“The work that I’ve been producing as of 2025 has felt like arriving at the truth I suspected might be possible when this journey began. The ‘Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes de Cuba’ has been a place of respite and contention throughout my adolescence…

Leaving my homeland as a child was my life’s great fracture. Every time I return I discover that a new family member or friend has migrated, that there is less of my childhood to return to. This is where the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes has been key, because it is a place of permanence in Havana. The paintings never leave the collection, they are only shifted around.” - Ana Suarez, 2025.

“The figure of the bride, much like the figure of the warrior, the poet, the nymph, the prophet, and the ballerina, have haunted my studio often. I believe we are inherited this initial woman, this mother and homemaker who never faulters and continually makes every right choice. These feminine archetypes have always fascinated and terrified me, as I negotiate and evolve into what a portrait of a woman looks like in my own adulthood. We have not yet built a world where every last woman is safe and has enough to provide for herself and her family through reasonable means, I think this is why I am drawn to the female figure again and again, and often paint my girls as larger than life. The women in my life are larger than any accolade or stage I’ve ever known.”

The collection I’m currently working on is a direct conversation with my favourite pieces in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, and also with my favourite Cuban artists. “Drawing from the root”, as I call it, has allowed me to meet the discipline of painting in its purest form, and through the vanguards which made me fall in love with her. Creole and tropical expressionism, with their lush, colourful brushstrokes, and insistence on storytelling, inform most of the work I am producing during undergrad at the University of Toronto.