“My father built this house. Some of the people I lived with in this house are right here with me,” artist Enrique Martinez Celaya paused in front of the microphone and seemed to be holding back tears. “This is a place we will always remember, for so many reasons.”
On Saturday, November 8, 2025, the garden of the Wende Museum was filled with people celebrating the new exhibits now open. Martinez Celaya offered his reflections on the house he had re-recreated as an art installation. Life sized, pale and stark, a series of structures covered in sugar, it fills the entire front gallery of the Wende Museum for the exhibition ‘The Sextant.’
“My father built this house, in Cuba, during the years before, during and after the Cuban Revolution. He had never built a house, it was hard to get materials, and there was, you know, a lot of challenges at that time.” His modest reflection was a quiet perspective on an astonishing piece of artwork. Using memory to both reflect and re-imagine reality, it’s a walk through vision, enormously thought provoking and resonant.
A sextant is an historic navigational tool for measuring distances between objects. The artist also uses the term to navigate time, and has as much to offer on world history as it does on personal family history.
The second gallery is devoted to ‘Intersections,’ a detailed history of the collaboration between Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi. The Ghanaian Adegbite and the Hungarian Polónyi worked together to design and create architecture in 1960’s Ghana; the first African country to free itself from colonial rule. The materials were brought together from archives created by Adegbite’s daughters, Alvina Adegbite and Valerie Adegbite-Calloway, proving how even preserving ephemera can have an unexpected historical impact.
Both exhibits will be open though October of 2026.
Judith Martin-Straw
