Baruj Salinas

They remained in Turkey until the Greco-Turkish Wars of the early 20th century, after which they emigrated first to Marseilles, France in 1918 and then to Cuba in 1920, within the area of Old Havana, which had a substantial Jewish community.

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' family is of Sephardic Jewish origins.

His ancestors came from a small salt mining town in northern Spain and they derive their name from these origins with "sal" meaning salt in Spanish.

They resettled to Silibria, Turkey, another small town, following the 1492 expulsion of the Jews in Spain.

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.

By age eleven, Salinas had begun painting landscapes based on his observations of scenery in Cuba.

This was followed by scenes of life and people in Havana such as fish salesmen, ice cream salesmen, and children on buses.

These evolved into busier market scenes that he would sketch in person and apply paint to afterwards.

His early works were made in his childhood bedroom as he did not have a studio at the time and he first exhibited his works at his school.

At fourteen, he attended the Círculo de Bellas Artes behind the National Capitol Building in Havana and was the only teenager in attendance, surrounded by older professional painters.

His mother encouraged his progression as a self-taught artist and he continued developing in this way (“unrestrained”) until he received a scholarship to study painting in Kent State University.

Upon attending, he felt socio-economically excluded from the fine art world due to his background, though he remained strongly dedicated to design.

Therefore, he followed in his father's footsteps and switched his major to architecture, continuing to paint as a personal hobby and minor income source.

While in America, he had begun painting portraits to supplement his income.

His subjects were largely his friends and their family and they continued in his early realist vein.

Salinas later admitted that in these commissions he would idealize his subject's likeness for a more flattering representation and overall did not enjoy painting portraits.

In his personal painting, however, his style had begun to evolve away from realism and representational imagery as his architecture studies impacted him creatively.

During this period he became exposed to the Abstract Expressionist movement, which would influence his later art.

He began to explore facades and structures and gradually dabble into abstraction, which would become his most identifiable style later in his career.

He began by depicting buildings around him in America and eventually delved into depicting imagined buildings, which would take him further into three dimensional representation and the conceptual.

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).

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.

In 1959 he participated in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

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.

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.

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.