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Museum And Gallery

USM takes on another politically themed art show

Two nudes, which Guerrero has subtitled "Pure Inspiration and Study," are rendered in muscular, realistic detail. Their backs face the artist, a significance implying a distance somewhat greater than modesty. In a haunting untitled piece, an amorphous figure of a man hunkers over a chess match in its final throes. "Vista desde el Morro (The Havana From His Childhood)" is beset with an inscribed frame, as if viewed from the window of a distant vessel. Interestingly, one of Guerrero's least nostalgic works is also his most stirring: "Un dia mi camis de preso se quedara ahi colgada (One day my prison shirt will remain hanging there)" austerely renders the prisoner's uniform as it hangs draped on a wall of the same color. For all the vivid, imaginative color Guerrero dapples in his pieces, "One Day..." shows him grappling with the drabness in his immediate environment. Just as it'd be impractical to hold him to traditional standards of artistic maturation, it'd be strange not to note where it occurs.

Guerrero has reason to hope. Amnesty International issued appeals to the US government in October 2010 to implement a clemency process for the Five. In 2009, Guerrero's original sentence was reduced to 22 years.

On February 2 from 7 to 9 pm, the Let Cuba Live organization of Maine will host a presentation in the Glickman Library where former political prisoner Ray Luc Levasseur, local performance artist Angel Putney, and San Francisco activist Michael Vernon will lead discussions on "The Creative Process as a Form of Resistance," as well as make the case for the exigency of this controversial outlier in the US justice system.

Nicholas Schroeder can be reached atnschroeder@phx.com.

"LET CUBA LIVE" | works by Antonio Guerrero | through February 18 | at USM Glickman Family Library, 5th floor, 314 Forest Ave, Portland | 207.780.4270