Cuba
Havana, 1983
Reynier Leyva Novo is a conceptual artist and activist based in Houston, Texas. His multidisciplinary practice explores the symbolic weight of power, memory, and ideology through historically grounded, research-driven works. Combining installation, sculpture, painting, digital media, and data systems, Novo examines how invisible forces — political, spiritual, economic, and environmental — materialize in public space and collective memory. His projects emerge from long-term investigations and collaborations with historians, scientists, programmers, conservators, perfumers, military analysts, and communities. In Methuselah, a transnational, multi-institutional digital work, Novo traces the real-time migration of the monarch butterfly as a metaphor for endurance and transformation. Global Active Dust Collection Center gathers dust from monuments, state buildings, and sacred sites, converting residue into evidence — matter into memory. Other key works include Mnemosyne’s Whisper, paintings that conceal the image of toppled monuments beneath layers of color; Sauna Truck, a mobile unit for symbolic cleansing and transition; and The Weight of History, a sculptural series measuring the ink used in historical documents.
In 2022, Novo received the Pommery Prize at The Armory Show for What it is, what it has been, a layered meditation on political symbols and their material decay. He has participated in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), Shanghai Biennale (2017), Aichi Triennale (2019), FotoFest Biennial (2022), and 00 Havana Biennial (2018). His work is held in public collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Walker Art Center, MFA Houston, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Phoenix Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum, AGO, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. For Novo, art is not a mirror but a tool — cutting through ideological sediment to make space for friction, doubt, and re-reading. Not to echo the past, but to look again — differently.
