca Wing  

JM: I’m not certain we would call the paintings of Nestor Zarragoitia surrealist, but there is a decided weirdness to his sense of representation and portraiture. It’s a world of misfit characters painted with a purposefully convoluted, but confident, style. There are so many spaces within his paintings that are wonder-ful to consider—odd renderings, satisfying color choices, and, most apparently, the off-kilter nature of his portraiture. It’s as though he is conceding that we are basically a world of weirdos and it might be most appropriate to give subtle—and sometimes aggressive—emphasis to that weirdness.

KB: Nestor Zarragoitia’s paintings illustrate specific scenes, though not always intelligible ones. You may not know who is being depicted, what narrative is playing out, but there’s the sense that you are being made privy to a moment. 

In one, a man swings a chicken around, presumably for reasons. In another, Francis Bacon is restrained to a chair at what looks like a casual back yard gathering. Add to this Nestor’s oddball shifts in stylization, what results are images that are as familiar as they are uncomfortable.

JM: In the end, as curators, we concede to our own weird inclinations and attractions in the artwork we selected. It’s what we loved at this moment in time. As we begin to install it in the gallery, unsurprisingly, those seemingly-intuitive decisions reveal some kind of internal logic and all these crazy, disparate works start to look like they belong together. Natually, we collected them together under a shared title, so they “belong together” in that sense. But in other ways as well, in comfortable ways, where different things made by different people reveal their shared dreams, their shared color schemes, their eloquently-rendered lines, shared thematic origins, and the expressive threads of emotion that run through all we make and see.

Buffalo News: Nestor Zarragoitia

The hyphen is punctuation's hiccup, an unexpected interruption in the ordinary flow of words. Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about the King's English, saw the hyphen as an awful blemish to be avoided wherever possible. "My feeling," Sir Winston opined, "is that you may run (the words) together or leave them apart, except when nature revolts."

When it comes to the hyphenated compound Cuban-American, nature still seems bent on revolt. The long estrangement between Cuba and the United States that began shortly after Fidel Castro installed himself as Cuba's dictator in January 1959 has seen to that. On this particular hyphen rides two distinct worlds; worlds at odds politically, socially, and economically, if not always culturally.

The exhibition "Art on the Hyphen: Cuban-American Artists in Western New York State" presents the work of seven artists who, in their very different ways, attempt to define their dual identities through an art that relates their (or their families') homeland in Cuba to life as it is lived here in Western New York. As Lynette M.F. Bosch, guest curator for the exhibition, says, these are artists who "negotiate" the hyphen and as such "present a story of Cuban immigration and assimilation that is intrinsically American."

The exhibition will begin with an opening reception Friday evening from 6 to 8 in the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Rockwell Hall, Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Ave., and continue on view through April 9.

Zarragoitia was 9 when his father sent him and his sister on "vacation" to New York City. He carried one small bag and was allowed no toys or objects, not even a cherished ring he wore on his finger. As if to make up for this interruption of childhood joys, his assemblages incorporate a plethora of objects, including toys, not all of which have pleasant connotations. The clusters of toy soldiers that crop up in hidden places on the sculptures, for instance, hark back to Cuba and a strong childhood memory of Castro's brutal troops swelling the streets.

Statuettes of saints and other religious items -- some gleaned from commercial products -- hold better memories. "I grew up in a family with mixed religion," Zarragoitia said in between assembling an 8-foot-high pyramid-shaped sculpture. "They were Catholics but practiced Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion based on a very, very large religion in West Africa."

As part of Santeria, in what Zarragoitia calls "a kind of party," entire rooms would be dismantled to make way for improvised altars. "I grew up seeing my father building these elaborate altars. I think it was a major influence on my work."