By Cliff Bellamy

cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744

CHAPEL HILL — Ernesto “Ché” Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967, but his image lives on, printed on countless T-shirts and posters. At UNC Chapel Hill’s Ackland Art Museum, that image is offered in multiple forms, beginning with a copy of Alberto Korda’s circa 1960 photo of Guevara with flowing hair, eyes looking into the distance, and characteristic black beret.

Three accompanying posters, two of them advertisements for film documentaries about Guevara, translate that photographic image and serious expression into bold, bright orange, red, yellow, purple and green.

The images and others can be found in an exhibit that opened this weekend at the Ackland at UNC, titled “Almost Now: Cuban Art, Cinema, and Politics in the 1960s and 1970s.” In addition to the Korda photo, the exhibit includes 16 Cuban cinema posters, and examines the role that artists and filmmakers have played in Cuba since the 1959 revolution. The exhibit is in conjunction with UNC’s Institute for the Study of the Americas’ presentation of “The Cuban Revolution at 50: Art and Cinema.” In November, the Institute will present lectures, and in conjunction with the Ackland, screen of some of the films depicted in the posters.

UNC Chapel Hill alumnus David Craven, now a professor of art history, recently gave the collection to the Ackland. Craven will lecture during the November events.

Most of the works are from the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a close relationship between film and printmaking in Cuba, said Carolyn Allmendinger, director of academic programs at the Ackland and exhibit curator. “This was a productive time period for these two art forms,” she said. By 1959 the Cuban government had established a film institute. The posters on view both complement and promote the films, and show off each artist’s individual approach, Allmendinger said.

“The experience of seeing them all together is very striking,” she said.

The posters are for various kinds of films, including shorts, documentaries and feature films. The poster for the 1964 feature film “Soy Cuba (I am Cuba)” by artist Rene Portocarrero, reflects the cross-cultural collaboration between Cuban and Soviet filmmakers, Allmendinger said. The film is a series of vignettes, according to Internet Movie Database, that dramatize life under Fulgencio Batista in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Portocarrero’s colorful, abstract image would not have appeared on a Soviet poster at the time, Allmendinger said, so while the film is a coproduction, the abstract image is a strong reflection of Cuban art at the time.

Other feature films with accompanying prints in this exhibit are Raul Martinez’ poster for “Lucia,” a film that focuses on three different women characters in different historical eras, and Eduardo Munoz Bachs’ print for “Cartas del Parque (Letters from the Park),” based on stories by author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Several documentaries are represented as well, among them artist Alfredo Gonzalez Rostgaard’s poster for a 1965 short newsreel called “Now!” This film features the voice of singer Lena Horne, and has footage from the civil rights movement in the United States at that time. Bachs also did the poster for “Por Primera Vez (For the First Time),” a documentary about audiences in a rural village watching the Charlie Chaplain movie “Modern Times” for the first time.

The collection, Allmendinger said, allows the Ackland to collaborate with various classes in language, history, and political science. Each poster will be accompanied by a card providing Web and other resources for more information about the films and artists, she said.