Felipe Jesus Consalvos: Cuban-American, 1891–1960, Havana, Cuba
About:
A self-appointed “artist, healer, and man,” Felipe Jesus Consalvos worked for much of his life as a cigar roller, and he extrapolated the vernacular tradition of cigar band collage to a sophisticated practice. The Havana-born artist immigrated to Miami around 1920, eventually settling in New York and then Philadelphia. His obsessive body of work—over 750 surviving collages on paper, found photographs, musical instruments, furniture, and other unexpected surfaces—was discovered in 1980 at a West Philadelphia garage sale.
Consalvos’ practice parallels and in some cases prefigures certain contemporaneous developments in Surrealist, Dada, and Futurist and Pop collage, and even poetry. His collages share the biting socio-political satire and absurdist impulse of Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst, along with abstruse mysticism.