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Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas's sculpture is rooted in primitive art, with its bold structures, expressive directness, communal symbolism, and conviction of cosmic absolutes. It is also rooted in Cubism, with its awareness of the dialectical ambiguity of appearances, perhaps most evident in Picasso's use of frontal and profile views of the face in a single image, at once integrating them yet allowing them their difference. Primordial expression and sophisticated perception are the alpha and omega of modern art. Strong-Cuevas's idiosyncratic synthesis of them gives her work its singular intensity. But what makes it especially engaging is that it reveals the primordial ambiguity basic to the "human aesthetic," to use the socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson's term. The struggle to overcome this archetypal ambiguity — to achieve self-sameness or unity of being — is inseparable from the human condition…

…Strong-Cuevas is a master of mass and monumentality (more particularly, the monumental scale, whatever the size of the work). Both are made more emphatic through the dramatic use of voids, the interplay of straight and curved lines as well as the geometric and organic, and, more broadly, an intricately displaced geometry. However apparently firmly fixed in place, shapes are sufficiently at odds to seem disrupted and fragmentary and thus on the move, indeed, oddly lyric for all their epic bulk…

From World Sculpture New, Summer 2003

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