Havana on the Hudson: A Cuban Sculptor’s Big Bet on Union City

Earlier this year, on a windy March day, overwhelmed and procrastinating, I wandered into a very uptown, blue-chip gallery opening. The crowd was peak Upper East Side: elegant, self-assured, perfectly accessorized. Not so polished or poised, I was a writer on a bullying deadline, seeking a fresh perspective to escape my head for a while.

The online critic’s recommendation that nudged me there might have had weight, but if I’m honest, the faint promise of good free wine at a fancy opening had tipped the scale.

Wine in hand, I people-watched briefly before stopping at a bold, abstract sculpture by Mel Kendrick, the man of the hour. The exhibit’s showpiece, the color choices, sharp angles, and voids demanded attention as if daring anyone to interpret it. I looked around. Kendrick was in the gallery but was engrossed in conversation with a group of important-looking collectors, the kind who radiate the quiet confidence of owning several homes and possibly a small island.

Stories come naturally to me; abstraction does not. Yet something about the piece lingered—a weight, a pull—that refused to let me walk away, even as my brain whispered, I don’t entirely get it.

Wine, Sculpture, and a Stranger

Beside me soon stood a fortysomething man in jeans and a T-shirt, his salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed, an outlier in a room teeming with bespoke suits and blowouts so perfect they could deflect wind. He didn’t look like he belonged any more than I did. Still, he studied the sculpture I was figuring out with the laser focus usually reserved for assembling Ikea furniture while the manual mysteriously disappeared. What did he see that I didn’t? Curious and slightly emboldened by wine, I asked, “What do you think?”

What followed wasn’t just insightful—it was transformative. Brimming with passion and vivid detail, his explanation made the sculpture feel alive, as though I’d been invited into its secret world. This is a bit of a preamble, but this is exactly how I met Adrián Fernández Milanés, a Cuban photographer and sculptor quietly navigating his artistic odyssey in the 21st century.

The Artist and the Move

Respected in Cuba but still under the radar as a new immigrant in New York City, Adrián grew up in Havana, the son of architects. His thick Cuban accent and deliberate cadence exuded humility and wisdom. “Cuba is fertile ground for the arts,” he told me as we wandered through the gallery, “but that fertility comes from everyday challenges. Being an artist gave me privileges but not freedom from struggles.”

Adrián pointed out the most sublime details in Kendrick’s work while he also recounted his career: he had pieces in The J. Paul Getty Museum and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. (Impressive!) For over a decade, he’d taught Documentary Photography at NYU Tisch, commuting between Havana and New York every six months, balancing his career on a precarious visiting expert visa.

“Adjuncting doesn’t exactly pay the bills,” he said with a wry smile. As an NYU adjunct myself, I nodded knowingly.

“But it’s rewarding,” he added. “I take students out to talk with gallery directors, see exhibitions in Chelsea, and visit museums. I don’t just teach art—I teach the dialogue between artist and gallery.” Bridging art with its ecosystem mirrored Adrián’s career: constantly adapting and connecting.

Havana to New York

For years, Adrián split his life between Cuba and the U.S., balancing art sales, teaching, and commercial photography. He made the leap three years ago, uprooting his wife, Jennifer, and their two-year-old daughter to leave Cuba for good.

“Moving here was a leap of faith,” he said. Teaching on a limited visa at NYU gave me some stability. Still, the decision was about family as much as finances.

His daughter, now five, barely remembers Cuba. “During the pandemic, my wife and daughter were essentially confined for nearly two years,” he said.

Manhattan was out of reach, but Union City, New Jersey, offered history, community, and breathing room. “It’s not Manhattan,” Adrián said, “but it’s close enough. And here, there’s space to start over.”

A Studio Full of Stories

A few weeks after our first meeting, Adrián invited me for a studio visit in Union City. My knowledge of Union City then was limited to Blondie’s 1980 music video Union City Blue. (Gen X forever, babes.)

When this non-driving New Yorker asked if there was a PATH stop, Adrián sent a laughing emoji. “No PATH—that’s why I can afford the studio!”

As promised, the bus zipped through the Lincoln Tunnel. Adrián greeted me at his studio with coffee and a welcoming grin.

The historic R.H. Simon Silk Mill, home to his studio, is a nexus of history and reinvention. Its red-brick walls, soaring ceilings, and massive industrial windows hum with stories of the past while the Manhattan skyline looms just a mile away.

“Giving it all up in Cuba was nerve-wracking,” Adrián admitted after taking me through his astounding welded work that filled the room. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pay rent. I started by committing to three months and extended in small increments until I felt stable. And I did ask for a ground floor space, these sculptures are heavy! I was so lucky to get one.”

I would later learn the mill’s founder, Herman Simon, also arrived in the United States in 1868 as a broke German Jewish immigrant intent on reinvention. After working his first job in Baltimore for $350 a year, not that much even then, he saved enough to bring over his brother, Robert—a skilled technician and inventor. Together, they pioneered textile innovation, producing the world’s first perfect grosgrain silk, a fabric synonymous with high fashion. During World War II, the mill took on a covert role, crafting cold-rolled uranium rods for the Manhattan Project. Today, it houses over 100 artists and small businesses, brimming with creativity and reinvention.

Union City’s history as “Cuba’s Northernmost Province” began in the 1950s and ’60s, when Cuban exiles fled political turmoil and economic collapse. By 2000, more than 10,000 Cubans called Union City home, transforming it into a vibrant enclave of Cuban culture. Though its demographics have diversified, the rhythms of the city remain distinctly Cuban—Spanish conversations weaving through bakeries and the smoky scent of ropa vieja wafting from lunch counters along Bergenline Avenue.

Bergenline is, as I learned over a coffee with Adrian after the studio visit, a cultural crossroads. On any day, he told me, you might hear a bodega owner calling out to regulars, pass a bakery with pastelitos fresh from the oven, or catch a family sharing stories over café Cubano. For Adrián, Union City wasn’t just affordable—it was a place where practicality met the community, a softer landing for starting over.

“Bergenline and Union City feel familiar to me, like pieces of home that made the trip with me,” Adrián said. “If I could speak Spanish, why not Union City?” At first, he resisted its distance from artist hubs like Brooklyn and Long Island City, but the space—and its history—won him over.

Salvaged Stories: A Narrative of Resilience

Adrián’s new exhibition in New York, called Salvaged Stories, captures the tension of his journey. “I grew up in a place where the ideals were grand, but the realities often fell short,” he said. “My work salvages those ideals—transforming them into something hopeful.”

The show, his second at the Lower East Side gallery, Thomas Nickles Project, is the culmination of everything he’s experienced over the past three years. His first exhibit combined photography and sculpture from his time in Cuba, but the work in this new show—all forged in his “Havana on Hudson” studio in Union City—captures the profound transformation of leaving Havana, starting anew in the U.S., and adapting to a new life and artistic vision.

These sculptures reimagine broken structures as exercises in resilience, bringing them to life.

Full Circle

And just like that, a chance encounter spun itself into a full-circle moment, landing exactly where it was meant to. Salvaged Stories is displayed at Thomas Nickles Project (47 Orchard Street) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. On Wednesday, December 11, at 7 PM, Adrián will give an artist talk at the gallery—a rare opportunity to hear his remarkable story firsthand.

“When I started this series,” he recently told me in a Lower East Side café across from his gallery, “I wasn’t sure how it would all come together. It took a lot of experimentation—six months just to figure out how to build the interior of one large piece. But now, seeing it all in the gallery, it feels cohesive. This show focuses entirely on sculpture because, after my first exhibition, I felt I had proven the point of integrating my photography. Now, I wanted to let the sculptures stand on their own. The production process for my sculptures is incredibly challenging. I often start with cardboard models to map out the forms. For this series, I worked with steel and bronze, combining materials that speak to their contrasting qualities—steel as rough, almost like a shell, and bronze as smooth, fluid, and polished. Welding is essential to my process, not just functionally but as a way to create expressive marks. It’s like drawing, but instead of using a pencil or paintbrush, I’m using a torch to ‘paint’ with metal.”

"In sculpture,” he added, “the American artist Martin Puryear and the British sculptor Antony Gormley have been huge inspirations. Puryear’s work, especially, is spectacular in terms of its use of form and material. I’ve been deeply influenced by Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological studies in photography—their sense of structure and form has even shaped how I approach my sculpture.”

For more details, follow the gallery at https://www.thomasnickles.com, or on Instagram @thomasnicklesproject. To explore Adrián’s work, visit www.adrianfernandezstudio.com or follow @adrianfernandezstudio.

And again don’t miss the talk on Wednesday—a chance to connect with an extraordinary artist redefining resilience—one weld at a time. I’ll be there. Say hello! You never know where a conversation in New York might lead.