Cuban Dancing Toys, made by Ana Flores in 2003 from wood and recycled food cans, are part of the exhibit Crossing Borders / Cruzando Fronteras which closes Saturday at Wakefield’s Hera Gallery.

The providence journal / john freidah

As a prominent Rhode Island sculptor, Ana Flores has been on my radar for years. And since she’s been artist in residence at the Kettle Pond wildlife refuge in Charlestown for the last three years, we’ve corresponded often about programs at the refuge’s Green Café.

But I’d never talked to her or met her. When I phoned to see if she’d be willing to speak to me about immigration, given that she’s from Cuba and has a couple of pieces in a show at Wakefield’s Hera Gallery called “Crossing Borders / Cruzando Fronteras,” I was startled to hear a voice without a trace of a Spanish accent. And then, when she came to the door of her Charlestown home, I was surprised again to see a woman whose hair, falling to a couple of inches above her shoulders, was straight and blond.

Turns out I’m not the only one to make assumptions based on stereotypes about Hispanics — it’s not uncommon, she says, that when she tells people her background, “they don’t believe me.”

She recalls one collector in particular who had agreed to buy a sculpture, and “when I went to deliver the piece he was in a state of shock, because I think he thought he was buying the whole Latino-American experience.”

She laughs.

“He kept looking behind me — ‘Is there someone else here with brown hair?’ ”

FLORES IS Hispanic, all right. She was born in Cuba 52 years ago, and moved to the United States with her family in 1962, when she was 6. Her three brothers were already here, living with an uncle, an engineer who had been trained to take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion the year before, the one meant to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist government. When her uncle ended up not being sent on that mission, he stayed on and got a job in Connecticut.

“We left Feb. 2 from Havana and landed in Granby, Conn., in a snowstorm,” she recalls. “Essentially, the landscape was erased.

“I’d never seen snow before.”

A year later, Ana — whose mother’s father had been born in Louisiana — became a U.S. citizen, a status her whole family eventually attained. And within six years, her father — who died last month — was the city architect of Hartford, and “had built us a wonderful home” in a nearby suburb.

“He found this lot on a hill with the only Spanish name in town, Buena Vista Road,” she recalls. And he built a five-level house into the side of the hill.

By now her grandmother had come to live with them, and her parents had a fourth son — “a new American baby.” Together, they lived in that house on the hill until Ana finished high school.

“That was a great perspective,” she says. “After we moved into our new home, it sort of defined what you could accomplish as an immigrant in America.”

FLORES’ MOTHER was a painter, though in this country she worked as a Spanish-language college professor. “Before I could speak English, I could draw my way through school.”

So it was natural that she applied to the Rhode Island School of Design, which she ended up attending on a scholarship. RISD was where she met Gabriel Warren, a sculptor from Fairfield, Conn., who would become her husband.

Heading home from Providence to Connecticut, “we would always drive through South County,” she says. And in 1985, they found an unfinished house off Kings Factory Road in Charlestown, a place they could fix up over the years, doing the work a little at a time as the family grew with the addition of Noah, now almost 19, and Sofia, almost 17.

“That, I tell you, was a whole other immigrant experience, coming to South County,” Flores says.

“When we landed here in South County, I was not a country person. In Cuba you get as far from working on the land as possible, because that was connected to slave culture.”

Flores was surprised to find herself living where “nothing’s connected by sidewalk.” And the town had no center, no downtown to provide a social life. It took a while to figure out the area’s social connections — places, such as the libraries, where residents make contact with one another.

“It’s like one of those Advent calendars where you open a window every day,” she says. “South County is like that. It’s constant surprise. You open this window and meet people who have their own little paradise that’s not visible from the road.”

IF A SOCIAL circle took time to build, a connection with the outdoors came more quickly, she says. “The wild community is more immediate than the human community. …

“For the first time since we left Cuba, I felt rooted again. The land works on you, and roots you.”

She and Warren started with 10 acres, and later added 7 more. It’s a beautiful place that backs up to state parkland, with tall trees as far as you can see, and the house set back from the road so that you don’t hear passing cars. Around the house is a clearing where comfortable chairs, normally kept on a shady front porch, can be moved on a sunny but cool day.

In this natural setting, Flores found herself becoming an environmentalist. She began looking at the links between world overpopulation and immigration.

“I think it’s very sad that there is such a reactive attitude toward people who are coming here from other places,” she says. “I think it has a lot to do with population pressure, which is never mentioned in the articles on the subject.”

She expects more “environmental refugees,” she says, fleeing natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, “because our numbers are too large, and we live in places that aren’t tenable. … No one wants to talk about that … but it’s a fact of life that is playing out.”

Nature has become part of her artwork, which for the last 15 years has involved found objects, such as rocks, roots, fungi and logs. Her pieces at Hera Gallery include tiny figures that stand on empty cans of Goya kidney beans and coconut milk, recycled to speak of Hispanic culture.

“I see everything environmentally now,” she says.

THE HERA works are part of a larger installation Flores created after she returned to Cuba in 2002, her first time there in 40 years. She took a three-week trip with a U.S. permit to study Cuban religious customs; even more, she wanted to thank the island’s patron saint, the Virgin del Cobre, for having saved Noah from a mysterious intestinal illness.

Flores bicycled around for two of her three weeks in Cuba, taking in the sights and the people.

“And I just felt so Cuban!” she says. “I was just amazed at how Cuban I was, even though I’ve lived so much of my life in New England.”

Not only Cuban genetically, but in using found materials in her art, which echoed the waste-nothing methods of the down-at-the-heels island. Flores saw a man with a box of parts by a roadside in the morning; by the end of the day, he had turned them into an ice-cream maker and was selling his ice cream. Another man had been a nuclear engineer at a power plant that the government abandoned; he had taken parts from the plant and built a restaurant.

“The guy could do everything, including build a nuclear reactor,” she marvels. “The island is full of characters like that. … Once they get a real opportunity, that island is going to take off.”

SO WHAT, at base, does she consider herself? A Cuban-American? A Hispanic? An environmentalist?

“I’m Ana Flores,” she responds. “You can’t generalize people by their name, or where they come from, because everybody’s got a complex history. …

“I guess I’m just what I am.”

“Crossing Borders / Cruzando Fronteras” continues through Saturday at Hera Gallery, 327 Main St., Wakefield. Gallery hours are today through Friday, 1 to 5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, call (401) 789-1488 or go to www.heragallery.org.

arosenbe@projo.com