Picture in Focus: Maps of the Prodigal Son by Ediciones Vigia

September 18, 2022

Picture in Focus: Maps of the Prodigal Son by Ediciones Vigia

We travel  from Mexico to Cuba this week for a look at the last type of paper art in my Collection--a handcrafted book of verse from the Ediciones Vigia publishing house in Matanzas, a center of Cuban culture 90 km. east of Havana. This collective of writers and artists has been gathering since 1985 to make books, magazines, leaflets, and scrolls by hand out of scrap page and recycled materials. Working at long tables in a colonial-era mansion, volunteers assemble each copy by cutting, pasting, coloring and collating mimeographed and photocopied images with text, often decorating them with yarn, aluminum foil, and whatever objects can be gleaned from the left-overs of Cuba's scarcity economy. This week's featured piece is a collection of contemporary Cuban verse, featuring the title poem, Maps of the Prodigal Son by Jose Manuel Espino Ortega. A truncated view of a map of the Holy Land appears on the cover, reproduced in full on a hand-colored fold-out page. This new volume from Ediciones Vigia joins another in the gallery of the Cuban Graphic Art page in the Schools of Sacred Art section. (John Kohan)