JOSÉ BEDIA 137 T. A. M.: Do you remember what started your collection, and how did you form the collection you have today? Was a lot of traveling and field exploration involved? Did anyone else influence you? J. B.: I started collecting my first tribal objects when I graduated from art school in 1976. These first objects were shell artifacts from the Siboney culture from the early history of my own country, which is Cuba. Later, the first African and Afro- Cuban objects started to form a part of my slowly growing collection, as did some Oceanic and Amazonian objects that I could find in my country. In those early years it was impossible for me to travel. The first chance I had to do something like “field work” was when I was sent as a soldier to Angola from 1985 through 1986. This chance encounter later would become a method of exploration for me—I would go to a country for work and then make it a point to spend time in the indigenous communities of the area. I continued doing this when I first went to the U.S. and was in South Dakota and Montana with Lakota and Cree Chippewa peoples, and also during my first visits to Mexico (mostly northern Mexico) with the Seri, Tarahumara, Yaqui, Cora, and Huichol peoples. Many years later I started taking regular trips to Kenya and Tanzania as well as traveling with friends such as Manuel Jordán and Alan Varela in Zambia, Botswana, and South Africa. Perhaps the notion of accumulation and collection first awoke in me because of my multiple visits to the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Havana, a memorable place full of books and also relics, especially Masai and Makonde objects from his trips to East Africa. Also important was the influence of an art history professor, the late Antonio Alejo, who marked me and many other artists with his talent and passion. Before Castro came to power, he traveled extensively and accumulated objects from diverse cultures throughout the world, and his home was full of objects like Chinese pottery and jade, African masks, Mexican Pre-Colombian fragments, and Japanese prints, to name just a few.
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