By James Foritano Cambridge, MA - So many insights in art, in scholarship and in life derive from accidents of attention grasped by some intuition insisting sotto voce, “Hey! This is important!” For me it was a prompt to walk once again through the first retrospective exhibition of the Afro-Cuban artist Roberto Diago currently at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art — though I had already Velcroed and snapped my overshoes against the snow waiting in Harvard Square. My overshoes squeaked, so I slowed down as I passed a lone couple conversing to the requisite hush society demands of us when together in the precincts of art. The whisper I heard as I turned the corner of the Cooper’s long central gallery asked, just above the whisper of my now disciplined overshoes, “Why are you being so quiet?” I realized I was listening to a silence deeper than I could … [Read more...] about Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present” at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art