Leandro Soto

Leandro Soto was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba. He started his art studies when he was 11 years old in a Special Art School for Gifted Children in the Arts. He graduated from the National Art School with a degree in painting and engraving in 1976. In 1982 he was appointed as faculty at the Instituto Superior de Arte to teach Visual Arts to drama students after finishing his studies in Higher education in Havana, Cuba.
Soto has been consistently involved in the art world for the past 30 years, participating in 157 group exhibitions and 82 Solo art shows in museums, art galleries, and alternative art spaces in various countries: Spain, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Czech Republic, Germany, Peru, Japan, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Italy, Cuba, India, and the United States, among others. Soto was one of the leading figures in installation and performance art in the famous “Volumen Uno”, a renowned artistic movement that, according to art critics, changed the course of Cuban Art in the decade of the 1980’s.
Art critic Giulio V. Blanc explained Soto’s art works in the following terms: “Soto has fully understood the aesthetics of pre-Columbian and contemporary native American cultures. His paintings are two-dimensional, often reductive to the point of abstraction, and echo the linear qualities of the weavings that are today perhaps the principal manifestation of indigenous art throughout the Americas” (Art Nexus). He is considered the first artist in his generation that works with the national Afro Cuban heritage. Accomplished visual and performance artist, he is at the present time Senior Lecturer Artist-in-Residence at Arizona State University West Campus, where he teaches interdisciplinary art courses in painting, installation, and media/performance art. His art is in many permanent art collections: National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cienfuegos Art Museum, Cuba; Art Museum of Fort Lauderdale, Lowes Museum, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Wheaton College Art Museum, Jerome Lawrence And Robert E. Lee Theater Research Institute at Ohio State University, the Florida International University art Collection, MOCA Florida, in the US; and Global Art Village Art Collection, New Delhi, India among others. He is represented by Paulina Miller Gallery in Phoenix, Arizona. In the last years Soto has developed a research artistic project named Redefining Displacement where he works consciously with non European cultural heritages and art forms used by artists displaced from their original land and culture. Among his more recent exhibitions and performance piece counts: “Abacua: Signs of Power”,“Efi in the Desert” and Kachireme .In this last piece Soto shows de symbolic similarities between Abacua and Native American rituals