Carlos Fentanes

It’s curious how our minds work — how some desires are repressed, curtailed by social convention, or what we might call social suppression. But before we dig deeper into that, let me tell you a story.

Our story begins in the early 1980s with Heidi Berg, a young singer navigating New York’s folk scene. She moved in small, influential circles — Lorne Michaels, Jim Henson (where she would later perform in the chorus), and even a passing acquaintance of Paul Simon, a singer orbiting the same scene. She was desperate for a break — a single song, a record, anything that might lift her out of the shadows.

Then, one day, she discovered a tape: a recording of a band with a jagged, hypnotic jive unlike anything she had heard before. She played the accordion herself and wanted to record a song inspired by the tape, so she gave it to Simon, hoping he could help produce it.

The tape contained Gumboots — a collection of accordion jive songs from a South African group. For a time, it seemed to vanish. Then, unexpectedly, it reappeared in Paul Simon’s car while he was driving to check on a house he was building in the Hamptons. Heidi’s dream, meanwhile, was stuck in that car with him — and she was not invited.

At the time, South Africa was under apartheid: a system in which a white minority government enforced strict racial segregation and suppressed the rights of the Black majority. Cultural boycotts isolated the country, and many Black musicians were effectively banned from international recognition. The group on Heidi’s tape existed in that politically constrained world, their music trapped by a system designed to silence them.

Despite the boycotts, Paul Simon acted on the tape. He traveled to South Africa to record with the musicians, bringing their sound to the world stage. The music, once trapped by political repression, was finally heard internationally.

From this collaboration was born Graceland, a pivotal record that brought the sounds of South African musicians to a global audience. It exposed, in its own way, the inequalities of apartheid and became one of the cultural forces that helped raise international awareness, contributing — along with many other factors — to the eventual dismantling of apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Peace Prize in the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, Heidi Berg — the person who had first recognized the music’s potential and handed him the tape — remained on the sidelines. Her dream of producing a song inspired by the Gumboots recordings had been overtaken by forces beyond her control: fame, timing, and the structural power of Simon’s platform.

The story illustrates a recurring pattern in the arts: talent and insight are often filtered, suppressed, or redirected by social, political, or institutional forces. Some voices reach the world; others are lost, even when their vision is what sparked the chain of events in the first place.

It also reflects a pattern we carry within ourselves. Our own talents, desires, and impulses are often filtered, suppressed, or redirected — by social norms, political pressures, or institutional expectations — sometimes without us even realizing it, or even with our quiet complicity. Just as Heidi’s vision was overtaken by circumstances beyond her control, we too navigate invisible forces that shape what we dare to pursue, what we express, and what remains hidden.

Heidi was supressed of the art discourse because she didn’t fit in the narrative, she was not part of what the gatekeepers wanted to be seen, she was not in the story they were weaving.

Chuck Close and the Vanishing Filter

There is another story that runs parallel to the one about Heidi Berg. If the Graceland episode is about how ideas can be taken and redirected by power, this one is about what happens when the filters inside a person begin to fail.

Chuck Close was one of the most celebrated painters of the late 20th century—museum retrospectives, postage stamps, honorary degrees, the whole architecture of recognition. His enormous pixelated portraits became part of the visual vocabulary of American art. And then, late in his life, Close was diagnosed with dementia, a form of frontotemporal degeneration. Doctors described the condition as one that doesn’t just affect memory, but behavior: it erodes the mental mechanisms that normally hold back impulses, comments, and desires that society teaches us to restrain.

Around the same time, several women came forward saying Close had made sexually explicit comments during sitting sessions in his studio. His legal team suggested the disease had stripped away inhibitions he had once kept in place. Whether that explanation is accurate, strategic, or incomplete is still debated. What matters for our purposes is what happened next.

Institutions began to step back.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington quietly cancelled his planned exhibition. Other museums postponed, reconsidered, or rewrote their wall texts. Some removed his works from display, not because the art had changed, but because the context around the artist had become difficult to manage. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts left his work on the wall, but placed it beside a new exhibit of women artists, as if to balance a ledger that had suddenly become politically charged. In other places, Close’s disappearance from the exhibition schedule was simply silent—no announcement, no explanation, just absence.

An artist once too large to ignore had begun to be filtered out.

The parallel to the human mind is uncomfortable but clear.
Inside each person, there are behaviors, impulses, and desires that are continuously suppressed by a kind of internal curator— a mechanism shaped by social norms and expectations. We learn what not to say, what not to do, what not to want. Sometimes we internalize those rules so deeply we forget they are there. Close’s disease didn’t create new impulses; it allegedly removed the filter that kept old ones unseen.

And the art world reacted in the same way a mind does when something breaks through the surface: it pushed the uncomfortable thing out of view.

The question, then, is not whether Close was guilty, nor whether the museums were right or wrong in their decisions. The point is that the pattern is the same.
We curate the self. Institutions curate culture.
Both decide what is visible and what must be hidden.
Both call the result a reflection of truth.
And both leave a record full of omissions we rarely notice.

The Creature Who Changes Shape Without Changing Form

There is one more story worth weaving in.
In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the creature is not presented as a monster. He is, instead, a presence that alters depending on the person standing before him. With Victor, he is sharp-edged, defiant. With Elizabeth, he softens. With the old blind man, he becomes almost gentle, even hopeful. The same body, the same history — different selves revealed in response to the world around him.

Del Toro does not treat this as contradiction. He treats it as human nature.

This is what we do.
We shift.
We edit.
We present different versions of ourselves to different audiences without thinking of it as performance.

The creature does not decide to be tender or violent. The environment calls forth one capacity or another. And this is where the echo with the art world becomes unmistakable. Artists do not exist in a vacuum. Their reception — whether they are amplified, ignored, celebrated, or quietly erased — depends on who is looking, who is listening, and what the cultural climate is willing to tolerate.

A work in one context is “iconic.”
The same work, in another, is “controversial.”
In another, simply forgotten.

We change the meaning not by changing the art, but by changing the room around it.

Del Toro’s creature makes this visible.
The self is not a fixed sculpture — it is a relational event.
Identity is something that happens between people.
The same is true of art.
A painting, a song, an idea — all of them exist in multiple forms depending on who encounters them, and under what conditions.

What gets seen, what gets hidden, and what gets misunderstood is not inherent.
It is situational.

We are all the creature.

Wifredo Lam and the Place That Would Not Take Him

Wifredo Lam was supposed to be in New York.

By 1940, he had already moved through the core of European modernism. He had drawn alongside Picasso, eaten at Breton’s table, survived the collapse of Paris. His works were already in the hands of the avant-garde before the term had calcified into a syllabus. He was not a student of modernism — he was part of its bloodstream.

Then the war closed in.
Artists fled. Papers had to be acquired. Borders hardened.

Lam secured passage on a ship bound for the Americas — New York and Mexico City were to be his next chapters. But when the ship reached port, the rules changed. The United States refused him a visa. Mexico refused him a visa. The doors to the centers of the art world — and even to his own political allies — did not open.

So he kept sailing.

And he ended up where he had not planned to go: back in Cuba.

This is where the narrative often gets rewritten. Retrospective museum labels talk about “a return to heritage,” “a reconnection with Afro-Caribbean roots,” as though this were a pilgrimage, a chosen awakening, a poetic homecoming. It wasn’t. It was the result of exclusion, of a world that could not place him, of passport offices that decided his identity was too complicated, too foreign, too hybrid to process.

Lam did not return to Cuba to rediscover himself.
He returned because he was not admitted anywhere else.

And this is where his most famous work, The Jungle (1943), emerges.

Not as a celebration.
Not as folklore.
But as a map of a self that is forced to exist in a space that does not know how to receive it.

The figures in The Jungle are elongated, masked, hybrid. Human and animal and spirit, all at once. They are crowded, pressed forward, with no horizon. They do not inhabit the space — the space closes in around them. The painting is claustrophobic not by accident, but because Lam himself was living within claustrophobic historical conditions: geopolitical exclusion and colonial inheritance layered on top of personal displacement.

Lam was not simply navigating art history.
He was navigating borders, identification systems, skin politics, racial hierarchies, Cold War alignments, and the limits of institutional imagination.

What Del Toro shows with the creature —
what Chuck Close reveals in the collapsing of internal filters —
what Heidi Berg lived in the shadow of a missing credit —
Lam embodies in the most global sense:

We are not simply who we are.
We are who the world allows us to be, in the moment we are seen.

Lam was visible in Paris.
He was invisible in New York.
He was unclassifiable in Havana.
The art remained the same.
The room changed.

And that changed everything.

How to Read What’s Missing

If there is a pattern in these stories, it’s not that the art world is unfair — that’s too easy, and too familiar. The pattern is that the systems that shape what becomes visible — who gets credited, who gets displayed, who gets remembered — are always operating, even when no one mentions them.

There will always be tapes that disappear into someone else’s car.
There will always be artists whose work is removed to avoid discomfort.
There will always be creators who are allowed into one room and turned away from another.

This is not an aberration of the art world.
This is the art world.

The mistake is to look only at what is on the wall, or on the stage, or in the catalog. The real information is in the absences: the canceled exhibition, the unreturned phone call, the denied visa, the missing liner note. The things that are not said tell you just as much as the things that are.

We cannot prevent these suppressions.
But we can learn to recognize them.

To look at a painting and ask: Who is not here?
To listen to a song and ask: Whose work made this possible?
To walk into a museum and ask: What had to be removed for this to be acceptable now?

When you start to look this way, the art world stops being a neutral landscape and becomes a map of negotiations, pressures, refusals, permissions, silences, and strategic revelations.

It becomes something legible.

And once you can see how things are filtered — inside a person, inside a museum, inside a culture — you can begin to navigate it deliberately. Not to correct it, not to solve it, but to understand the terrain. To know where you stand. To know what forces are acting on you. To know when you are being shaped, and when you are being erased.

Because the point is not to escape suppression.
The point is to name it when it happens.

Naming makes it visible.
Visibility makes it real.
And what is real can be worked with.

This is not a conclusion.
This is a method.

A way of looking.
A way of moving.
A way of knowing where the edges are — including the ones inside yourself.