Cuba Celebrates 200 Years of the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Art

The National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba is holding an exhibition today to commemorate the bicentennial of the San Alejandro National Academy, the oldest institution in Latin America dedicated to the teaching of plastic arts.

The exhibition entitled Tradition and contemporaneity allows us to appreciate some 60 pieces from different periods and was inaugurated on Friday in the Cuban Art Building to celebrate the arrival of the first official school established in Cuba for teaching the arts and the second one in the Latin American continent.

Its first director was the Frenchman Juan Bautista Vermay, from whom several paintings are preserved in the country and whose mark can be appreciated in the book Vermay, messenger of lights, which will be sold to the public on July 3 and 4, after the colloquium San Alejandro: tradition and contemporaneity of art education in Cuba, in the Audiovisual Room of the Museum.

Collateral activities in connection with the bicentennial include the special cancellation of a commemorative anniversary stamp, as well as the sale of the volume The Three Heredia, by French researcher Sabine Faivre D´Arcier, published by the House of Higher Studies Don Fernando Ortiz, of Cuba.

According to the San Alejandro Academy, every Friday morning during the month of July, teachers and students of the school will carry out teaching exercises in front of the visiting public.