Baruj Salinas

In 2022, The American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora hosted a 50-year retrospective of Salinas' career from May to August. The exhibition, titled Baruj Salinas: 1972-2022, included works from several of Salinas' most high-profile series, including The Language of the Clouds and The Torah Project. The retrospective was produced by the Cuban Legacy Gallery, MDC Special Collections at Miami Dade College, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora. Originally intended to be held at the Miami Freedom Tower, Salinas stated that the retrospective was "the best and most comprehensive exhibition of my career” noting that, in comparing the venues, the Museum allowed for considerably more work to be featured.

In 2021, Salinas was awarded the 2021 Premio Amelia Pelaez by the Cuban Cultural Center of New York. The award presentation event was co-sponsored by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

From 2015 to 2017 Salinas was recruited to be part of The Torah Project which was then compiled in the book The Torah Project Humash. The book featured 27 images of his work. The book was presented in 2017 to Pope Francis at a ceremony in the Vatican with Salinas in attendance.

Another identity he explores is his Jewish heritage. His expression of Jewish identity are seen in his themes and concepts of solitude, individuality, movement (diaspora), as well as his exploration of Jewish mysticism through the Kabbalah. Key Jewish-inspired series' of Salinas work include his award-winning collaboration with José Angel Valente, Tres Lecciones de Tinieblas, as well as his paintings for the Torah Project in 2015.

In describing Salinas' style, art critic Carlos M. Luis stated: "Baruj uses color and all its intense chromatism as a channel or filter (in the manner of alchemists) to distill a world of a romantic nature, but of a Romanticism closer to Turner than to Corot. That which Novalis called 'the adoration of chaos' was based in his belief that 'the more impenetrable was the chaos, so much more splendid was the star that would come out of it'." Luis believes Salinas' early experiments with color and abstraction were in the general vein of Kandinsky and that Salinas later developed a style akin to the "calculated spontaneity of Zen brushwork." In her 2004 book Cuban American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity, and the Neo-Baroque, SUNY art historian Lynette Bosch wrote that technique and emotion are both central to Salinas' body of work, as well as the development of "an integral aesthetic language of gesture, color, form, space, and movement."

In 2000, his career was the subject of the film Baruj Salinas, 21st Century Master. In 2019 he participated in the second “Art + Architecture” exhibition in Coral Gables, Florida, where he was the main featured artist alongside his late fellow Grupo GALA member José Mijares.

From 1993 to 1998, and again in 2000 and 2002–03, Salinas served as the Arts Coordinator for the International Committee for Human Rights in Miami. He is currently a fine art professor at Miami Dade College and began teaching in the MDC Interamerican campus in 2001. In that role, he has been active in curating and facilitating student exhibitions of art there.

Salinas returned to Miami in 1992 and would reside in Coral Gables, Florida. Since returning to the United States, he has exhibited in New York City, Chicago, Spain, France, Switzerland, Japan, Egypt, Panama, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

His style since his second Miami period has seen Salinas gradually re-embrace color. He attributed the widening of his color palette and increased use of contrast and saturation to the difference in light between Spain and Miami, as well as the cultural differences between how each city uses color. Upon his return to the United States in 1992, Salinas also met his future wife Marilyn C. Fonts, who was then employed in a South Florida fine art gallery; the couple would wed in 2004.

He also did two books with María Zambrano, one of which, Antes de la ocultación: los mares (1983), was noteworthy for its four lithographs by Salinas that involved a complex double process: the first being the lithographic process while the second was the incorporation of texture into the book. The pair had a long-running collaboration that would grow to include a second book, Arbol (Tree), in 1985 as well as a number of other projects through editor and gallerist Orlando Blanco. In 1988 Salinas worked with Michel Butor on the book Trois enfants dans la fournaise. The book featured etchings by Salinas and accompanying poetry by Butor and was shown in the Museum of Bayeux in France.

In the 1980s, Salinas actively worked with several writers, particularly poets. In 1980 Salinas partnered with José Ángel Valente on Tres lecciones de Tinieblas (Three Lessons of Darkness), a book inspired by the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah and utilized fourteen Hebrew letters along with Valente’s poetic interpretation of each. The first letter (Aleph) was called "first blood", while "Beth" corresponded with the concept of home or dwelling. The book won Spain’s National Prize of Poetry for its year.

A core theme of Salinas' body of artwork has been the exploration of personal identity and the various cultural identities he embraces. One is his Cuban identity and he is considered part of the original wave of the La Vieja Guardia (the Old Guard) generation of Cuban artists that followed the Vanguardia movement in Cuba. His “Penca de Palma Triste” (Leaf of a Sad Palm) series of the late 1980s expressed his Cuban identity in exile as Salinas depicts a single leaf of a palm tree, a longtime quintessential symbol of Cuba, as symbolic of a piece removed from the whole, while also using his abstract method to create ambiguous images that can also be interpreted as waterfalls or the tail feathers of an exotic bird. Salinas also described color is a key acknowledgment of his Cuban identity.

He was the subject of the book BARUJ SALINAS, first published in Spanish in 1979 and republished in 1988, when it was translated into English and French.

In 1974, Salinas relocated from Miami to Barcelona, Spain where he would remain for the following two decades. The move signaled the end of the GALA group and a new phase of Salinas’ career. In Spain, Salinas became associated with leading art dealer Juana Mordó, who was an essential contact for Salinas and opened her vast network to him within Madrid and Barcelona. This critical exposure helped him become established in Spain and develop a regular stream of collectors there. Salinas also became associated with prominent Spanish painters, including Joan Miró, Antoní Tàpies, as well as American Alexander Calder. He also became immersed in Spain's literary community and developed close friendships with several writers including María Zambrano, José Angel Valente, Vahe Godel, Ramon Dachs, Pere Gimferrer, and Michel Butor.

During this period Salinas was neighbors with fellow prominent Cuban artist Juan Gonzalez and taught him the airbrush painting technique González used to achieved the large-scale hyperrealism style that would soon gain him recognition by leading art institutions in following decade. Salinas also introduced González to Jesus and Marta Permuy, in 1969. This facilitated the launch of Permuy Gallery in 1972 as Gonzalez relocated permanently to New York City and the Permuys assumed the lease to González's Coral Gables art studio and converted it into one of the first Cuban art galleries in the United States. Salinas and the individual Grupo GALA members would be active participants in the gallery's activities as well as in other early Latin American art events and activities, which contributed to the gradual growth of that market in the region during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Throughout his career, Salinas has received numerous international fine art awards for his paintings. They include: Best Transparent Watercolor award from the Texas Watercolor Society (San Antonio, 1964), First Prize for Watercolor in the Hortt Memorial Exhibition at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art (1968), the Cintas Fellowship (twice; 1969, 1970), the Prize to Excellency at the VII Grand Prix International de Peinture in Cannes (1971), First Prize at the IV Pan American Exhibition in Miami, First Prize in the VI Latin American Print Biennial (Puerto Rico, 1983), and the National Prize of Engraving from the National Calcography of Madrid (1996).

Throughout the 1960s Salinas was increasingly active in exhibiting his painting in art venues throughout the United States (Florida, Texas, Missouri) as well as internationally in Mexico and Guatemala. His artwork continued his self-imposed evolution away from architectural influences and saw him directly embrace abstraction for the first time. He drew inspiration from the Space Race and Apollo XIII and painted pieces inspired by outer space and astronomy, such as nebulas and constellations.

Salinas was also increasingly active in the Cuban and Latin American art market in Miami. A significant development came in the mid-1960s when Salinas co-founded (with Enrique Riveron) and subsequently led the Grupo GALA (an acronym for Grupo de Artistas Latino Americanos), the first formal professional organization of Latin American artists established is South Florida. GALA members (Salinas, Enrique Riveron, Rafael Soriano, José María Mijares, Roxanna McAllister, and Osvaldo Gutiérrez) would gather bi-monthly to discuss their individual art projects, sponsorships, and organize bi-annual group exhibitions.

Through most of the 1960s, while he continued to deepen his commitment to art, Salinas still worked in architecture as his main profession. This would change by the turn of the decade as he received increasing recognition for his art. In 1968, Salinas won a First Prize award for Watercolor from the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. In 1969 he received the Cintas Fellowship for art and then for a second time in 1970, which Salinas has credited in interviews with giving him the initiative to ultimately quit architecture as his main profession and fully dedicate himself to fine art in the 1970s. In 1971, Salinas had a solo exhibition in Washington D.C. at the B.I.D. Gallery.

Having emigrated from Cuba in 1959, Salinas joined the Cuban diaspora in exile as a result of Fidel Castro’s rise to power in the Cuban Revolution, joining them in Miami after his stays in Mexico City and San Antonio. Once in Miami, he first mainly worked professionally as an architect to sustain himself but also continued to paint. Salinas had the advantage of being already fluent in English by that point, but still struggled economically as most early exiles had, particularly in the arts. By 1963-64 he was selling his works for as little as $25 (about $200 in 2020, adjusted for inflation), during the period well before the establishment of an organized market for Cuban art in South Florida. As a result, even those relatively low rates were often paid in installments, such as five dollars a week or month. Some buyers were previous collectors of Cuban art in Cuba looking to restart their collection after losing their paintings to the Castro regime. Others were new collectors.

After he received his degree in architecture from Kent State in 1958, Salinas pursued architecture professionally in different cities, identifying as a Modernist, while also continuing to paint and exhibit his work. For the remainder of the decade he would work as an architect while residing in Mexico City (1957–59) and San Antonio, Texas (1959–61). In 1959 he participated in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. In 1960 he exhibited at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Havana as well as the Witte Museum in San Antonio and was well received. During this period of the early 1960s Salinas began winning awards for his art and also began feeling restrained by the rigidity and form of architecture. This combination led him to stray from architecture and embrace the arts more directly, a process that would continue into the 1960s.

Baruj Salinas (born July 6, 1935) is a Cuban-American contemporary visual artist and architect. He is recognized as a central figure in the establishment of the modern Latin American art market in South Florida.

Salinas was born in Havana, Cuba on July 6, 1935. He began painting early in life and was influenced and supported in the arts by his mother. Regina was a painter whose work consisted of still life scenes of flowers as her main subject in oil paint. This was Salinas’ first exposure to art and by the age of six he began to assist with his mother’s painting. Salinas would also draw and sketch, such as tracing newspaper comics. His early sketches included Tarzan, Dick Tracy, and Superman.