Belkis Ayón returned repeatedly to the story of Sikán, a woman in the foundational myth of the Afro-Cuban Abakuá brotherhood. The society historically excluded women from its membership; Sikán nevertheless occupies a central place in the narrative. That contradiction gave the Black Cuban printmaker a precise artistic problem. Who gets to appear in a story whose rules deny them entry? The Fowler Museum’s retrospective identifies the Abakuá myth as the source from which Ayón made an independent visual language, rather than a set of pictures intended simply to teach outsiders the rite.
Ayón used collography: she assembled textured materials on a cardboard matrix, inked the surface and passed paper through a press. Its roughness and absorbency let her build a varied field out of material contact. The Museo Reina Sofía traces her move from earlier color prints to black-and-white work in the 1990s. In a work like La cena, listed by the Fowler among selected prints from 1991, scale and tonal difference become part of how bodies occupy a shared scene. Ayón’s choices show why medium is inseparable from argument: the story is not only retold; its presence is physically assembled.
The Reina Sofía’s exhibition account notes that Ayón began to explore Abakuá imagery while studying at Havana’s San Alejandro academy and later made large works by joining printed sheets. A figure previously confined by the legend could thus take up a wall. The expansion does not make the ritual public property, and it need not resolve every tension in Ayón’s use of its symbols. It does change the terms on which a museum audience encounters them. Scale demands attention to the women and the structures that pushed them to the edge.
The museum also locates the mature prints within Cuba’s severe economic and ideological crisis after the collapse of European socialism. That context does not turn each symbol into a coded newspaper headline. It helps explain why themes of exclusion, control and intolerance could be made visible through a story older than the immediate moment. Ayón’s practice joined close knowledge of a specific Afro-Cuban narrative with the formal freedom to question who had inherited its authority.
Ayón died in 1999, and the Fowler’s 2016–17 exhibition was her first solo presentation at a U.S. museum. Such a late institutional arrival is part of the work’s reception, not evidence that the work had been waiting for validation. Nkame, the retrospective title, names greeting and praise in Abakuá language. Ayón’s prints invite a more exact response: notice the labor of making a place for a figure whom the rules of a brotherhood never allowed to stand inside it.