Héctor Pascual Gallo Portieles
(1924–2020)
BornCampo Florido, Cuba
DiedAlamar, La Habana, Cuba
BiographyHéctor Pascual Gallo Portieles, better known as simply Gallo, or the Rooster, reimagined the detritus of his Havana neighborhood as the Jardín de Afectos (Garden of Affections). He intended this art environment to be a place of inspiration and upliftment, to which he contributed with his assemblages made from discarded telephones, typewriters, sewing machines, motorcycles, televisions, and heaps of rusted metal. He installed these works throughout the fenced garden outside his home in Alamar and inside his ground-level apartment. He decorated many of them with aphorisms and sayings in Spanish, such as “Criticism, like the knife, wounds to save,” “Wanting and caring is nothing but the start: it’s worthwhile,” and “Art is neither good nor bad: it is art or it is not art.” He also made figures outfitted with glasses or enhanced with collage elements, including photographs of himself.As he would tell it, he was first inspired by the sculptural possibilities of an old car bumper. Before he became a celebrated local character in Alamar, instantly recognizable for his long beard and homemade canes adorned with bells and other found objects, he lived a very different life. He was born in 1924 in Campo Florido, Cuba, on the eastern outskirts of Havana. He worked as a barber before getting involved with the Cuban Revolution. Under Castro, he was a diplomat and traveled the world. His retirement was followed by a period of economic strife for Cuba alongside the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading him and his wife, Emilia, to move their family from their large home in central Havana to Alamar in the early 1990s. The neighborhood has the largest public housing project in the nation, and Gallo lived amid its deteriorating prefabricated apartment blocks that had been erected in the 1970s. He used his artwork to stay positive, first turning his home into a gallery and then expanding to the garden and building exterior. He told the Miami Herald in 2018 of his dedication to transforming what others had cast off: “Nothing is unserviceable just like no one is useless.”
Gallo was also a writer; in 2006, he published Radiografía de Gallo (An X-ray of Gallo) featuring his sayings, poetry, and reflections on his life. He continued working on the Jardín de Afectos into his nineties. After he died, in 2020, his family took over its care.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).