BARUJ SALINAS
Biography of the jewish cuban artist
Baruj Salinas, a Jewish Cuban artist, was born in Havana, Cuba in 1935. His ancestors came from a small town in the north of Spain, which was known for its salt mines (Minas de Sal). Following the Jews expulsion from Spain in 1492, many Jewish families went to Turkey. Baruj Salinas’s family settled in Silibria, Turkey, a small town west of Istanbul. His family lived in Turkey until the 1920’s when, as a result of the Greco-Turkish Wars, many Jewish families decided to move to the Americas, settling in Cuba.
How did his life begin?
Baruj Salinas started painting from a very young age, influenced by his mother Regina Algazi de Salinas. In 1958 he received his degree in architecture from Kent State University in Ohio. After his exile from Cuba in 1959, he moved to Miami where he worked as an architect and continued with his painting. In 1969 he received the Oscar B. Cintas scholarship that was created by the Cuban philanthropist. In 1974 Baruj Salinas moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he worked closely with painters of the stature of Joan Miró and Antoní Tàpies. His early paintings were influenced by his architectural background but gradually he moved toward an abstract expressionistic language. Because of his collaboration with poets and writers in Europe, Baruj Salinas developed his personal concept of the ‘Language of the Clouds’, which consists basically of a grey background with white as the main color of the palette - white symbolizing clouds. For these series of paintings he used pictograms, ideograms, as well as Greek, Hebrew and symbols from the Iberian alphabet.
Where is the artist now?
Currently Baruj Salinas lives in Miami, Florida. He divides his time between painting in his studio (where the artist created all of the paintings for The Torah Project, and his classes as an art professor at Miami Dade College Interamerican campus.
Baruj Salinas’s paintings can be found in important collections all over the world such as theJoan Miro Foundation - Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; the National Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona - Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya; the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico D.F - Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura; the Beit Uri Museum, Israel; NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the Fine Arts Museum, Budapest; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Phoenix Museum of Art, Arizona.
