Tania Bruguera elected member of the United States National Academy of Design

The renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera was elected as a member of the National Academy of Design of the United States along with seventeen other artists and architects, for their contributions to contemporary American art and architecture.

Each year the academy's new members bring breadth and diversity to cultural practice in the United States, reflected Gregory Wessner, its executive director, who also considers the election a particularly significant honor because it implies the recognition of a broad community of artists and architects in asset.

New academics are invited to donate a representative work to the institution's collection, one of the most important of its kind in the world and which already has more than 8,000 works such as paintings, sculptures, drawings and architectural models.

The annual nomination and election processes have been carried out since the founding of the National Academy, established as the first artistic organization run by artists in the United States in 1825. Voting is carried out within a group of no more than 450 artists and architects from all over the country.

The visual artist Tania Bruguera won the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts last November, delivered by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Spain and endowed with 100,000 euros, equivalent within the Iberian plastic arts to the Cervantes Prize for Literature.

At the end of July 2021 it emerged that Bruguera was chosen as a professor at the School of Theater, Dance and Media at Harvard University, USA. At that time she expressed that she would have greatly celebrated the news if she had not been immersed in an atmosphere of pain for all the innocent Cubans imprisoned since the protests of July 11, 2021.

Bruguera had already been making visible the lack of freedoms and human rights in Cuba through art for several years, and had been harassed at various times by Cuban State Security agents. Just a few days before receiving the news of his promotion to the Harvard faculty, suffered an 11-hour interrogation with threats of three criminal charges in Villa Marista.