The Amistad Art Gallery on the first floor of Du Bois College House, under the leadership of Faculty Director Amalia Daché, currently houses:
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Woman – Mujer
Lisandra Álvarez
La Habana, Cuba
From her first breath, a woman embarks on a path of transformation. She moves from child to adolescent, from sister and caretaker to mother before her time, carrying responsibilities that may steal her childhood yet sow strength. Her dreams—to be an artist, to belong to a creative world —unfold alongside the daily rhythm of feeding, sustaining, and protecting. Time passes, and almost imperceptibly, the child becomes a mother, then a grandmother, though her instinct to care endures: to create, to believe, to persist.
In this exhibition, the vision of Lisandra Álvarez intertwines with that journey. Her photographs reveal both tenderness and strength, the play and the burdens of childhood, the intimacy of the everyday made universal. Like a mirror, her lens reminds us that within every woman lives a story of becoming, where fragility and fortitude dwell as one.
Lisandra Álvarez Álvarez is a professor of typography and photography at the Higher Institute of Design (ISDI), Havana, Cuba. Her work has been recognized with an honorary mention from Alfredo Sarabia in Sarabia de la Habana at the Photography Biennial (2020), the National Photography Prize for the 40th anniversary of the Center for Psychological and Sociological Research, Cuba (2023), and the Second Prize in the Leica Women Street Foto Project and Women Street Photographers (2024).
In her work, childhood appears not only as innocence, but as a stage where responsibility and imagination collide. A girl brushing the hair of her younger sister, or cradling an infant in weary arms, embodies both play and duty. These small, tender gestures speak of endurance and of the silent inheritance of care. In Álvarez’s images, girlhood carries within it the seeds of motherhood, and the fleeting wonder of play becomes inseparable from the weight of obligation.
Yet her photographs are also a testament to perseverance and creativity. They reveal women as guardians of memory, as keepers of daily rituals, as dreamers who persist even as time advances. In each image beats a quiet defiance, a reminder that to be a woman is not only to endure, but also to imagine, to reinvent, and to pass on both strength and tenderness.
She works across both analog (35 mm and 120 mm) and digital formats, using photography as a way to connect with people in the intimacy of their daily lives. Through her images, she seeks to reveal the rawness and emotional depth of ordinary existence—whether behind closed doors or on the streets of Centro Habana—capturing fleeting moments that speak with honesty and strength.
She said: « When I am in touch with the feelings that move me, I am better able to see it in others. My emotions become my guide and lead me into the photograph. They help me see moments which resonate with me, whether ones of compassion, tenderness, sadness, fear or something else. When I feel the moment, I shoot it. And hopefully I create images that invite reflection, provoke emotional response, and elevate a split second in time into a larger moment unifying my subjects with the viewer. It’s an on-going process; a circle that always spins and integrates my life with my art. And helps me better understand myself and explore what I am seeking as an artist and a person. »
Curatorship and museography by Santiel Rodriguez Velázquez
Previous Exhibitions
