Family ties
Artist’s search for abuelo’s paintings in Cuba
A LL his life, Brooklyn artist Joseph Milazzo heard stories about his Cuban grandfather, a prolific painter named Enrique Dominguez. But Milazzo, 43, never met his abuelo — nor saw any of his artworks. His family abandoned them when the revolution forced them out of Cuba.
“Growing up, I was always told, ‘You get your talent from your grandfather,’ ” the Gravesend resident says. “But starting in my late 20s, early 30s, I started really thinking, ‘Who was my grandfather? Where was his artwork?’ I became more and more fascinated with trying to get to Cuba, with recovering the art that was left behind.”
“The Cuba Series: Portraits of the Old Guard,” on view Saturday in Carroll Gardens, documents Milazzo’s quest four years ago to find these mysterious pictures. His 20 largescale paintings depict the people and places he encountered while searching for the past.
Milazzo’s mother barely knew her father, a mechanic with a passion for painting. She was 2 when he died in 1948. Still, she remembers growing up in Santa Clara, Cuba, with one of his Madonnas hanging in their living room.
In 1955, Milazzo’s mother and grandmother fled, leaving most of their belongings behind. His great-grandmother entrusted Dominguez’s paintings with her servants when she left in 1962, after Fidel Castro had taken power. “Nobody thought to remember who [the servants] were,” says Milazzo, who, nevertheless, went to Cuba in 2013 to track them down.
After arriving in Santa Clara, he went to his great-grandmother’s old street and knocked on doors. He met a 70-year-old woman who learned math from Milazzo’s schoolteacher grandma. Other seniors in the village remembered eating the bread sold at Dominguez’s father’s bakery. Though he’d yet to uncover a single painting by his grandfather, Milazzo says, “I knew I was going to leave Cuba with some kind of artistic project.”
Last February, Milazzo started painting some of the people he had met during his trip: a white-haired lady in straw sandals selling milk creams outside her house; a salsero playing the bongos in a Havana bar. “The more I thought about the individual people [I met] — their faces, their character — it just boiled down to: I really honor these people.”