"Dream the Rest": On the Mystery and Vernacular Modernism of Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Cubamerican "Cigarmaker, Creator, Healer, & Man"

Little is known about enigmatic Cuban American cigarmaker and artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos (1891-c. 1960), whose over 800 collages were discovered at a West Philadelphia garage sale in 1983. This manuscript examines Consalvos’s collage practice by speculatively tracking its orbit within a constellation of enmeshed contexts: the radical sociopolitical world of Cuban American tabaqueros; the fraught history of U.S.-Cuban relations and associated processes of cultural appropriation and hybridization; the rise of collage as a recursive development within both vernacular and elite or academic expressive culture; Consalvos’s potential positioning within the aligned discourses of contemporaneous Euro-American modernist art and poetry (especially Dada, Surrealism, and Pop); the artist’s self-declared role as “healer”; and the machinations of the contemporary North American art market.