Tonel

Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel) (b. Havana, 1958) Tonel is an independent artist, art critic and curator. He graduated in Art History from the University of Havana in 1982. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California, USA, in 2001, and was a visiting artist/lecturer at the Center for Latin American Studies and at the Department of Art and Art History in Stanford University, California, USA, from 2001 to 2003. His articles and essays on Cuban and Latin American contemporary art have been published regularly in catalogues, magazines and books in Cuba and abroad. His works have been collected by the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; the Van Reekum Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands; the Daros Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; the Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA; the Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, Arizona, USA; the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA; and the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA, among other institutions. Tonel is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities (1997-98) with residency at The University of Texas, Austin, and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for painting and installation art (1995). He was awarded the prize for art criticism by the Cuban Section of the International Art Critics Association (AICA) in 1988. In 2003 he received the Cuban Artists Fund Award (Cuban Artists Fund, New York, USA). He is currently based in Vancouver, Canada, where he focuses in his own practice as a visual artist and writer, and teaches drawing and painting at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.