On Thursday, February 12, at 12 pm PT, the Pacific Council will host a private tour of The Sextant, followed by a conversation on U.S.–Cuba relations through the lens of art, history, and lived experience. Members will hear from the featured artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, Professor Teofilo Ruiz, Distinguished Research Professor from the Department of History at UCLA, and Joes Segal, Chief Curator and Director of Programming at the Wende Museum.

Beginning with an exclusive private tour of The Sextant, an exhibition that reflects on themes of migration and displacement within the political and historical context of the Cold War, participants will reflect on how art and symbolism can illuminate the emotional and human dimensions of geopolitical relationships. The tour will be followed by a discussion on the political, cultural, and historical dimensions of the U.S.–Cuba relationship, exploring themes such as distance and proximity, exile and belonging, memory, and national identity. 

About Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant

The installation, The Sextant, is a smaller-scale recreation of Martínez Celaya’s family house, which serves as an embodiment of the cultural, architectural, and emotional responses to the Cold War in the Caribbean. The aspect of recreation, re-staging, and artifice of the installation is critically meaningful. The model of the house shines a light on the question of authenticity as well as the gap between what is reality and what is a dream, and reveals tensions that are present in all our lives but have a particularly profound relevance to the experience of those who lived in communist countries during the Cold War. 

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Guest Speaker

Professor Teofilo Ruiz, a student of Joseph R. Strayer at Princeton, is a scholar of the social and popular cultures of late medieval and early modern Spain and the Western Mediterranean. He joined the history department at UCLA in 1998, received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008, and was selected as the Faculty Research lecturer for 2011-12.  Prior to this appointment, he taught at Brooklyn College, the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Michigan, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and at Princeton, as the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching.  He received a National Humanities Medal for 2011 in 2012 from President Obama for his “inspired teaching and writing.” He received a doctor honoris causa from the Universidad de Cantabria (Spain) in 2017. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. In 1994, CASE and the Carnegie Foundation selected Ruiz as one of four U.S. Professors of the Year.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the ACLS, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Teo, as he liked to be known, served as a member of the AHA Teaching and Research (as Vice President for Research) Divisions and as a member of the AHA Council. He was P.I. for a California History, Social Sciences project to create a 7th grade lesson plans on global sites of encounter. These lesson plans are now taught in California public schools.

Among his most recent books are The Terror of History; Crisis and Continuity:  Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Premio Del Rey Prize, American Historical Association); Spanish Society, 1400-1600; From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society in the Late Middle Ages, 1150-1350; Medieval Europe and the World; Spain, 1300-1469:  Centuries of Crises; and A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain  (2012). His Spanish Society, 1348-1700, 2nd revised edition, appeared in 2017. His The Western Mediterranean and the World: ca. 500 to the Present appeared in early 2018.

Presider

Joes Segal is Chief Curator and Director of Programming at the Wende Museum in Culver City, where he has organized more than 30 exhibitions and numerous programs. He has published widely on German cultural history, Cold War culture, and art and politics in a global perspective. Among his publications are Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, co-edited with Peter Romijn and Giles Scott-Smith (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), and Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency (Los Angeles, 2024), co-edited with Marieke Drost.