Yet, beyond trimming the distances of time and geography, Bravo’s odes to Cuba offer something else: fantastical visions of a brazenly fluid and almost eerily sublime landscape—an idyllic Third Space for fellow queer diaspora kids that is “ni de aquí ni de allá.” In her paintings, spectral characters rendered in graphite and wax pastel traverse wide-open landscapes or enact scenes of queer communion, such as in First Gay Bar in Fomento, 2022—its title, a sly nod to her grandparents’ rural hometown. In this sense, Bravo’s work also draws on Foucault’s notion of Heterotopia, through which real sites may be represented only to be inverted or otherwise contested. Speaking with the artist, she chalks this tendency up to a longstanding interest in “botched translation,” here applied to a physical and metaphorical place.  Hen Party, 2022, for example, shirks the titular connotations of marriage and heteronormative ritual by rendering two femme-appearing characters on horseback, poised to ride off into the sunset, wearing little more than a t-shirt and cowboy boots. In the distance, a bra-clad character appears ready to chuck a rooster—that omnipresent symbol of machismo—to the wind.

In Bravo’s The Leader of the Calvary, 2022, another massive work on unstretched canvas begun during her time at Fountainhead, a horse appears again, this time charging forth with a gender-fluid (and impossibly flexible) figure on its back. For Bravo, the equine motif is another allusion to her rancher grandfather, perhaps a way of keeping him close. Similarly, the high drama of many of her compositions riff on the camp of Catholic iconography—a trickle-down effect of her Italian-American upbringing and religious abuelos. Here, the animal’s hand-stitched veins and doily heart evoke the immortal steeds of Greek mythology, its raised leg poised to fight off the serpent rearing at its feet.
This melding of diverse spiritual and visual influences is similarly present in the work of Priscilla Aleman, a Cuban and Colombian-American artist whose sculptural practice is informed by her experiences working as an archaeological technician in Miami. The temporary sidestep, from art to social science, renewed her affection for making objects at a time when artmaking had lost much of its allure. Take, for example, Aleman’s long-running series of National Geographic interventions.