File:The neighborhood around the studio of Jose Fuster (11741582024).jpg

Jose Fuster is a Cuban naïve artist specializing in ceramics, painting, drawing, engraving, and graphic design. He not only decorates his studio, but also the homes of his neighbors. From Havana-cultura.com:

While Fuster’s art can’t really be described as groundbreaking (his visual language owes a heavy debt to Picasso and Jean Dubuffet), he has certainly covered a lot of ground with it. Roofs, walls, doorways and benches, stretching for blocks around the epicentre of his studio enclave, are adorned with his brightly coloured sculptures and mosaics : mermaids, fish, palm trees,roosters and Santería saints; quotations from Alejo Carpentier, Onelio Jorge Cardoso, and Ernest Hemingway. More than 80 neighbours have allowed Fuster to use their homes as his canvas.

Fusterlandia, the artist says, was a natural outcropping of Fuster’s artistic development, nothing more, nothing less. "I kept working every day to do something more and more spectacular," he says. "’I wanted my studio to be a place where I could live with art. That was always my illusion, my idea. And I think, little by little, it became a reality."

He says he puts his own money — money he makes from selling his paintings and sculptures — back into the community, redecorating his neighbour’s houses, incorporating them into Fusterlandia. "This project is not only about my house. It’s about my neighbour’s houses. My neighbours are great people." What about charges of self-glorification? "People have criticised me, saying that all this is an ode to myself. But I can’t do anything about that. That’s life."