Margarita Cano

Margarita Cano was a Cuban-American artist, curator, scholar, former liaison of the Miami-Dade Public Library System and Center for the Fine Arts, and former Head of Community Relations for the Miami-Dade Public Library System. She was a significant contributor to the development of the Latin American art market of South Florida as a leading figure in the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County public library systems. Cano is responsible for launching the permanent art collection of the Miami-Dade County Library System as well as spearheading several milestone Miami art and literary events of the 1980s, such as Surrounded Islands, The Miami Generation exhibition, and the Miami Book Fair.

Cano died in Miami, Florida, on March 19, 2024, at the age of 92.

Background and early life in Cuba

Margarita Victoria Fernandez y Villa Urrutia was born in Havana, Cuba on February 27, 1932, to Margarita Villa Urrutia Suarez and Rafael Antonio Maria Fernandez Ruenes. She was the second of their two children, following her brother Rafael, who was born five years previously. Her father was an architect and held master's degrees in physics and chemistry. He became a notable figure in Cuba for designing the landmark Bacardi Building, which in 1930 became Havana's first Art Deco building. Her mother was a housewife from a family of Basque descent that had migrated to the Canary Islands before settling in Cuba. Margarita and her brother attended the Ruston Academy for their education, taking classes in both English and Spanish and also learning French. She would also frequently visit New York City and Washington, D.C., in her youth before the Cuban Revolution.

Cano's mother died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism when Cano was in her twenties and employed in an industrial chemical lab in Havana. Following her mother's death, a close relative was appointed by the Castro government as director of the National Library and Margarita became her personal assistant. During this period the National Library was a central element of Castro's campaign to increase literacy in rural areas. While working in the library, Cano also returned to the University of Havana to study library science, after which she was tasked with reorganizing the National Library’s serial publications department. As Castro became more personally involved in the Library's operations, the government also began banning and censoring books and publications that countered the government's positions, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, The Anatomy of Revolution, as well as capitalist publications such as Life, Time, and The New York Times. The following year Cano began working at the City of Miami Public Library System. Over the next thirty years she would play a public role in elevating the Library System's profile and role in the community, particularly in the arts. In 1970 Cano started working at the newly created Art Services Department, where she would organize lectures and art exhibitions, throughout the library system. These activities were designed to use the Public Library System to help meet the growing needs of the South Florida art community and supplant the lack of art institutions, particularly for minority communities such as Latin American and African American art markets.

Among her significant contributions to the Library System, Cano launched the system's permanent art collection of original prints and art works that were displayed throughout the system's libraries.

In 1971, the City of Miami transferred the Library management responsibility to the Dade-County Public Library System, merging the institutions. Through the 1970s, Cano organized the Art Services Department as it continued to grow. During this period she initiated "The Art Mobile,” a mobile art gallery exhibition space sponsored with the support of Southeast Banks. The success of the program caused the Artmobile concept to become a model for other library systems in the United States. The following year Cano organized the presentation of the first exhibition of CINTAS Fellows in 1977. The performance art event featured over 600 giant domino blocks designed by various artists, including Barbara Young, Lowell Nesbit, the studio of Andy Warhol, Pedro Hernandez, Miami Dade Public School students, and several local Miami artists. As the first street art project in Miami, large artwork "dominoes" were then aligned and tumbled by then-Miami Mayor Maurice Ferré along Flagler Street from Biscayne Blvd to the Courthouse, for which traffic was closed. Thirty five years later, the project was the focus of the 2018 exhibition and film Christo and Jean-Claude: Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980–83, A Documentary Exhibition in the Perez Art Museum Miami, for which Christo returned to attend the opening and give a lecture in support of the retrospective. The exhibition was curated by Giulio V. Blanc and feature nine prominent emerging Cuban artist: Juan González, Emilio Falero, Humberto Calzada, Cesar Trasobares, Maria Brito, Fernando García, Carlos Macia, Mario Bencomo, and Pablo Cano, Margarita's son. The exhibition's profile ultimately grew to become a traveling exhibition, showing at Miami's Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture in Miami, the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia, and Meridian International Center’s Meridian House in Washington, D.C. Since its launch, The Miami Book Fair International has become the most comprehensively programmed book fair in the United States and attracts more than 200 national and international exhibitors, 500 authors, and over 200,000 attendees.

In 1990, Cano curated the exhibition Miami Thriving in Change: Showcasing 50 years of Miami's Cultural Growth. Cano then retired from the Miami Dade Public Library System in 1992, after which she recommitted herself to her art career.

In 2001, Cano co-founded the Miami-Dade Public Library System's Vasari Project with Kohen and Young to archive the development of visual arts in the area from 1945 to the present.

Art career

In addition to her career as a curator, Cano painted since the age of five in Cuba and was self-taught.

Throughout her career, her art has been exhibited in New York, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, and throughout South Florida. Cano's art is held in the permanent collection of the Lowe Art Museum, Miami-Dade Public Library of Downtown Miami, and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale FL.

Select art exhibitions 1970 — 6th Annual Piedmont Graphics Exhibition, Mint Museum, Charlot, NC 1970 — Bacardi Art Gallery, Miami FL 1973-75 — Permuy Gallery, Coral Gables FL 2002 — South Florida Art Center, Miami Beach FL 2005 — Connors Rosato Gallery, NY 2014 — Miami Dade College Downtown Campus, Miami FL 2015 — Miami Dade Public Library Retrospective 2017 — FAU University Gallery, Boca Raton FL 2019 — LnS Gallery, Miami FL 2019 — Frost Art Museum FIU, Miami FL 2021 — Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Center, Miami FL 2022 — Daytona Art Museum, Daytona FL 2022 — NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale FL 2022-2023 — The BluPrnt, Bridge Red Studios, North Miami 2023 — Chapel of La Merced, Corpus Christi Church, Allapatah FL

Legacy and recognitions

In 1992, the Miami-Dade County School Board recognized Margarita Cano for being instrumental in the development of the Art Mobile.

In 2009, Cano received the Oscar B. Cintas Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A piece from her Virgen de la Caridad series was accepted into library’s permanent collection, which also features works by Salvador Dalí, Dale Chihuly, Peter Max, and Pedro Hernandez.

Personal life and family

Margarita Cano was married to agricultural engineer and President of Climax recording studio Pablo Benigno Cano Diago (1929-2014).

Her father was the noted Cuban intellectual and scholar Rafael Antonio Maria Fernandez Ruenes. Fernandez Ruenes was a polymath who, as an architect, designed the Bacardi Building, Havana's first Art Deco building. Fernandez Ruenes was also a professor of the University of Indiana and Purdue University and later in his career served for 14 years as a handwriting expert for the Metro Police Crime Laboratory. He had previously served as vice president and co-founder of the American Society of Examiners of Questioned Documents, founded in 1942.

Her brother, Rafael Fernandez, was the Chief Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Clark Art Institute in Williams College of Williamstown, Massachusetts.