Okay, so after this blog post I will take myself out of the headlines for the forseeable future, and return to more of my "vintage" blogging. Meanwhile (back at the ranch??!! no, I don't think so! I am a city girl through and through, except of course when I go back to Shelbyville, Illinois to see my VERY DEAR high school buddies!!). . . .I am going to be working away on my memoir. And of course teaching and tutoring at Miami Dade College, Kendall campus. Want to say THANKS SO MUCH to my dear friends, current colleagues, and former esteemed colleagues (one for whom I am sorry I never got to work for that much time because now in our post-Herald life he is exceptionally thoughtful) who have taken the time to read some or most of what I have written so far, and to offer helpful encouragement. Yes, I know very well I am in for a LONG haul . . . . and it may never see the light of day as a published book.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ART NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Thanks to my terrific artcentric buddy Sergio Garcia for this news: The website for Triennial Miami is now up and running. Visit www.triennialmiami.org
From Miami gallery Spinello Projects, this news: Congrats to Manny Prieres as his "Black Book" series is now on view in the summer show "HELP/LESS" (opened July 14, up through Sept. 29) at Printed Matter, Inc., 195 Tenth Ave., NYC, ph. 212-925-0325. As the press release tells us: This show is curated by Chris Habib, hosted by Printed Matter. The store-wide show includes over 180 books "that explore the fluidity of authorship in artists' books and multiples. . . .In the spirit of books, ephemera and multiples it presents, HELP/LESS reconsiders the exhibition space as an object to upset. It considers its viewers and featured artists accomplices."
The "Black Book" series by Manny Prieres comprises book cover reproductions of novels that have been censored or marginalized. The covers are intricately rendered by hand with black graphite and gouache on paper. Among the books: The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Ulysses by James Joyce, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Another book-related show, this time in Miami: "Summer Reading" at Black Square Gallery, 2248 NW 1st Place, Miami, Wynwood Art District. See www.blacksquaregallery.com or call 305-424-5002. It features text-based art, now on view and up through Sept. 5. Includes work by artists from USA, Italy, Argentina, and Korea, with various work including objects and installations. Artists are Claire Satin, Kyu Hak Lee, Pablo Lehmann, Patrizia Giambi, Ryan McCann, Tony Vazquez. (I've known Claire's remarkable work for years.)
Odalys Valdivieso, a terrific photographic artist and curator, tells me via email that she is partnering with her friend Gady Alroy, widely known in Venezuela for his services in high quality image related processes. Together they offer scanning, retouching, and printing services at the ArtMedia Studio in The Wynwood Building, 2750 NW 3rd Ave., Suite 12. Stop by during business hours or call 786-210-3535. Their website is in progress but can be surfed now: http://www.artmediaus.com/site/
Calling all digital dinosaurs!! Mark your calendar for screening of film "Linotype" and talk with director at Wolfsonian-FIU on July 27 at 7 pm. Museum promises an engaging evening re the once-revolutionary Linotype type casting machine, which is now practially an endangered species, even though it was once called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Thomas Edison. The Linotype type casting machine revolutionized printing, communication, and, yes, even society. But now we must ask, especially those digital dinosaurs who surely scratch their heads in total puzzlement, what place does this machine possibly have in today's world?? Maybe this event will help answer those questions. . . . On Friday, July 27 at 7 pm The Wolfsonian will screen the new documentary "Linotype: The Film" (75 mins), followed by a talk with film's director Doug Wilson. After the talk there's reception at the nearby hotel Betsy-South Beach. This, as the press release tells us, is surely a rare chance to view the film on a large screen; after a limited run, it will be released digitally and on DVD in October.
Event is free and open to the public. Due to limited seating, RSVP suggested at www.tinyurl.com/linotypeMIAMI The Wolfsonian-FIU is located at 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info, see www.wolfsonian.org
Some background info on this machine, courtesy of The Wolfsonian's press release: Before the Linotype machine, typesetting for newspapers and books was a time-consuming process done by hand. The Linotype casts an entire line of type at one time, producing printable type six times faster than a person. The invention of the Linotype galvanized the printing of newspapers [hey, remember those??] and books, quickly became an indispensable part of the printing industry, and dramatically changed journalism and society [and now so much is changing AGAIN!!] as a whole. . . . However, in the 1950s photo-typesetting technology began to take over the industry. By the 1970s, the Linotype was no longer state-of-the-art and the machines were scrapped and melted down by the thousands. Today, very few machines exist and even few are in operation.
Cool show coming soon, with related panel discussion happening even sooner: Note that "Trading Places 2" will be on view in North Miami at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), from Sept. 13 to Nov. 11, 2012. In this promising exhibit, South Florida artists swap their studio spaces for the museum's galleries for a period of two months. Artists taking part: Dona Altemus, Onajide Shabaka, Magnus Sigurdson, Rick Ulysse, Antonia Wright.
On Wednesday, July 25 at 7 pm Magnus Sigurdson and Rick Ulysse will speak in panel discussion about the upcoming exhibit. Discussion moderated by MOCA Executive Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents and City of North Miami employees. Cost is $3 for seniors and students with ID. To reserve a seat, visit www.mocanomi.org or call 305-893-6211. MOCA is located at 770 NE 125th St., North Miami, FL.
This fascinating series was launched in 2005, when I was still writing for The Miami Herald. Artists then were Salvatore La Rosa, Maria Martinez-Canas in collaboration with Alaskan artist Kim Brown, and Frances Trombly.
Cool websites for the co-authors Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow of that essential book Miami Contemporary Artists with my foreword: www.paulclemence.com and www.juliedavidow.com
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW: A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally my working title!!) (this is second half of my first chapter; to read first half, see previous blog post)
There was nothing I did not like about living in New York. I loved exploring Manhattan's many neighborhoods, discovering Gotham Book Mart amid stores lining West 47th Street in the Diamond Distric, poking among shops selling buttons and sequins in the Garment District, catching a glimpse of Toni Morrison in the elevator when we both had jobs at Random House, even though she worked in the far more glamorous Trade Division while I toiled away in the College Textbook Division.
Often I would meet Eric after work on the plaza at Lincoln Center so that we could see a performance of the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater. Such a good sport but exhausted after driving to Manhattan while he completed his medical training in Brooklyn or after working in a clinic in Paterson, New Jersey, he sometimes settled into his seat and began to snore soon after the lights dimmed and the curtains opened.
I didn't mind, really, because I knew he had battled heavy traffic to get there that night, plus I was thrilled to see performances by now legendary dancers: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins. And I knew it was too much to expect my husband to be as nuts about ballet as I was--he grew up boating and watching football in sunny Miami, while I grew up studying ballet and reading tons of books in the Midwest, where for many days it was just too cold or rainy to do anything outside.
But was I really ready to leave New York?
I was not so sure. Yes, I had finally quit my job in textbook publishing at Random House several months ago, disilllusioned with the grind it had become, thinking I would follow my dream of becoming a writer. After all, even as a cadet Girl Scout eager to earn as many badges as she could to decorate that geeky forest green sash, I had rushed to earn the "Writer" badge right away. Somehow, I found its delicately embroidered black and white scrolls curiously appealing. But as anyone who knows who's tried it, being a free-lance writer in New York is a lonely feast-or-famine kind of occupation. Already I had published at least one art book review in the magazine ARTnews, thanks to a connection I had made through a former colleague at Random House, and other jobs had come my way, but it was still a frustrating and solitary endeavor.
I had even paid good money to attend a conference for professional journalists and authors at a swanky hotel in Manhattan. I remember going to a session on conducting an interview, and that a journalist explained how she always got her best comments at the end of the interview and that a good strategy to elicit more comments was simply to wait after a particularly revealing remark and invariably more would follow to fill in the silence. Little did I know then that I would use the same strategy about a decade later in Miami, when I was interviewing internationally-known artists describing how horrific experiences in Argentina and Rwanda had shaped their riveting art.
No doubt about it, however, in the early 1980s I was intimidated by the dazzling talent already active in New York and did not see how I could ever acquire the many editorial connections and writing assignments that "real writers" seemed to have in such abundance. Once again, I was sure I had traveled to a dead-end in my so-called career. For sure, I had run out of things I was not good at.
Worst of all, my biological clock was ticking louder all the time. We knew we could not finally swing the challenges of raising children in Brooklyn, let alone Manhattan, and life in bedroom communities outside the city didn't appeal to us at all.
So whether or not I was truly on board, we were bound for Miami. Eric had already lined up a job there and found us a darling wood-frame cottage with a fireplace, built about a decade after Miami was incorporated in 1896. A key lime tree and grapefruit tree grew in the yard. Dozens of folks from his Cuban-American family were thrilled that he was returning home, especially his Cuban grandmother we all called Mama. She lived with his father Fred and Fred's charming second wife, Gerry, in the pink house were Eric grew up on Natoma Street in Coconut Grove--a quaint, leafy neighborhood near downtown Miami.
In Miami, Eric had childhood friends still living in the city who shared his love of boating and watching football, adoring relatives who could make his favorite Cuban dishes with a skill I could never match. He had many threads from a life there to pick up and fashion into a promising future.
But what would my future be in Miami? I knew I would never be happy being known solely as "Eric's wife" or worse, as my defiantly feminist self grumbled quietly, "a doctor's wife." To the ever-so-polite consternation of my parents and in-laws, I had refused to drop my maiden name and become Mrs. Smith when we tied the knot in 1979. Everyone had pretty much gotten used to this when we picked up and settled in Miami for good in 1984. Yet even then I knew I was not willing to be identified as simply someone's wife or someone's mom.
[Blogger's Note: Yes, even unpaid bloggers need to take a break. I don't expect to blog again until the first Thursday in September or October, 2012. Really need a big chunk of time now to work on my book-length memoir.]
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Begins First Chapter of Memoir
Well, I have taken the plunge, and I must say the water feels just fine. I am actually well into what I hope may be my third chapter, but because I only have so much time to blog (and I am sure readers only have so much time to read my blog!!) I am posting below about half of my first chapter. Of course this digital "ms." is still in a fluid state, and subject to more revision I know, but I am quite pleased with my progress so far.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Events I hope I do not miss. . .
Miami Art Museum Staff Art Exhibition at University of Miami Gallery, 2750 NW 3rd Avenue, Suite 4, Miami. Opening reception is July 14, 6-9 pm. On view through Aug. 24. Hours are Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm.
What's new with ArtCenter/South Florida at 800/810/924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Look for Studio Crawl, 7-10 pm July 7: Visit resident artists in studios and hear performance by Greater Miami Youth Symphony; also look for David Zalben as he continues his "free-wheeling poetic installation" re love and relationships in his "signature wire-graffiti style." Note also that the "Afterlife" is on view through Aug. 5, 2012, presenting these artists' distinctive take on the hereafter: Byron Keith Byrd, Alex Heria, and Franklin Sinanan at the ArtCenter's Richard Shack Gallery on 800 Lincoln Road.
"Outside the Box: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art" at PanAmericanArtProjects, 2450 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 28. For more info call 305-573-2400 or see www.panamericanart.com Show includes art by Jasmin Joseph, George Liautaud, Andre Pierre.
"lynne golob gelfman: sand" at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, 2630 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 31. I've known Lynne for years, and she makes absolutely exquisite abstract paintings. Hours are Tues-Friday 11 am to 6 pm; Saturday noon to 5 pm. For more info call 305-438-0220 or see www.alejandravonhartz.net
Frost Art Museum's Target Wednesday After Hours celebrates two new exhibitions. Mark your calendar for 6-9 pm July 18 for this free and open-to-the-public event at the Frost at Florida International University, located at 10975 SW 17th Street in Miami, across from the Blue garage and adjacent to Wertheim Performing Arts Center on the Modesto A. Maidique campus.
Exhibitions:
"This and That: Unconventional Selections from the Permanent Collection." Includes art by Guerra de la Paz, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Bert Rodriguez, Graham Hudson. Curated by Klaudio Rodriguez. On view through Oct. 21, 2012.
"Shared Threads: Maria Lino's Portrait of a Shipibo Healer." This documents a collaborative experience during which two artists from vastly different cultural and artistic traditions came together in the Amazon region of Pucallpa, Peru. Maria Lino has twice been named a Cintas Fellow. In 2011, she was awarded a Fullbright US Scholar Grant and spent 8 months working in Peru on an ongoing series of video portraits. The exhibit, curated by Ana Estrada and sponsored by Latino Magazine, runs through Sept. 30, 2012.
For more info, call 305-348-2890 or visit http://thefrost.fiu.edu
Check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com
Don't forget to mark your calendar for the memorial service for feminist art historian Paula Harper. It is set for noon July 20 at the Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info about this, see my previous blog post.
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally a working title!)
Chapter One
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place. When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up north." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers," who theatrically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things I was not good at when I moved to Miami in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
Earlier in that summer of '84, a moving van had pulled up in front of the 19th Century brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my husband Eric Smith and I had become one of the first owners of the building's newly remodeled co-op apartments in 1979. Five years after we moved in, I watched with amazement and more than a little anxiety as movers efficiently packed up most of our belongings, including treasured antique furniture from my family in the Midwest. By Madison Avenue standards, these were not really antiques at all. I can imagine an East Side dealer dismissing some as "white trash country oak."
In a much later visit back to New York from Miami, my husband and I discovered that our dining room table that has been in my mother's rural Illinois family for several generations was a dead ringer for a kitchen table in a Lower East Side museum about that neighborhood's early tenement life. We shared an affectionate giggle about our "tenement table."
Nevertheless, our bedroom furniture, with the high four-poster bed, came from my great-grandparents' stately brick 19th Century two-story mansion on Main Street in Shelbyville, Illinois. I can assure you that no one then or even now would ever look at that home and think of it as a tenement. The tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite were part of many reminders of my past that I still treasure and have since imported to our home in Miami.
Even more so than that furniture, I've made a long and circuitous journey from the Midwest, with many unexpected twists. But when the tenement table and I were fixing to leave Brooklyn for Miami, I remember looking out the third-story window of our walk-up brownstone apartment with sadness. Even the red geraniums in our window boxes I had so carefully tended, perhaps as an unconscious homage to the way my mom used to grow red geraniums in clay pots when I was growing up in Shelbyville, seemed to look a bit wilted and out of sorts.
When the moving van drove down Berkeley Place and disappeared out of sight, I wondered melodramatically if I would ever see that furniture again. Was I saying good-bye forever to this part of my life?
I had always loved living in that brownstone with its high ceilings and ornate architectural details. No matter how tired I was from arriving home in the evening from my book publishing job in Manhattan, riding that screeching D train to the 7th Avenue stop in Park Slope until I was blue in the face, I always took special pleasure in opening the grandly carved dark wooden double doors gracing the entrance to our building at 210 Berkeley Place. Forever the bookish English major, I felt as if I were opening the door to a Henry James novel. My knees were not as creaky as they are now, so I really did not mind--too much anyway--climbing the many steps to our apartment.
So in the summer of 1984, we were on the move again, and my life was in flux once more. Before arriving in New York in 1979, I had spent four years living in North Carolina while I attended graduate school in literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I steeped myself in literature with the intensely overachieving zeal of a grad student, and along the way I encountered many eccentricities of the American South.
I learned that the expression "might could" was sometimes called the "Southern subjunctive." I discovered the thrill of reading poetry by Baudelaire and Rimbaud in French, threaded my way through the rich metaphorical language of "King Lear" and "Othello," and heard people smirk about a woman driving past tobacco fields while getting drunk on Rebel Yell.
But I also learned that I was not willing to struggle for who-knows-how-much-longer to earn a PhD, having worried myself sick over the process of writing my MA thesis in Comparative Literature on the visual imagery of sacrifice and saintliness in short fiction by Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce. I had no intention of becoming a PhD "gypsy scholar," bouncing from one non-tenure track position to another in remote corners of this country. Earlier I had spent four years studying English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small Midwestern town that reminded me too much of Shelbyville, Illinois.
The summer we left Brooklyn, I was beginning to wonder if my fate was to undergo major upheavals every four years. I even made Eric promise me that we could reconsider moving back to New York after four or five years in Miami--which he reluctantly did, even though we both knew that his bred-in-Miami body would never consent to enduring another cold and snowy winter in New York.
When we had decided to get married in 1979 and move to New York, I was thrilled to leave behind the obsessive craziness of academia and pursue a new dream, working for book publishers in New York. Eric had just received his MD degree from University of Miami and was ready for a change, too.
I became thoroughly smitten by the bright lights and big city life of The Big Apple.
TO BE CONTINUED, PROBABLY BY JULY 19, 2012
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Events I hope I do not miss. . .
Miami Art Museum Staff Art Exhibition at University of Miami Gallery, 2750 NW 3rd Avenue, Suite 4, Miami. Opening reception is July 14, 6-9 pm. On view through Aug. 24. Hours are Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm.
What's new with ArtCenter/South Florida at 800/810/924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Look for Studio Crawl, 7-10 pm July 7: Visit resident artists in studios and hear performance by Greater Miami Youth Symphony; also look for David Zalben as he continues his "free-wheeling poetic installation" re love and relationships in his "signature wire-graffiti style." Note also that the "Afterlife" is on view through Aug. 5, 2012, presenting these artists' distinctive take on the hereafter: Byron Keith Byrd, Alex Heria, and Franklin Sinanan at the ArtCenter's Richard Shack Gallery on 800 Lincoln Road.
"Outside the Box: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art" at PanAmericanArtProjects, 2450 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 28. For more info call 305-573-2400 or see www.panamericanart.com Show includes art by Jasmin Joseph, George Liautaud, Andre Pierre.
"lynne golob gelfman: sand" at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, 2630 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 31. I've known Lynne for years, and she makes absolutely exquisite abstract paintings. Hours are Tues-Friday 11 am to 6 pm; Saturday noon to 5 pm. For more info call 305-438-0220 or see www.alejandravonhartz.net
Frost Art Museum's Target Wednesday After Hours celebrates two new exhibitions. Mark your calendar for 6-9 pm July 18 for this free and open-to-the-public event at the Frost at Florida International University, located at 10975 SW 17th Street in Miami, across from the Blue garage and adjacent to Wertheim Performing Arts Center on the Modesto A. Maidique campus.
Exhibitions:
"This and That: Unconventional Selections from the Permanent Collection." Includes art by Guerra de la Paz, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Bert Rodriguez, Graham Hudson. Curated by Klaudio Rodriguez. On view through Oct. 21, 2012.
"Shared Threads: Maria Lino's Portrait of a Shipibo Healer." This documents a collaborative experience during which two artists from vastly different cultural and artistic traditions came together in the Amazon region of Pucallpa, Peru. Maria Lino has twice been named a Cintas Fellow. In 2011, she was awarded a Fullbright US Scholar Grant and spent 8 months working in Peru on an ongoing series of video portraits. The exhibit, curated by Ana Estrada and sponsored by Latino Magazine, runs through Sept. 30, 2012.
For more info, call 305-348-2890 or visit http://thefrost.fiu.edu
Check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com
Don't forget to mark your calendar for the memorial service for feminist art historian Paula Harper. It is set for noon July 20 at the Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info about this, see my previous blog post.
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally a working title!)
Chapter One
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place. When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up north." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers," who theatrically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things I was not good at when I moved to Miami in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
Earlier in that summer of '84, a moving van had pulled up in front of the 19th Century brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my husband Eric Smith and I had become one of the first owners of the building's newly remodeled co-op apartments in 1979. Five years after we moved in, I watched with amazement and more than a little anxiety as movers efficiently packed up most of our belongings, including treasured antique furniture from my family in the Midwest. By Madison Avenue standards, these were not really antiques at all. I can imagine an East Side dealer dismissing some as "white trash country oak."
In a much later visit back to New York from Miami, my husband and I discovered that our dining room table that has been in my mother's rural Illinois family for several generations was a dead ringer for a kitchen table in a Lower East Side museum about that neighborhood's early tenement life. We shared an affectionate giggle about our "tenement table."
Nevertheless, our bedroom furniture, with the high four-poster bed, came from my great-grandparents' stately brick 19th Century two-story mansion on Main Street in Shelbyville, Illinois. I can assure you that no one then or even now would ever look at that home and think of it as a tenement. The tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite were part of many reminders of my past that I still treasure and have since imported to our home in Miami.
Even more so than that furniture, I've made a long and circuitous journey from the Midwest, with many unexpected twists. But when the tenement table and I were fixing to leave Brooklyn for Miami, I remember looking out the third-story window of our walk-up brownstone apartment with sadness. Even the red geraniums in our window boxes I had so carefully tended, perhaps as an unconscious homage to the way my mom used to grow red geraniums in clay pots when I was growing up in Shelbyville, seemed to look a bit wilted and out of sorts.
When the moving van drove down Berkeley Place and disappeared out of sight, I wondered melodramatically if I would ever see that furniture again. Was I saying good-bye forever to this part of my life?
I had always loved living in that brownstone with its high ceilings and ornate architectural details. No matter how tired I was from arriving home in the evening from my book publishing job in Manhattan, riding that screeching D train to the 7th Avenue stop in Park Slope until I was blue in the face, I always took special pleasure in opening the grandly carved dark wooden double doors gracing the entrance to our building at 210 Berkeley Place. Forever the bookish English major, I felt as if I were opening the door to a Henry James novel. My knees were not as creaky as they are now, so I really did not mind--too much anyway--climbing the many steps to our apartment.
So in the summer of 1984, we were on the move again, and my life was in flux once more. Before arriving in New York in 1979, I had spent four years living in North Carolina while I attended graduate school in literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I steeped myself in literature with the intensely overachieving zeal of a grad student, and along the way I encountered many eccentricities of the American South.
I learned that the expression "might could" was sometimes called the "Southern subjunctive." I discovered the thrill of reading poetry by Baudelaire and Rimbaud in French, threaded my way through the rich metaphorical language of "King Lear" and "Othello," and heard people smirk about a woman driving past tobacco fields while getting drunk on Rebel Yell.
But I also learned that I was not willing to struggle for who-knows-how-much-longer to earn a PhD, having worried myself sick over the process of writing my MA thesis in Comparative Literature on the visual imagery of sacrifice and saintliness in short fiction by Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce. I had no intention of becoming a PhD "gypsy scholar," bouncing from one non-tenure track position to another in remote corners of this country. Earlier I had spent four years studying English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small Midwestern town that reminded me too much of Shelbyville, Illinois.
The summer we left Brooklyn, I was beginning to wonder if my fate was to undergo major upheavals every four years. I even made Eric promise me that we could reconsider moving back to New York after four or five years in Miami--which he reluctantly did, even though we both knew that his bred-in-Miami body would never consent to enduring another cold and snowy winter in New York.
When we had decided to get married in 1979 and move to New York, I was thrilled to leave behind the obsessive craziness of academia and pursue a new dream, working for book publishers in New York. Eric had just received his MD degree from University of Miami and was ready for a change, too.
I became thoroughly smitten by the bright lights and big city life of The Big Apple.
TO BE CONTINUED, PROBABLY BY JULY 19, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Miami Contemporary Art Museum Presents Ed Ruscha Paintings
In North Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), is now presenting "Ed Ruscha: On the Road," a collection of drawings and paintings inspired by passages from famed novel by Jack Kerouac. This exhibit is organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, curated by Douglas Fogle. It's up though Sept. 2, 2012. For more info, see www.mocanomi.org
As a follow-up to my previous blog post, I'm refining the book pitch for my memoir. I know it's not in good-to-go shape yet, but it is much better than the previous one I made at the Pitch-o-Rama at the Writers Institute in early May at MDC. I really fell flat on my ass with that one (figuratively, I mean).
So here's my current book pitch (a very short summary of the essence of the book someone wants to write, designed to interest a book publisher, or not):
I wake up every morning and praise God that I'm not dead or drooling in a wheelchair, and that the rest of my family is alive and well. One rainy day our lives changed instantly in a car crash as we drove our son to start college. Yet I'll never remember this life-changing event. In a flash I was knocked into the black nothingness of a coma and hospitalized for a month while I tried to remember who I was and re-learn basic skills I'd always taken for granted, like talking, walking, sipping coffee, even the typing I did as a journalist. Today I'm blessed to look as if my life has returned to normal, but now I live with my "new normal": dealing with the post-traumantic stress disorder dreadfully familiar to those who've suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, football game, or war zone. I've said good-bye to my former life and income: I lost my newspaper job. Driving on expressways gives me the creeps. Painful reminders of my past trigger flashbacks, also bad dreams that seem real until I wake up to realize I'm not being strangled, or that someone I know isn't amputating my feet.
First things first: More visual arts news connected to Miami
So very sad to report the death of feminist art historian and retired University of Miami professor Paula Hays Harper on June 3, 2012. When I read The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor Brecher in the paper on June 13, 2012, I cried and cried, even though I had known she had been quite sick for such a long time. Mark your calendar, if you will be in Miami then, for the memorial service her friends are planning at noon on July 20 at The Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach 33139.
Had to share this touching email comment I received re Paula from Billie G. Lynn, Associate Professor of Sculpture at University of Miami:
"She was a great teacher and I loved her sense of humor. . .sooooo wicked and yet right on! The students of the future will miss her and not know quite what is missing, but I'll be sure to tell them about her. As you well know, no one knows the hour of their death, as the bumper sticker says: 'Live like it's your last day on Earth because one day you'll be right.'
"She as a great woman, let's honor her by living outrageously."
For particularly noteworthy exhibits in Miami this summer, check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com In the June ARTnews, you might like to catch my review of Rita Ackermann solo show at MOCA in North Miami, page 98. Also note in that issue on page 42 story about how ARTnews has won a prize for its excellence in journalism.
Sebastian Spreng tells me about an exhibit of 150 artworks by Julio Larraz, who lives in Miami, opening July 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm and up through the last week in Sept. 2012 at Galleria D'Arte Contini, Via S. Marco 2765 / 30124 in Venice, Italy. To rsvp call this Miami ph number: 305-665-3334. For more info about this exhibit, see www.continiarte.com
Tina Spiro tells me she has been invited for the second time in a row to exhibit at Beijing Biennale, this time for 2012, at the National Museum of China. Her tryptych oil painting "Rembrandt 2012: Back to the Future" will be featured to represent Jamaica. Other news: Tina (who used to live and work here and has since moved to Jamaica but we keep in touch via email) has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Gallery of Jamaica and asked to serve as the chair of the Exhibitions Committee of that institution.
Joel Hoffman, director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, has created a blog to document the process of replacing Vizcaya's Courtyard skylight. It's really been an eyesore for years in that quite beautiful place. Plans are to finish this project in September. Find the link to his blog at the homepage at www.vizcaya.org
My BFF Rosie Gordon-Wallace tells me about this exhibit, which sounds quite exciting and impressive. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator presents this in partnership with the Miami Dade College Art Gallery System and MDC Live!:
"Milagros: Portal Culture" by Felici Asteinza
National Performance Network / Visual Artists Network Residency
Opening night reception is Thurs. June 28, from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd. Artist Talk is Friday, June 29 at 1 pm. This exhibit continues through July 27, 2012 as a DVCAI Caribbean Crossroads exhibition series. All programs are free and open to the public.
Milagros: Portal Culture
Felici Asteinza, Caribbean artist whose one week NPN/VAN community residency is June 24-30, 2012 will create Milagros: Portal Culture, presenting a series of community partnership projects and programs, including a collaborative community-making / collecting project where artists and musicians guide participants through creation and collection of art and sound. Working with her artist group Alvin Fillastre, Evan Galbick and Elestial Sound, visitors to MDC Art Gallery System at the Freedom Tower will experience first hand the process and creation of building the installation performance space, culminating in an on-site, one-night artist musician performance.
Felici's artwork explores the ritualistic nature of creating. These multi-layered collages are embedded with re-discovered residue from the artist's studio as well as images reflecting anxieties and greed. Elaborate, precise lines become the glue between elements, creating a rhythmic, activated field.
Elestial Sound Records is a sustainable record label run by solar panels in the northern California mountains, also supporting an abundane of cutting-edge musicians from Florida. Their music plays while the installation is created, making a truly collaborative venture between the visual and music arts. The Freedom Tower's architecture has guided this site-specific installation.
WOULD LOVE TO GET COMMENTS FOR MY BLOG ABOUT WHAT READERS THOUGHT ABOUT THIS EVENT: The live performance will take place ONLY during the opening reception, Thursday, June 28 from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne, 3rd Floor.
For more info about Felici, see www.milagrosartcollective.blogspot.com For more info about Diaspora Cultural Arts Incubator, see www.diasporavibevirtualgallery.com For more info about Miami Dade College Art Gallery system, see http://www.mdc.edu/ags For more info about MDC Live! Performing Arts Series, see http://www.mdc.edu/main/mdclive
This program is sponsored by the National Performance Network (NPN) Visual Arts Network (VAN) funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, partnered with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. For more info about NPN and VAN, please see http://www.npnweb.org
Rustin Levenson, that art conservator extraordinaire, tells me how she is cleaning up Salvador Dali, his artwork, that is! See "Four Salvador Dali masterworks cleaned, repaired in public" by Lennie Bennett, Tampa Bay Times Art Critc (thank goodness Tampa residents have one for THEIR paper!) See http://www.tampabay.com
Cernuda Arte and Cernuda Family Collection have loaned 13 artworks to "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," a remarkable collaborative group of exhibitions in New York now on view at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Queens Museum of Art. Congrats to this gallery and collection! The loaned artworks are by Esteban Chartrand, Victor Patricio Landaluze, Domingo Ramos, Jose Cuchi Arnau, Oscar Garcia Rivera, Carlos Enriquez, Rene Portocarrero, Fedelio Ponce, Roberto Diago, Jose Bedia.
And now here's the "vintage" part of my blog. . .
CINEMATIC IN STYLE AND SIZE, RUSCHA'S ART ADMIRED WORLDWIDE by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald April 2001
"Ed Ruscha" at the Miami Art Museum is a traveling survey that charts one American artist's journeys along open roads and crowded urban intersections.
Often characterized as a Los Angeles practitioner of Pop art, Ruscha (pronounced ROO-shay) resists that label, as does the lyrical and deadpan variety of the 50-plus paintings, books, drawings and photography that make up this survey covering nearly 40 years of an inventive and internationally admired career.
Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, this not-to-be-missed show is accompanied by a 196-page hard-bound catalog. Unusual among museum tomes, this catalog contains essays of exceptional insight and clarity by Kerry Brougher, chief curator at the Hirshhorn, and Neal Benezra, the Art Institute of Chicago's deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art.
They discuss important precedents for Ruscha's work, including Jasper Johns's famous 1955 Pop painting, "Target with Four Faces." Another critical influence was Robert Frank's often surreal 1958 book of photographs, "The Americans," showing bleak highways dotted with cafes and filling stations.
Throughout his career, Ruscha has melded photography and painting, building upon these sources by adding his droll trove of "found words," as he describes them in his book of word drawings "They Called Her Styrene" (Phaidon), published last year. The book reprises the down-to-earth poetry of brand names, billboards, comic-book exclamatory phrases and movie lingo that weaves throughout his MAM show, forming a witty narrative that occasionally turns sublime and poignant.
Ruscha also exploits the myth-making devices of Hollywood's dream factory, and plants that wide-angle cinematic style where we would least expect it. You find the reminder of a film director's eye in his unfolding photographic strip of gas stations or in his monumental 1963 painting of a Standard Oil station in Texas.
The dramatic, looming perpsective in this signature painting recalls the image of a speeding train seen in countless movies particularly, as Brougher points out, in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
In the '80s and '90s, Ruscha produced some of his most pared-down but evocative work, stripping his palette to foggy shades of light gray and inky black. The work reminds us of the romantic gloom of his old black-and-white movies, a feeling that remains pervasive whether his subject is a fading mythic shot of Native American tents or a 1950s car struggling toward a mountain pass.
"Like everyone else, I'm a frustrated film director," Ruscha once said.
He is clearly not a frustrated storyteller, inviting us to read his cinematic landscapes left to right, just as we would the lines of a script, poem or novel. That mix of language and landscape finds eloquent expression in his murals, which are on permanent view in the rotunda and elsewhere at Miami-Dade's Main Library.
In the rotunda, Shakespeare's line "words without thoughts never to heaven go" graces a lush stream of sunset paintings. And individual segments of his word paintings make sly homage to their surroundings, like the awkward layers of the word "sure" in the science section.
"We have people coming from all over the world not because they want to check out books, but because they want to see his paintings," says Barbara Young, the library's art services director. "It's really like turning pages as you move through the library."
Ruscha's mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go" and 56 painted lunettes are on permanent display at the Main Library, 101 W. Flagler St.
SIGN LANGUAGE PAINTER ED RUSCHA, WHOSE WORK IS NOW ON VIEW AT THE MIAMI ART MUSEUM, CAPTURES THE DRIVE-BY POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Elisa Turner, from The Miami Herald April 2001
Ed Ruscha sounds sure he made the right move when he gave up that day job as a professional sign painter.
"Computers," he explains with a slight smile, "would have put me out of business."
There's no such danger of that happening now. A well-connected Los Angeles artist, he counts actor Dennis Hopper and Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley as friends. He has even posed in a Gap ad and played a bit part in a film about radio talk shows.
But best of all, he transformed his commercial training into a brilliant international art career years ago.
Today his paintings can fetch as much as $400,000.
Still, you sense that he must have painted a bundle of bang-up signs. Right now he's standing in front of one of his sleek paintings at the Miami Art Museum. It's a snowy scene that tries too hard to sparkle, like a billboard selling some mountain valley's bottled water.
As a witty riff on commercial art and photography, it's labeled with meticulous signage.
"I call that typeface Boy Scout Utility Modern," he says with affectionate pride, his cornflower blue eyes flashing beneath barely spiked silver hair. "If a lineman from the telephone company got the job of a designing a poster for the annual picnic, well, that's the typeface he would use."
Signs are still on the artist's mind, as you can see in the remarkable survey "Ed Ruscha," which runs through June 3 at Miami Art Museum. The exhibition includes more than 50 paintings, drawings and books spanning nearly four decades. And looking at his vision of everything from parking lots and film credits to sublime sunbursts, it's clear that Ruscha remains a professional sign painter--though on the big scale of a California thoroughfare.
With a laconic sense of humor and a love for journeys westward, Ruscha's art points us toward a truly American cinematic flow of roads and words whisking past our dusty windshields. The paintings include a behind-the-scenes view of the famous letters spelling out "Hollywood" next to a freeway. Then there's his empty, apocalyptic map of Sunset Boulevard and his grand painting of the signage for a Standard Oil gas station in Amarillo, Texas.
Works like this have made him the art world's terse but telling road writer.
"There's glory," he insists in an interview at MAM, "in word combinations for somebody selling tires."
In the 1960s, Ruscha's affection for drive-by ordinariness earned him acclaim as an L.A.-styled Pop artist. That's not a title he likes, nor one suitable to the plot twists of his career.
Life in L.A. has not been the only thing that has shaped his life, he says.
"The whole Western United States--I see it as a great, expansive land with the Grand Canyon and all these beautiful places that are really inspiring, and somehow that gets into my work," he says.
In fact, Ruscha, 63, is itching for another road trip, this time to Wyoming. Nudging him on is "Annals of the Former World," a book by John McPhee about geology in the Western states.
"It rekindled my interest to get in a car and go driving, just see the landscape and take a camera," he says. "I was seeing the parallel between his [McPhee's] interest in geology and my life as an artist. He was talking about flowing volcanic mud, full of rock fragments.
"Art history moves in the same way. It makes its own garbage and people learn from it. It's a rolling-never-stopping kind of thing."
On the road, he turns the radio dial to R&B or jazz.
"It's like a soundtrack for what I'm seeing," he says. "Looking out the window is almost like seeing a movie. You're constantly surprising yourself. I love driving just for that alone."
CROSSING COUNTRY
His love for long drives started early. After finishing high school in 1956, Ruscha climbed into his 6-year-old Ford and rolled across Route 66 from his home in Oklahoma City to art school in Los Angeles. It was a trip he repeated many times, finding some of his most famously deadpan images and making monuments out of mundane gas stations.
"I had a desperate need for gasoline and moving at the same time," he remembers. "I thought there was pictorial juice to these gas stations."
Late 1950s L.A. was a good place to be an artist. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was about to open and the new Ferus Gallery was a magnet for young local talent, also staging pioneer shows of collage art by Kurt Schwitters and the work of a new kid from New York named Andy Warhol.
And in 1963, Marcel Duchamp came to town. This pivotal figure in 20th Century art struck Ruscha as a brainy but down-to-earth alternative to the "chain-smoking, macho [Jackson] Pollock."
It was a fortuitous encounter, coming at a time when Ruscha was growing disenchanted with the heroic, painterly flourishes of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Not only was Ruscha leaning toward the attention to ordinary items of daily life celebrated by Pop art, but he found that Duchamp suggested more deliberate ways to conceive ideas for art. Ruscha learned to plan art in his mind, as he did with commercial illustration or typesetting, and then execute it. Early works were a roiling mix of brand names and paint, but the brush strokes quickly turned thin and flat.
In the '60s and early '70s, he went through a startling range of approaches, painting with blueberry extract and photographing a typewriter tossed from the window of a speeding car.
During these turbulent years he married, and with wife Danna has a son Eddie, now a musician. The couple divorced in 1975, only to remarry 13 years later in the same county courthouse.
"I lived with other women and she lived with other men and we got back together," he says simply.
At about the same time, Ruscha did a series of "silhouette" paintings that evoked the look of film noir.
Riley, the Miami Heat coach who got to know Ruscha when Riley coached the L.A. Lakers, owns a work from this series showing a simple house as lonely refuge.
"People take a look at it, and it brings tears to their eyes," Riley says. "Here's a man who paints every day, who works very hard in his studio, but when he goes out he's a fun man to be around."
PUBLIC ART
In 1985, Ruscha tackled his first public artwork, the splendid mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go," that lines the rotunda of the Main Library of the Miami-Dade Public Library System. Four years later his 56 lunette paintings were installed over arched windows around the library.
"I think it's one of the great pieces of public art in the last part of the 20th Century," MAM director Suzanne Delehanty says. "It's totally appropriate for the library, and I love the beautiful skies that are painted by the words."
"I was really nervous about accepting the job," says Ruscha, who admits he was daunted by the 128-foot circumference of the rotunda.
He felt too old to paint on the site, a la Michelangelo. But once the logistics were solved, he threw himself into the task, camping out all night inside the library to study Miami history.
Ruscha saw the project as "not just an architectural setting but a human setting," says Cesar Trasobares, then director of Miami-Dade Arts in Public Places, which commissioned the work. "As he got to know people here, he had a better sense for issues like language and local color."
That rare sense of language and local color has become Ruscha's signature.
"I can read the Yellow Pages like a novel," he insists. "I can just flip anywhere, and there seems to be a new frontier. It opens up to expose its innards, and the city is right there."
As a follow-up to my previous blog post, I'm refining the book pitch for my memoir. I know it's not in good-to-go shape yet, but it is much better than the previous one I made at the Pitch-o-Rama at the Writers Institute in early May at MDC. I really fell flat on my ass with that one (figuratively, I mean).
So here's my current book pitch (a very short summary of the essence of the book someone wants to write, designed to interest a book publisher, or not):
I wake up every morning and praise God that I'm not dead or drooling in a wheelchair, and that the rest of my family is alive and well. One rainy day our lives changed instantly in a car crash as we drove our son to start college. Yet I'll never remember this life-changing event. In a flash I was knocked into the black nothingness of a coma and hospitalized for a month while I tried to remember who I was and re-learn basic skills I'd always taken for granted, like talking, walking, sipping coffee, even the typing I did as a journalist. Today I'm blessed to look as if my life has returned to normal, but now I live with my "new normal": dealing with the post-traumantic stress disorder dreadfully familiar to those who've suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, football game, or war zone. I've said good-bye to my former life and income: I lost my newspaper job. Driving on expressways gives me the creeps. Painful reminders of my past trigger flashbacks, also bad dreams that seem real until I wake up to realize I'm not being strangled, or that someone I know isn't amputating my feet.
First things first: More visual arts news connected to Miami
So very sad to report the death of feminist art historian and retired University of Miami professor Paula Hays Harper on June 3, 2012. When I read The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor Brecher in the paper on June 13, 2012, I cried and cried, even though I had known she had been quite sick for such a long time. Mark your calendar, if you will be in Miami then, for the memorial service her friends are planning at noon on July 20 at The Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach 33139.
Had to share this touching email comment I received re Paula from Billie G. Lynn, Associate Professor of Sculpture at University of Miami:
"She was a great teacher and I loved her sense of humor. . .sooooo wicked and yet right on! The students of the future will miss her and not know quite what is missing, but I'll be sure to tell them about her. As you well know, no one knows the hour of their death, as the bumper sticker says: 'Live like it's your last day on Earth because one day you'll be right.'
"She as a great woman, let's honor her by living outrageously."
For particularly noteworthy exhibits in Miami this summer, check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com In the June ARTnews, you might like to catch my review of Rita Ackermann solo show at MOCA in North Miami, page 98. Also note in that issue on page 42 story about how ARTnews has won a prize for its excellence in journalism.
Sebastian Spreng tells me about an exhibit of 150 artworks by Julio Larraz, who lives in Miami, opening July 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm and up through the last week in Sept. 2012 at Galleria D'Arte Contini, Via S. Marco 2765 / 30124 in Venice, Italy. To rsvp call this Miami ph number: 305-665-3334. For more info about this exhibit, see www.continiarte.com
Tina Spiro tells me she has been invited for the second time in a row to exhibit at Beijing Biennale, this time for 2012, at the National Museum of China. Her tryptych oil painting "Rembrandt 2012: Back to the Future" will be featured to represent Jamaica. Other news: Tina (who used to live and work here and has since moved to Jamaica but we keep in touch via email) has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Gallery of Jamaica and asked to serve as the chair of the Exhibitions Committee of that institution.
Joel Hoffman, director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, has created a blog to document the process of replacing Vizcaya's Courtyard skylight. It's really been an eyesore for years in that quite beautiful place. Plans are to finish this project in September. Find the link to his blog at the homepage at www.vizcaya.org
My BFF Rosie Gordon-Wallace tells me about this exhibit, which sounds quite exciting and impressive. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator presents this in partnership with the Miami Dade College Art Gallery System and MDC Live!:
"Milagros: Portal Culture" by Felici Asteinza
National Performance Network / Visual Artists Network Residency
Opening night reception is Thurs. June 28, from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd. Artist Talk is Friday, June 29 at 1 pm. This exhibit continues through July 27, 2012 as a DVCAI Caribbean Crossroads exhibition series. All programs are free and open to the public.
Milagros: Portal Culture
Felici Asteinza, Caribbean artist whose one week NPN/VAN community residency is June 24-30, 2012 will create Milagros: Portal Culture, presenting a series of community partnership projects and programs, including a collaborative community-making / collecting project where artists and musicians guide participants through creation and collection of art and sound. Working with her artist group Alvin Fillastre, Evan Galbick and Elestial Sound, visitors to MDC Art Gallery System at the Freedom Tower will experience first hand the process and creation of building the installation performance space, culminating in an on-site, one-night artist musician performance.
Felici's artwork explores the ritualistic nature of creating. These multi-layered collages are embedded with re-discovered residue from the artist's studio as well as images reflecting anxieties and greed. Elaborate, precise lines become the glue between elements, creating a rhythmic, activated field.
Elestial Sound Records is a sustainable record label run by solar panels in the northern California mountains, also supporting an abundane of cutting-edge musicians from Florida. Their music plays while the installation is created, making a truly collaborative venture between the visual and music arts. The Freedom Tower's architecture has guided this site-specific installation.
WOULD LOVE TO GET COMMENTS FOR MY BLOG ABOUT WHAT READERS THOUGHT ABOUT THIS EVENT: The live performance will take place ONLY during the opening reception, Thursday, June 28 from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne, 3rd Floor.
For more info about Felici, see www.milagrosartcollective.blogspot.com For more info about Diaspora Cultural Arts Incubator, see www.diasporavibevirtualgallery.com For more info about Miami Dade College Art Gallery system, see http://www.mdc.edu/ags For more info about MDC Live! Performing Arts Series, see http://www.mdc.edu/main/mdclive
This program is sponsored by the National Performance Network (NPN) Visual Arts Network (VAN) funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, partnered with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. For more info about NPN and VAN, please see http://www.npnweb.org
Rustin Levenson, that art conservator extraordinaire, tells me how she is cleaning up Salvador Dali, his artwork, that is! See "Four Salvador Dali masterworks cleaned, repaired in public" by Lennie Bennett, Tampa Bay Times Art Critc (thank goodness Tampa residents have one for THEIR paper!) See http://www.tampabay.com
Cernuda Arte and Cernuda Family Collection have loaned 13 artworks to "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," a remarkable collaborative group of exhibitions in New York now on view at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Queens Museum of Art. Congrats to this gallery and collection! The loaned artworks are by Esteban Chartrand, Victor Patricio Landaluze, Domingo Ramos, Jose Cuchi Arnau, Oscar Garcia Rivera, Carlos Enriquez, Rene Portocarrero, Fedelio Ponce, Roberto Diago, Jose Bedia.
And now here's the "vintage" part of my blog. . .
CINEMATIC IN STYLE AND SIZE, RUSCHA'S ART ADMIRED WORLDWIDE by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald April 2001
"Ed Ruscha" at the Miami Art Museum is a traveling survey that charts one American artist's journeys along open roads and crowded urban intersections.
Often characterized as a Los Angeles practitioner of Pop art, Ruscha (pronounced ROO-shay) resists that label, as does the lyrical and deadpan variety of the 50-plus paintings, books, drawings and photography that make up this survey covering nearly 40 years of an inventive and internationally admired career.
Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, this not-to-be-missed show is accompanied by a 196-page hard-bound catalog. Unusual among museum tomes, this catalog contains essays of exceptional insight and clarity by Kerry Brougher, chief curator at the Hirshhorn, and Neal Benezra, the Art Institute of Chicago's deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art.
They discuss important precedents for Ruscha's work, including Jasper Johns's famous 1955 Pop painting, "Target with Four Faces." Another critical influence was Robert Frank's often surreal 1958 book of photographs, "The Americans," showing bleak highways dotted with cafes and filling stations.
Throughout his career, Ruscha has melded photography and painting, building upon these sources by adding his droll trove of "found words," as he describes them in his book of word drawings "They Called Her Styrene" (Phaidon), published last year. The book reprises the down-to-earth poetry of brand names, billboards, comic-book exclamatory phrases and movie lingo that weaves throughout his MAM show, forming a witty narrative that occasionally turns sublime and poignant.
Ruscha also exploits the myth-making devices of Hollywood's dream factory, and plants that wide-angle cinematic style where we would least expect it. You find the reminder of a film director's eye in his unfolding photographic strip of gas stations or in his monumental 1963 painting of a Standard Oil station in Texas.
The dramatic, looming perpsective in this signature painting recalls the image of a speeding train seen in countless movies particularly, as Brougher points out, in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
In the '80s and '90s, Ruscha produced some of his most pared-down but evocative work, stripping his palette to foggy shades of light gray and inky black. The work reminds us of the romantic gloom of his old black-and-white movies, a feeling that remains pervasive whether his subject is a fading mythic shot of Native American tents or a 1950s car struggling toward a mountain pass.
"Like everyone else, I'm a frustrated film director," Ruscha once said.
He is clearly not a frustrated storyteller, inviting us to read his cinematic landscapes left to right, just as we would the lines of a script, poem or novel. That mix of language and landscape finds eloquent expression in his murals, which are on permanent view in the rotunda and elsewhere at Miami-Dade's Main Library.
In the rotunda, Shakespeare's line "words without thoughts never to heaven go" graces a lush stream of sunset paintings. And individual segments of his word paintings make sly homage to their surroundings, like the awkward layers of the word "sure" in the science section.
"We have people coming from all over the world not because they want to check out books, but because they want to see his paintings," says Barbara Young, the library's art services director. "It's really like turning pages as you move through the library."
Ruscha's mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go" and 56 painted lunettes are on permanent display at the Main Library, 101 W. Flagler St.
SIGN LANGUAGE PAINTER ED RUSCHA, WHOSE WORK IS NOW ON VIEW AT THE MIAMI ART MUSEUM, CAPTURES THE DRIVE-BY POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Elisa Turner, from The Miami Herald April 2001
Ed Ruscha sounds sure he made the right move when he gave up that day job as a professional sign painter.
"Computers," he explains with a slight smile, "would have put me out of business."
There's no such danger of that happening now. A well-connected Los Angeles artist, he counts actor Dennis Hopper and Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley as friends. He has even posed in a Gap ad and played a bit part in a film about radio talk shows.
But best of all, he transformed his commercial training into a brilliant international art career years ago.
Today his paintings can fetch as much as $400,000.
Still, you sense that he must have painted a bundle of bang-up signs. Right now he's standing in front of one of his sleek paintings at the Miami Art Museum. It's a snowy scene that tries too hard to sparkle, like a billboard selling some mountain valley's bottled water.
As a witty riff on commercial art and photography, it's labeled with meticulous signage.
"I call that typeface Boy Scout Utility Modern," he says with affectionate pride, his cornflower blue eyes flashing beneath barely spiked silver hair. "If a lineman from the telephone company got the job of a designing a poster for the annual picnic, well, that's the typeface he would use."
Signs are still on the artist's mind, as you can see in the remarkable survey "Ed Ruscha," which runs through June 3 at Miami Art Museum. The exhibition includes more than 50 paintings, drawings and books spanning nearly four decades. And looking at his vision of everything from parking lots and film credits to sublime sunbursts, it's clear that Ruscha remains a professional sign painter--though on the big scale of a California thoroughfare.
With a laconic sense of humor and a love for journeys westward, Ruscha's art points us toward a truly American cinematic flow of roads and words whisking past our dusty windshields. The paintings include a behind-the-scenes view of the famous letters spelling out "Hollywood" next to a freeway. Then there's his empty, apocalyptic map of Sunset Boulevard and his grand painting of the signage for a Standard Oil gas station in Amarillo, Texas.
Works like this have made him the art world's terse but telling road writer.
"There's glory," he insists in an interview at MAM, "in word combinations for somebody selling tires."
In the 1960s, Ruscha's affection for drive-by ordinariness earned him acclaim as an L.A.-styled Pop artist. That's not a title he likes, nor one suitable to the plot twists of his career.
Life in L.A. has not been the only thing that has shaped his life, he says.
"The whole Western United States--I see it as a great, expansive land with the Grand Canyon and all these beautiful places that are really inspiring, and somehow that gets into my work," he says.
In fact, Ruscha, 63, is itching for another road trip, this time to Wyoming. Nudging him on is "Annals of the Former World," a book by John McPhee about geology in the Western states.
"It rekindled my interest to get in a car and go driving, just see the landscape and take a camera," he says. "I was seeing the parallel between his [McPhee's] interest in geology and my life as an artist. He was talking about flowing volcanic mud, full of rock fragments.
"Art history moves in the same way. It makes its own garbage and people learn from it. It's a rolling-never-stopping kind of thing."
On the road, he turns the radio dial to R&B or jazz.
"It's like a soundtrack for what I'm seeing," he says. "Looking out the window is almost like seeing a movie. You're constantly surprising yourself. I love driving just for that alone."
CROSSING COUNTRY
His love for long drives started early. After finishing high school in 1956, Ruscha climbed into his 6-year-old Ford and rolled across Route 66 from his home in Oklahoma City to art school in Los Angeles. It was a trip he repeated many times, finding some of his most famously deadpan images and making monuments out of mundane gas stations.
"I had a desperate need for gasoline and moving at the same time," he remembers. "I thought there was pictorial juice to these gas stations."
Late 1950s L.A. was a good place to be an artist. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was about to open and the new Ferus Gallery was a magnet for young local talent, also staging pioneer shows of collage art by Kurt Schwitters and the work of a new kid from New York named Andy Warhol.
And in 1963, Marcel Duchamp came to town. This pivotal figure in 20th Century art struck Ruscha as a brainy but down-to-earth alternative to the "chain-smoking, macho [Jackson] Pollock."
It was a fortuitous encounter, coming at a time when Ruscha was growing disenchanted with the heroic, painterly flourishes of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Not only was Ruscha leaning toward the attention to ordinary items of daily life celebrated by Pop art, but he found that Duchamp suggested more deliberate ways to conceive ideas for art. Ruscha learned to plan art in his mind, as he did with commercial illustration or typesetting, and then execute it. Early works were a roiling mix of brand names and paint, but the brush strokes quickly turned thin and flat.
In the '60s and early '70s, he went through a startling range of approaches, painting with blueberry extract and photographing a typewriter tossed from the window of a speeding car.
During these turbulent years he married, and with wife Danna has a son Eddie, now a musician. The couple divorced in 1975, only to remarry 13 years later in the same county courthouse.
"I lived with other women and she lived with other men and we got back together," he says simply.
At about the same time, Ruscha did a series of "silhouette" paintings that evoked the look of film noir.
Riley, the Miami Heat coach who got to know Ruscha when Riley coached the L.A. Lakers, owns a work from this series showing a simple house as lonely refuge.
"People take a look at it, and it brings tears to their eyes," Riley says. "Here's a man who paints every day, who works very hard in his studio, but when he goes out he's a fun man to be around."
PUBLIC ART
In 1985, Ruscha tackled his first public artwork, the splendid mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go," that lines the rotunda of the Main Library of the Miami-Dade Public Library System. Four years later his 56 lunette paintings were installed over arched windows around the library.
"I think it's one of the great pieces of public art in the last part of the 20th Century," MAM director Suzanne Delehanty says. "It's totally appropriate for the library, and I love the beautiful skies that are painted by the words."
"I was really nervous about accepting the job," says Ruscha, who admits he was daunted by the 128-foot circumference of the rotunda.
He felt too old to paint on the site, a la Michelangelo. But once the logistics were solved, he threw himself into the task, camping out all night inside the library to study Miami history.
Ruscha saw the project as "not just an architectural setting but a human setting," says Cesar Trasobares, then director of Miami-Dade Arts in Public Places, which commissioned the work. "As he got to know people here, he had a better sense for issues like language and local color."
That rare sense of language and local color has become Ruscha's signature.
"I can read the Yellow Pages like a novel," he insists. "I can just flip anywhere, and there seems to be a new frontier. It opens up to expose its innards, and the city is right there."
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Begins Memoir
Yes, I know that it is not really kosher for a journalist to become part of the story she is covering. . . but, well, as you will see below from the beginnings of my memoir, I never went to "j-school," as those in the know like to call journalism school, so I trust readers will cut me some slack. . .
I think it was just great that I could attend The Miami Writers Institute, the creative writing conference in early May at The Center @ Miami Dade College. See www.flcenterlitarts.com for more info or google The Center @ Miami Dade College at www.google.com . For the second year in a row, I have attended a workshop in memoir writing. It has been really helpful and encouraging. This year, the workshop was taught by Da Chen, author of the memoir Sounds of the River. He really helped me plot a "roadmap" for finding a way to tell my story.
What I have posted below is most--but not all--of the writing sample I submitted for discussion at the workshop. Since then, I have slightly revised it, but I know I am a long, long way from writing a book-length memoir. Maybe as a book it will never see the light of day. . . but I would just like to do it anyway.
This memoir is probably one of the last big ideas I have had since my post-Miami Herald life began several years ago. And believe me, some of those big ideas have been doozies, lemme tell ya. Some of you reading this may remember at least one of them. . . But they all came to naught. So now, I am going to start on this one.
Before I begin more of this blog post, I want to say THANK YOU THANK YOU!! to my way-beyond-fab daughter Margaret Smith. She designed this blog for me because, as many of you know, I am indeed a self-confessed "digital dinosaur." There is just NO WAY NO HOW I could have set this up myself. She learned so much at the private Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida, where she graduated with honors and now has a job in her field of interior design. Ringling has terrific computer resources for designers. I am very grateful and proud that I was able to contribute over the years to her college fund thanks to all those years of working so hard for the Knight Ridder-owned Miami Herald.
Monday on CNN I just heard about this horrific story re an American citizen. See www.freejacobnow.com
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
LegalArt, at 1035 North Miami Ave, is offering this ONE NIGHT ONLY chance to see video-based works by national and international artists. It is 8 to 11 pm, Friday, May 25, 2012 on the second and fourth floors of LegalArt building, also at Corner Bar, on northwest corner of LegalArt building. This exhibition is organized by curatorial collective Southernmost Situations and will include video-based sculptures and installations, also looped reel of short videos. Among the artists: Clifton Childree, Alice Raymond, Magnus Sigurdson, TM Sisters, Antonia Wright. For more info, contact Dominique Breard, email info@legalartmiami.org or ph. 786-347-2360. www.legalartmiami.org
Norton Museum of Art announces the establishment of an award for emerging photographers. It is called the Rudin Prize and will be awarded annually. It will be coordinated by curator Tim B. Wride. Winner receives $20,000 and a solo exhibition. Panelists selecting the award nominees: John Baldessari, Graciela Iturbide, Susan Meiselas, Michal Rovner, Yinka Shonibare. Prize named for late New York City real estate developer Lewis Rudin. Inaugural prize awarded December 2012. Norton Museum of Art is located at 1451 S. Olive Avenue, West Palm Beach FL. More info: see www.norton.org
An Annual Winner for Art and Education: The Education Fund's Charity Auction of Art made by 5-to-18 year old public school students is set for May 24, with 100 percent of proceeds from art sales donated back to their classrooms to help teachers purchase supplies for next year's lessons. Auction will be held in the historic Moore Building in Miami's Design District. Purchase tkts in advance through May 18 online at www.educationfund.org/programs/silentartauction or purchase tkts at the door. For more info call 305-892-5099. Tkts start at $100. This is really an exceptional event--I remember both covering and attending this during my time with The Miami Herald. On view this year will be over 150 artworks created by Miami-Dade County Public School students and teachers representing nearly 50 schools. This event has raised more than $722,000 since it began. It allows students and teachers to have access to donated and recycled materials for art making, courtesy of Ocean Bank Center for Educational Materials. Visionary event sponsors of this visionary event: Ocean Bank, The Children's Trust, Whole Foods, DACRA, and Bacardi.
Bridge Red Studios / Project Space located at 12425 NE 13th Ave #5, North Miami FL is now showing the work of Zaydee Martinez, Joe Nicastri, Laura Tan. Really try not to miss this. Closing brunch is Sunday, July 8, 2012, from noon to 4 pm. Also you can see this by appt; call 786-390-8915. www.bridgeredstudios.com This is an exhibition of 3 painters who, as the press release says, "explore representation with all the complexity that the word re-presentaion connotes." Also in the same building, in the downstairs space of Lou Anne Colodny known as Under the Bridge is another not-to-be-missed be show: "smoke signals: portals y paisajes." This show aims to focus on the "concept of a lens as a portal, frame, window, an entry point that one can further look through to unlock narratives beyond the limits of a two-dimensional frame . . ." It is curated by William Cordova. Among the artists: Leslie Hewitt, Robert Thiele, Glexis Novoa, Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Onajide Shabaka [for more info on Onajide, see my first post on this blog], Luis Gispert. Closing brunch is also July 8, 2012, from noon to 4 pm. Very cool Miami artcentric synergy in this space!
New World School of the Arts continues to celebrate its 25th anniversary year with further examples of how it makes many pioneering marks on Miami's cultural development. This year it is ranked among America's Top High Schools by U.S. News and World Report, earning the prestigious Gold Medal Award. NWSA is ranked 17th place in the state of Florida and 186th among all high schools in the nation this year. NWSA is home this year to two Presidential Scholars in the Arts, out of 20 scholars recognized nationally. Scholars are Kelley Kessell, in music-theater, and Jessica Suhr, in visual arts.
Here's another don't-miss opportunity for those of us lucky enough to both "summer" and "winter" in Miami: The fabulous Community Arts Program Summer Concert Series is now starting its 27th season! Concerts are 8 pm every other Thursday evening June 7 to August 16. Concerts held at my totally terrific church: Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ at 3010 DeSoto Blvd, Coral Gables (directly opposite the Biltmore Hotel.) First concert is June 7: Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Tkts are $30 each in advance, $35 at the door if available. Order by calling 305-448-7421, ext 153. See www.CommunityArtsProgram.org
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR by Elisa Turner....or....FROM THE MIDWEST TO MIAMI: MY STAR-CROSSED AFFAIR WITH THE JOURNALISM (working titles) by Elisa Turner
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place.
When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street-smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up North." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers" who dramatically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things that I was not good at when I moved to Miami with my husband in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
All the summers thereafter I discovered would be insufferably sticky scorchers in Miami, especially when I was pregnant. When I would gripe about how weird I thought Christmas lights looked on palm trees, family and friends would roll their eyes. "There are no seasons here," I complained. "Yes, there are. They are just more subtle," people would say. "Well, yes, there are two," I would snap. "Hot and REALLY hot."
But, after all this time, I have made my peace with Miami. My terrific husband of over 30 years and I have raised two wonderful adult children. They grew up with the opportunity to spend every day of their young lives outside. They never experienced chilly "snow days" that kept them stuck in their home, away from friends from school. They learned Spanish in public elementary school in Miami. When learning how to drive, they never had to confront icy roads.
And professionally, I grew into a life I would never have thought possible back when I grumpily relocated here from New York. Miami opened up countless adventures in a new world for me then. It is still doing that.
The city has always been a place where people come to re-invent themselves, to start anew. Somehow, without ever taking a course in journalism or art criticism, I became the last Miami Herald art critic when the Herald was the flagship newspaper of Knight Ridder, which sadly no longer exists.
Because I was never a full-time employee at the paper, I worked in my book-lined study at home, so that I could handle the busy demands of raising children and running a household. I started working especially hard for the paper in 1995 when Helen L. Kohen, the previous art critic, left. I recall reading her good-bye column and going to a farewell dinner for her with newspaper colleagues. My children were in grade school then. But even after Helen left, I never had my own computer in the newsroom. It made sense for me to drive to museums, galleries and art events from my home without going to the newspaper office. I would often rush back to pick up my kids and cook dinner and then work late or early in the morning.
Through the wonders of telecommuting (and a reliable modem), I usually filed my stories on time. It was a hectic, harried and enthralling life. I had always loved words and images, had studied so much literature and art history, so what could be a better career for a working mom? And then there were the fabulous international assignments for the Herald: the paper sent me once to the Havana Bienal in Cuba, twice to the Venice Biennale in Italy, once to Art Basel in Switzerland, and once to Haiti.
That trip to Cuba was my first overseas gig. When I came back to write my story in Miami, I was astonished to see it printed with the dateline Havana under my byline. It looked as if I had written it in Havana and filed it from there--how remarkable that newspapers could do something like this, I thought, which just shows was a journalistic neophyte I really was. Nevertheless, the experience was so thrilling that I wanted to do it again, and I dreamed up more angles to persuade the paper to let me travel again.
When my half-Cuban husband Eric Smith traveled with me to Havana while I covered the art scene for the paper, we found time to visit some of his relatives who still live in Havana. We brought them medicine from Miami in a carry-on suitcase. It was a warm, friendly encounter even though we wrongly assumed we had never met. We spoke for about an hour in an apartment with modest decor recalling the 1950s. Actually, they did most of the talking, with Eric occasionally translating for me since I don't speak Spanish. Elenita, who was the first cousin of Eric's late mom, remembered that she had first met Eric in Miami when she came to help her cousin take care of him soon after he was born.
At my urging, Eric asked Elenita why she still lived in Cuba though so much of her family has moved to Miami. She sighed. Then she said, "Some of us have to stay in Cuba."
This is perhaps the brightest memory I have of those fabulous trips, and one I often recall as I see how the city today is frequently defined by its evolving relationship with Cuba.
In spite of those opportunities to travel, my professional relationship with the Herald ended with a thundering bang.
My family and I were nearly killed in a horrific car accident in 2004. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, I was plunged into the black nothingness of a coma. Afterwards I struggled through hours and days of therapy to learn once again how to eat and drink, to talk and walk. My fingers stumbled on the keyboard until I taught myself how to type again.
Cards, telegrams and orchids from family, friends, co-workers, also from so many people in the art world, kept arriving at my various hospital rooms (there were about four) and home. It was an astonishing deluge of concern for a free-lance art critic who never thought she was good enough because she did not have a degree in journalism or art history and was not full-time at the Herald.
Still more shocking surprises: journalism was changing dramatically, especially in Miami. In 2006 The Miami Herald was sold to The McClatchy Company and the venerable Knight Ridder newspaper chain dissolved. As a free-lancer I lost access to 21 years' worth of work in the Herald archives. While I was still learning how to live with the post-traumatic stress disorder that accompanies a brain injury, the doors slammed shut on my life as art critic for The Miami Herald.
The nasty truth piercing the heart of an exceptionally productive newspaper career is that no one from The Miami Herald has ever told me that I am no longer an art critic for that paper. I still have my photo I.D. to gain entry to the Herald building at One Herald Plaza in Miami. This building may soon be demolished as its valuable bayfront location has been sold, and the Herald will eventually have to move to another location. To me, all this is, as Aunt Velva from Fayette County, Illinois, might have said, as ugly as home-made sin.
TO BE CONTINUED . . . (not sure when)
[Blogger's Note: I may not post another blog entry until Thursday, June 21, 2012. In the meantime, readers can read my previous blog posts here, also see my blog at www.artcircuits.com or to see my original ArtCentric blog, google Elisa Turner at www.google.com . Be sure to sign up to receive email notices when I post another entry on this blog. Also you can become a follower of this blog by clicking on my bio info; then see info about doing that on lower left-hand side of screen.]
I think it was just great that I could attend The Miami Writers Institute, the creative writing conference in early May at The Center @ Miami Dade College. See www.flcenterlitarts.com for more info or google The Center @ Miami Dade College at www.google.com . For the second year in a row, I have attended a workshop in memoir writing. It has been really helpful and encouraging. This year, the workshop was taught by Da Chen, author of the memoir Sounds of the River. He really helped me plot a "roadmap" for finding a way to tell my story.
What I have posted below is most--but not all--of the writing sample I submitted for discussion at the workshop. Since then, I have slightly revised it, but I know I am a long, long way from writing a book-length memoir. Maybe as a book it will never see the light of day. . . but I would just like to do it anyway.
This memoir is probably one of the last big ideas I have had since my post-Miami Herald life began several years ago. And believe me, some of those big ideas have been doozies, lemme tell ya. Some of you reading this may remember at least one of them. . . But they all came to naught. So now, I am going to start on this one.
Before I begin more of this blog post, I want to say THANK YOU THANK YOU!! to my way-beyond-fab daughter Margaret Smith. She designed this blog for me because, as many of you know, I am indeed a self-confessed "digital dinosaur." There is just NO WAY NO HOW I could have set this up myself. She learned so much at the private Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida, where she graduated with honors and now has a job in her field of interior design. Ringling has terrific computer resources for designers. I am very grateful and proud that I was able to contribute over the years to her college fund thanks to all those years of working so hard for the Knight Ridder-owned Miami Herald.
Monday on CNN I just heard about this horrific story re an American citizen. See www.freejacobnow.com
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
LegalArt, at 1035 North Miami Ave, is offering this ONE NIGHT ONLY chance to see video-based works by national and international artists. It is 8 to 11 pm, Friday, May 25, 2012 on the second and fourth floors of LegalArt building, also at Corner Bar, on northwest corner of LegalArt building. This exhibition is organized by curatorial collective Southernmost Situations and will include video-based sculptures and installations, also looped reel of short videos. Among the artists: Clifton Childree, Alice Raymond, Magnus Sigurdson, TM Sisters, Antonia Wright. For more info, contact Dominique Breard, email info@legalartmiami.org or ph. 786-347-2360. www.legalartmiami.org
Norton Museum of Art announces the establishment of an award for emerging photographers. It is called the Rudin Prize and will be awarded annually. It will be coordinated by curator Tim B. Wride. Winner receives $20,000 and a solo exhibition. Panelists selecting the award nominees: John Baldessari, Graciela Iturbide, Susan Meiselas, Michal Rovner, Yinka Shonibare. Prize named for late New York City real estate developer Lewis Rudin. Inaugural prize awarded December 2012. Norton Museum of Art is located at 1451 S. Olive Avenue, West Palm Beach FL. More info: see www.norton.org
An Annual Winner for Art and Education: The Education Fund's Charity Auction of Art made by 5-to-18 year old public school students is set for May 24, with 100 percent of proceeds from art sales donated back to their classrooms to help teachers purchase supplies for next year's lessons. Auction will be held in the historic Moore Building in Miami's Design District. Purchase tkts in advance through May 18 online at www.educationfund.org/programs/silentartauction or purchase tkts at the door. For more info call 305-892-5099. Tkts start at $100. This is really an exceptional event--I remember both covering and attending this during my time with The Miami Herald. On view this year will be over 150 artworks created by Miami-Dade County Public School students and teachers representing nearly 50 schools. This event has raised more than $722,000 since it began. It allows students and teachers to have access to donated and recycled materials for art making, courtesy of Ocean Bank Center for Educational Materials. Visionary event sponsors of this visionary event: Ocean Bank, The Children's Trust, Whole Foods, DACRA, and Bacardi.
Bridge Red Studios / Project Space located at 12425 NE 13th Ave #5, North Miami FL is now showing the work of Zaydee Martinez, Joe Nicastri, Laura Tan. Really try not to miss this. Closing brunch is Sunday, July 8, 2012, from noon to 4 pm. Also you can see this by appt; call 786-390-8915. www.bridgeredstudios.com This is an exhibition of 3 painters who, as the press release says, "explore representation with all the complexity that the word re-presentaion connotes." Also in the same building, in the downstairs space of Lou Anne Colodny known as Under the Bridge is another not-to-be-missed be show: "smoke signals: portals y paisajes." This show aims to focus on the "concept of a lens as a portal, frame, window, an entry point that one can further look through to unlock narratives beyond the limits of a two-dimensional frame . . ." It is curated by William Cordova. Among the artists: Leslie Hewitt, Robert Thiele, Glexis Novoa, Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Onajide Shabaka [for more info on Onajide, see my first post on this blog], Luis Gispert. Closing brunch is also July 8, 2012, from noon to 4 pm. Very cool Miami artcentric synergy in this space!
New World School of the Arts continues to celebrate its 25th anniversary year with further examples of how it makes many pioneering marks on Miami's cultural development. This year it is ranked among America's Top High Schools by U.S. News and World Report, earning the prestigious Gold Medal Award. NWSA is ranked 17th place in the state of Florida and 186th among all high schools in the nation this year. NWSA is home this year to two Presidential Scholars in the Arts, out of 20 scholars recognized nationally. Scholars are Kelley Kessell, in music-theater, and Jessica Suhr, in visual arts.
Here's another don't-miss opportunity for those of us lucky enough to both "summer" and "winter" in Miami: The fabulous Community Arts Program Summer Concert Series is now starting its 27th season! Concerts are 8 pm every other Thursday evening June 7 to August 16. Concerts held at my totally terrific church: Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ at 3010 DeSoto Blvd, Coral Gables (directly opposite the Biltmore Hotel.) First concert is June 7: Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Tkts are $30 each in advance, $35 at the door if available. Order by calling 305-448-7421, ext 153. See www.CommunityArtsProgram.org
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR by Elisa Turner....or....FROM THE MIDWEST TO MIAMI: MY STAR-CROSSED AFFAIR WITH THE JOURNALISM (working titles) by Elisa Turner
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place.
When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street-smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up North." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers" who dramatically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things that I was not good at when I moved to Miami with my husband in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
All the summers thereafter I discovered would be insufferably sticky scorchers in Miami, especially when I was pregnant. When I would gripe about how weird I thought Christmas lights looked on palm trees, family and friends would roll their eyes. "There are no seasons here," I complained. "Yes, there are. They are just more subtle," people would say. "Well, yes, there are two," I would snap. "Hot and REALLY hot."
But, after all this time, I have made my peace with Miami. My terrific husband of over 30 years and I have raised two wonderful adult children. They grew up with the opportunity to spend every day of their young lives outside. They never experienced chilly "snow days" that kept them stuck in their home, away from friends from school. They learned Spanish in public elementary school in Miami. When learning how to drive, they never had to confront icy roads.
And professionally, I grew into a life I would never have thought possible back when I grumpily relocated here from New York. Miami opened up countless adventures in a new world for me then. It is still doing that.
The city has always been a place where people come to re-invent themselves, to start anew. Somehow, without ever taking a course in journalism or art criticism, I became the last Miami Herald art critic when the Herald was the flagship newspaper of Knight Ridder, which sadly no longer exists.
Because I was never a full-time employee at the paper, I worked in my book-lined study at home, so that I could handle the busy demands of raising children and running a household. I started working especially hard for the paper in 1995 when Helen L. Kohen, the previous art critic, left. I recall reading her good-bye column and going to a farewell dinner for her with newspaper colleagues. My children were in grade school then. But even after Helen left, I never had my own computer in the newsroom. It made sense for me to drive to museums, galleries and art events from my home without going to the newspaper office. I would often rush back to pick up my kids and cook dinner and then work late or early in the morning.
Through the wonders of telecommuting (and a reliable modem), I usually filed my stories on time. It was a hectic, harried and enthralling life. I had always loved words and images, had studied so much literature and art history, so what could be a better career for a working mom? And then there were the fabulous international assignments for the Herald: the paper sent me once to the Havana Bienal in Cuba, twice to the Venice Biennale in Italy, once to Art Basel in Switzerland, and once to Haiti.
That trip to Cuba was my first overseas gig. When I came back to write my story in Miami, I was astonished to see it printed with the dateline Havana under my byline. It looked as if I had written it in Havana and filed it from there--how remarkable that newspapers could do something like this, I thought, which just shows was a journalistic neophyte I really was. Nevertheless, the experience was so thrilling that I wanted to do it again, and I dreamed up more angles to persuade the paper to let me travel again.
When my half-Cuban husband Eric Smith traveled with me to Havana while I covered the art scene for the paper, we found time to visit some of his relatives who still live in Havana. We brought them medicine from Miami in a carry-on suitcase. It was a warm, friendly encounter even though we wrongly assumed we had never met. We spoke for about an hour in an apartment with modest decor recalling the 1950s. Actually, they did most of the talking, with Eric occasionally translating for me since I don't speak Spanish. Elenita, who was the first cousin of Eric's late mom, remembered that she had first met Eric in Miami when she came to help her cousin take care of him soon after he was born.
At my urging, Eric asked Elenita why she still lived in Cuba though so much of her family has moved to Miami. She sighed. Then she said, "Some of us have to stay in Cuba."
This is perhaps the brightest memory I have of those fabulous trips, and one I often recall as I see how the city today is frequently defined by its evolving relationship with Cuba.
In spite of those opportunities to travel, my professional relationship with the Herald ended with a thundering bang.
My family and I were nearly killed in a horrific car accident in 2004. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, I was plunged into the black nothingness of a coma. Afterwards I struggled through hours and days of therapy to learn once again how to eat and drink, to talk and walk. My fingers stumbled on the keyboard until I taught myself how to type again.
Cards, telegrams and orchids from family, friends, co-workers, also from so many people in the art world, kept arriving at my various hospital rooms (there were about four) and home. It was an astonishing deluge of concern for a free-lance art critic who never thought she was good enough because she did not have a degree in journalism or art history and was not full-time at the Herald.
Still more shocking surprises: journalism was changing dramatically, especially in Miami. In 2006 The Miami Herald was sold to The McClatchy Company and the venerable Knight Ridder newspaper chain dissolved. As a free-lancer I lost access to 21 years' worth of work in the Herald archives. While I was still learning how to live with the post-traumatic stress disorder that accompanies a brain injury, the doors slammed shut on my life as art critic for The Miami Herald.
The nasty truth piercing the heart of an exceptionally productive newspaper career is that no one from The Miami Herald has ever told me that I am no longer an art critic for that paper. I still have my photo I.D. to gain entry to the Herald building at One Herald Plaza in Miami. This building may soon be demolished as its valuable bayfront location has been sold, and the Herald will eventually have to move to another location. To me, all this is, as Aunt Velva from Fayette County, Illinois, might have said, as ugly as home-made sin.
TO BE CONTINUED . . . (not sure when)
[Blogger's Note: I may not post another blog entry until Thursday, June 21, 2012. In the meantime, readers can read my previous blog posts here, also see my blog at www.artcircuits.com or to see my original ArtCentric blog, google Elisa Turner at www.google.com . Be sure to sign up to receive email notices when I post another entry on this blog. Also you can become a follower of this blog by clicking on my bio info; then see info about doing that on lower left-hand side of screen.]
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Miami Artist Jose Bedia Presented by Miami Art Museum
Miami Art Museum offers a major career retrospective of the art of Jose Bedia, in "Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by Jose Bedia," running May 24 to Sept. 2, 2012. For more info see www.miamiartmuseum.org I have admired his work for ages, and so glad I have a reason now to post my Herald review about his work today. I really think it is my signature piece of writing that distills all that I have learned about the arts in a place like Miami. (Ok, Ok, I realize it may sound crazy to call what is probably the longest story I ever wrote for the Herald a "distillation." But I do think that I was able to distill something of what it means to be an artistic immigrant soul who has landed in Miami.)
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
From Tami Katz-Freiman, exceptionally talented Israeli curator and my very fab artcentric friend now based in Miami, I have learned that she has guest co-curated with Rotem Ruff this exhibit, "Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India," running May 31 to December 8, 2012 at the Tel Aviv Museum. See www.tamuseum.com With 17 artists, it is the first major show to introduce, as she tells me via email, the Israeli public to the thriving contemporary art scene in India. The press release explains: "The works included in this exhibition are anchored in a tumultuous social and political reality and their multiple layers of meaning reflect different responses to the deep transformations that have been taking place in Indian society for the past two decades." Wouldn't it be cool if somehow this show could travel to Miami??
LegalArt in Miami offers a series of roundtable discussions looking at how contemporary art curators do their work. This is presented by Amanda Sanfilippo, Curator-in-Residence at LegalArt. First discussion is May 15; topic is "Failure/Ruin." Discussions are free and begin at 7 p.m. Amanda's bio info says she is Development Associate at Locust Projects, Miami. She has previously worked with Creative Time and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other institutions. For more info, see www.legalartmiami.org
Renowned curator Dan Cameron is the next speaker in the Hot Topics discussion series at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. He speaks May 12. Reception with Cameron begins at 5 pm at the Center, 1650 Harrison Street, Hollywood. Lecture is at 6 pm. Tkts are $10 for non-members and $5 for members, students, teachers, and seniors. See www.ArtAndCultureCenter.org
Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya has been chosen by The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia to install monumental sculpture in its Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. "Enrique Martinez Celaya: The Tower of Snow," runs July 2012 to November 2012. His sculpture is 15 feet high and cast in bronze--I have seen a smaller version of this in his Miami studio, and I think it is quite evocative. Very poetic and inspiring, actually. I think it is one of my very favorite works by him. It depicts a boy on crutches bearing a house--really a home--on his back. As the press release explains, "Burdened but resilient and resourceful, the boy raises the idea of displacement and loss as well as possibility and redemption." Isn't that an idea inspiring to all of us, for WHATEVER reason??
ShoeboxLA presents "Joshua Levine: Monumental," opens Saturday, May 12, 2012 from 4 to 7 pm at The Studio for Southern California History-Chinatown, 818 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Josh is so talented. . .wish I could fly out there to see this. We had such a blast when we hung out together during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. With my VIP card, I could get him into the VIP lounge where we had such a fab lunch together. . .His show in Los Angeles is a series of 12 sculptures that continue his investigation of genetic animal hybrids. Now here's a really cool concept: ShoeboxLA gives Los Angeles artists an opportunity to do one-day site-specific exhibitions outside traditional gallery settings. See more at www.shoeboxla.blogspot.com
Don't miss this Miami show: "lynne golob gelfman: scapes" at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum of Florida International University, running May 16 through September 2, 2012. Opening is May 16, from 6-9 pm. For more on museum, see http://thefrost.fiu.edu As the release tells us, "Lynne Golob Gelfman makes abstract paintings that are rooted in the visible world. . .In recent years, inspired by morning walks along the Miami shore, she has been making works that evoke the reflection of light on water. But as a result of their repetitive markings, her works become as much about the process of their own making as about any outside source." Lynne is yet another artist I have known for years--more years than I want to count--and I have been fascinated to watch her exquisite work evolve--plus she is one of my neighbors! See her website at www.lynnegolobgelfman.com
You never know where you will find art that moves you. . .Recently at the Wirtz Gallery of First National Bank of South Miami on 5750 Sunset Drive in South Miami, FL 33143, I happened across a quietly stunning solo show by painter Reisha Leize Perlmutter. I understand she received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Check out her website www.ReishaArt.com
This just in. . . SUPER CONGRATS TO MY BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace!! She has been recognized as a Distinguished Achiever at the ICABA Salutes South Florida's 100 Most Accomplished Caribbean Americans Recognition Event. This is a black-tie reception and recognition program at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on June 29, 2012. For more info about ICABA, see www.icabaworld.com
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Jose Bedia loves to tell a story--or is it several stories at once? His plots and protagonists melt and nestle together as he talks about his sinuous imagery of mermaids and deer, oceans and earth. People and animals cross-dress, the way they do in American Indian myths and African masks. Stories overlap, like one blue Caribbean wave cresting into another, or like a serpent coiling back on itself. The remarkable connections can span continents in a single brushstroke or breath. Like the one about the mythical prince at the peak of his manhood who must trade in his royal crown for a leper's crutch after making an arrogant mistake. Now revered for his healing powers, this fallen figure is known as San Lazarus in Spanish Roman Catholicism, Babaluaye in the Afro-Cuban lore of Santeria, and Obaluaiye in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, homeland of many slaves brought to Cuba in the 19th Century.
Leaning on a ladder splattered with the black paint that's a constraint in his vivid visual narratives, the Cuban-born South Florida artist tilts his head back reflectively. His thick, brown, wavy hair seems to curl even closer to his waist. He is getting ready to tell the tale of San Lazarus, subject of a still-wet silhouette he's painted on the gallery walls of the Art Museum at Florida International University, site of "Jose Bedia," the fierce and fascinating solo show of his never-exhibited personal collection of paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks. [Note that this museum now has its own stunning building on campus, the Frost Museum at FIU.]
His eyes widen. The story begins.
"San Lazarus was a prince--a rich, wealthy, handsome man. He had a lot of lovers, a lot of women. So he was asking a favor from Olofi [the Yoruba god], if he can have all the lovers he wants."
Bedia goes on. The favor was granted, so long as San Lazarus reserved Thursday as a day of rest from his lovemaking, and prayed to God instead. But San Lazarus forgot his promise, and soon became sick with leprosy. Forgiveness was granted again, but his rich grandeur did not return. "He loses his crown," Bedia says. "He was homeless, a lone traveler, lying down in the street."
In Cuba, Bedia says, "they have two San Lazaruses," referring to the Saint Lazarus in traditional holy robes. "But the San Lazarus of the people is the guy with crutches, Babaluaye. He looks so weak, but he is powerful. If you promise something to him, you have to pay for it. Otherwise you'll be in trouble."
LEGENDARY INSTALLATION
The Lazarus legend comes to new life in "Mi Coballende (Protector of Patron Saint)," an installation Bedia created at FIU, dominated by an engulfing, electrifying silhouette. A man's black torso rises from the floor, tattoed with curvy chalk lines pointing to earth and sky, emblazoned with Afro-Cuban symbols standing for the crossroads between life and death. Vast arms extend around corners, one morphing into a giant dog's head, another draped with a tattered roll of burlap, emblems of the humbled but now beneficient Lazarus. Outlines of thorny trees sprout from his body; a tiny leggy man seems to race desperately along one gangly arm. As the work tells its story, boundaries between myth and man and forest blur.
It's a vivid example of the sort of work that's brought Bedia international acclaim--particularly since he left Cuba for Mexico in 1991, eventually settling in Miami with his wife and son. His art stands out for its elegant and assertive draftsmanship, and the way it's often laced with deft homages to American Indian drawings on animal hide and to action-figure comic books. Even more striking, though, is the way Bedia transforms eloquent scenarios expressing Afro-Cuban imagery and spiritual values into his own brand of contemporary art. This comes through in his direct graphic style, which he compares to "a primitive comic." It also surfaces in his love of symbolically loaded materials--whether it's the beaded Afro-Cuban ritual staff or even the weighted diving shoes (metaphors for mining personal myths) that are part of his installation here.
"For me, the object is very important," Bedia says. "It's a fetish--to have this thing that connects you with people even though they lived hundreds or thousands of years ago."
NON-WESTERN VIEW
His is an alchemical process that is gaining more notice amid the art world's current interest in work removed from the dominant American culture.
"I think Bedia's art is actually about providing an alternative, even a warning against Western culture," says South Florida art historian Roni Feinstein, who wrote the catalog essay for the FIU show.
In Bedia's primal universe, no one is truly disconnected from the natural world. In the handsomely rhythmic and bilingual "Nkunia Brava (Fierce Forest)," a wilderness of angular branches is rendered as an elaborate network of limbs and heads, so that plant, animal and person become one vital hybrid.
"In a world where everyone is sending each other e-mail and going shopping on the Internet, his work is a reminder that there's another world out there with real, physical experience, with spiritual values," Feinstein says.
Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, author of essential books on African and African-American culture and the opening-night lecturer for the Bedia show, gives lavish praise to Bedia's fluid adaptation of image and idea from non-Western sources--and especially from the rich Kongo culture of West Africa, carried across the Atlantic to merge in the Afro-Cuban religion of Palo Monte. (Palo Monte, meaning "trees of the sacred forest," venerates spirits living outside crowded cities.)
This is not a matter of amateur anthropology--even though the artist himself jokes that if he hadn't been so seduced by filling up sketchbook after sketchbook with restless drawings, he might have entered that field. A friend even once called him a frustrated anthropologist, Bedia says. And certainly, he's fed his muse with what some might call field studies. These include an apprenticeship in 1985 to a Lakota shaman on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and, more recently, a visit to the Southwestern Yaqui tribe during Easter week, when the Yaqui mount their own "Days of the Deer" festival.
"I learn things from my eyes and ears. This is different from when you learn only from books," he says of his travels. Archaeology, another way to recover the past, has also fascinated him, ever since he began finding carved shards of Cuba's native Taino and Siboney history buried in the island's soil and sand. An endlessly inventive artist, Bedia has dedicated his career to alternative ways of digging, and his creative excavations have struck not only past but present truths. Deeply influenced by his direct involvement with American Indian and Palo Monte rituals, his art is in synch with the changing uban landscape.
"Bedia's right at the forefront of contemporary art and culture. America has become the first universal nation on this planet," says Thompson, noting the evermore visible presence of people with Asian, American Indian, African and Hispanic roots. "Particularly in Miami. Miami is teaching the world what it will be like in the 21st century, and Jose is teaching us how to move into this multiethnic situation. He is at the very least trilingual."
Bedia's paintings and drawings are nearly always inscribed with sayings in Spanish or the Kongo language, so that their observations and admonitions mingle with scenes of people and animals negotiating crossings of earth, sea and sky. Their migrations tell not only the story of exiles and immigrants, but of moral choices that define life's journeys through a universe fraught with intricate connections.
"Who knows more, Isabel or Isabelita, who knows more?" is a typical, translated inscription. "It's a sermon about paying attention to our elders," says Thompson, "instead of just shoving them into a condo for old people."
THE OTHER 'MAMBO'
This query is called a mambo, a Kongo expression meaning "most important matters." These mambos are not the foot-tapping dances of 1930s Cuba but moral guides for living. Often, they remind us that time is running out for everyone. Even for the rich and handsome.
The cautionary tale of the once-handsome Lazarus, steeped as it is in Afro-Cuban lore carried so long ago to the Caribbean, is really not so different--as Bedia will tell you with a burst of wry laughter--from the catastrophe that beset a famous fallen charmer of Irish extraction, the terribly two-faced Dorian Gray. The "Cuban Dorian Gray," which Bedia's syncretic mind has suddenly dubbed Babaluaye, is just one example of his love of layered narratives.
Another is the story about a 10-year-old Cuban kid who recklessly clambered up a fence, only to fall and chip his two front teeth so that, forever after, they formed an odd little space, shaped like a triangle. "He was so spoiled," Bedia confesses. When the kid grew up and found himself doing a six-month compulsory military stint in Angola for Cuba in 1985, imagine his surprise to see tribesmen in southern Angola pointing at him. "They made a joke about my teeth," he said. "Mostly the men speak Portuguese, but my Portuguese was so bad, we were just talking to each other by gestures and laughing."
It turned out that the soldier's smile bore an uncanny likeness to those of various tribesmen in Angola. In the southern part of the country, men customarily cut their teeth to form a similar triangular pattern, as a way of paying homage to the cattle that are the focus of their nomadic life. In the north, men of another tribe cut their teen so that they form a triangular opening, making it easier to chew a sugar cane-like fruit during ritual ceremonies.
The 10-year old kid was Bedia, of course. His tale of the chipped teeth resonates as an especially striking coincidence, for Bedia's work is marked by his passionate fascination with the art and culture of West Africa, and by his profound awareness of how that intricate system of imagery and values has wound its way into the Afro-Cuban religions of Santeria and Palo Monte. Frustrated with the academic approach offered by his art training in Havana, Bedia was grateful when one teacher introduced him to the links between Cuban and African art. His later initiation into Palo Monte, he recalls, "was a conscious idea to recover my culture. When you are connected with [this tradition], many things develop for you. You can read reality in nontraditional ways. They teach you many things about the forces of nature in the river, the mountain, the sea, the ocean, the wind."
Not only does Bedia collect cross-cultural stories, he collects objects, too. His Miami home is filled with dozens of African as well as American Indian artifacts, from painted drums used by the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico to carved shell objects of Taino and Siboney origin, which the artist found as a teenager along beaches and hills in Cuba.
"When you live inside this environment, you must learn something," Bedia has said. "For at some moment, the symbol must open up to you. That is my technique. I try to find knowledge from many different places."
Perhaps the place that's given him the most knowledge is the sacred shrines of Palo Monte, which he began visiting in Havana at age 16 with his mother. Less than 10 years later, in 1983, Bedia was initiated into the priesthood of Palo Monte. A night of song and dance unfolded in a room painted brilliant blue with blazing stars, evoking the world's wheeling cycles between night and day, life and death.
Thompson, who was initiated with Bedia at his side a few years later, recalls the circular and cross-shaped Kongo designs, drawn in white chalk on the floor. Called "cosmograms," they represent the intersecting forces of life and death, God and man. "That's where you stand and swear to be a better person," Thompson says.
The cosmograms, also sliced with a knife into an initiate's skin as signs of spiritual strength, appear on figures in countless paintings and drawings by Bedia. At FIU, they score the shoulders of a lone, lean silhouetted figure in the painting "De Vuelta al Barrio" (Return to the Neighborhood). Carrying a suitcase in each hand, he seems nearly trapped in a chasm of bleak apartment buildings, their windows resembling ominous eyes--yet this figure's restless, taut posture suggests a defiant and mobile vitality very much at odds with the barren cityscape.
More Kongo circles, spun into a concentric maze, appear in another painting at FIU, "Isla Sola" (Lone Island). The circles revolve inside the silhouette of a large, disembodied head, which appears to be watching a swimmer fleeing a moonlit shipwreck. It's a dream-like scene, with the man's head seemingly laced together by a network of tree branches, so that he also resembles a forested island.
Both paintings pull us into a vortex of unsettling migration and cyclical motion, themes that South Florida poet Adrian Castro--a Bedia admirer--considers both consumately Caribbean and truly universal. Born and raised in Miami by parents from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Castro shares Bedia's deep sensitivity to the rich themes of Afro-Caribbean culture. Not only has Castro translated into English the Spanish works, laced with African expressions, by 1930s Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Mato, but the Miami poet is a Babalawo Ifa priest of Santeria.
IMMIGRANT LIFE
Asked to read from his new book of poems at this exhibit on March 17, Castro also wrote the poem "Para la installation de Jose Bedia" for a 1996 Miami Light Project performance at the Rubell Family Collection soon after Bedia created a room-sized installation, "Naufragios" (Shipwrecks), for the collection. Inspired by the deathly "rafter season" of 1994, "Naufragios" also comments on the pervasive presence of immigrants in world history, a fertile topic for the poet as well.
"Migration is really the story of humanity, of moving from one place to another," Castro says. "No one is from a single place."
That sense of movement is sounded like a steady drumbeat through so much of Bedia's art because, he says, "I am involved in the same thing. This is the drama of my people, and not only of the Cuban people but of so many around the whole world.
"From the moment I left Cuba, I started to study this feeling. I feel like this tiny little guy who's carrying his luggage with him wherever he goes. You always have to carry a little part of your country with you."
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Born in Havana in 1959, Jose Bedia studied art at Escuela de Arte de San Alejandro and at the Instituto Superior de Arte. He is the best known among the group of "80's generation" Cuban artists, whose work represented a significant break with tradition.
In the late 1980s, Bedia began to chart a place on the art world map when his work appeared in biennials in Havana and Sao Paulo and in the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre, a prominent show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1993, he was the youngest of five Cuban-born artists tapped for the landmark "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. His art is in the permanent collections of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and in museums in Mexico, Germany and Finland.
For the past two years, Bedia has been developing designs for the Opera and Symphony Hall lobbies of Miami's new Performing Arts Center, projects commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places.
This June, his work will go on exhibit at P.S. 1 in Queens, N.Y., a mammoth venue for contemporary art that recently announced a merger with New York's Museum of Modern Art. His piece will be part of the traveling group show, "Animal. Anima. Animus," which also includes installations by Maria Abramovic and Dennis Oppenheim and was organized by the Pori Art Museum in Finland.
"Jose Bedia will measure up as very important," says Amy Cappellazzo, director of the Rubell Family Collection, though she admits that, despite Bedia's growing reputation, vistors to the collection aren't always familiar with his distinctive style and materials. "A lot of Europeans see the work by Jeff Koons here and they nod approvingly, but when they see Jose they fall off the map. It has a whole different set of African and Caribbean references that don't even register on their scale."
Bedia's accomplishments register for Matta, the legendary Latin American master and 1940s Surrealist. After a meeting was arranged between the two artists at Matta's request, the elder Latin American attended a brunch at Bedia's home in January 1998. The dozen guests included Bedia's dealer, Fred Snitzer. "Matta was very charming, holding court," says Snitzer, "and he loved Jose's collection [of African and Native American art]. He kept saying, 'Ooh, can you get me one of those?' But it was clear that he recognized something in Bedia as very special."
[Blogger's Note: My goal is to post a new blog entry every other Thursday. That's my plan, anyway--we all know that things do not always turn out the way they have been planned. If I've made any mistakes, you can post a comment on my blog post informing readers and me what is correct. You can also post comments about other artcentric events or issues you would like to let readers know about. This is YOUR opportunity to inform the art community, since my newspaper deadline-filled days are over for good.]
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
From Tami Katz-Freiman, exceptionally talented Israeli curator and my very fab artcentric friend now based in Miami, I have learned that she has guest co-curated with Rotem Ruff this exhibit, "Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India," running May 31 to December 8, 2012 at the Tel Aviv Museum. See www.tamuseum.com With 17 artists, it is the first major show to introduce, as she tells me via email, the Israeli public to the thriving contemporary art scene in India. The press release explains: "The works included in this exhibition are anchored in a tumultuous social and political reality and their multiple layers of meaning reflect different responses to the deep transformations that have been taking place in Indian society for the past two decades." Wouldn't it be cool if somehow this show could travel to Miami??
LegalArt in Miami offers a series of roundtable discussions looking at how contemporary art curators do their work. This is presented by Amanda Sanfilippo, Curator-in-Residence at LegalArt. First discussion is May 15; topic is "Failure/Ruin." Discussions are free and begin at 7 p.m. Amanda's bio info says she is Development Associate at Locust Projects, Miami. She has previously worked with Creative Time and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other institutions. For more info, see www.legalartmiami.org
Renowned curator Dan Cameron is the next speaker in the Hot Topics discussion series at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. He speaks May 12. Reception with Cameron begins at 5 pm at the Center, 1650 Harrison Street, Hollywood. Lecture is at 6 pm. Tkts are $10 for non-members and $5 for members, students, teachers, and seniors. See www.ArtAndCultureCenter.org
Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya has been chosen by The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia to install monumental sculpture in its Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. "Enrique Martinez Celaya: The Tower of Snow," runs July 2012 to November 2012. His sculpture is 15 feet high and cast in bronze--I have seen a smaller version of this in his Miami studio, and I think it is quite evocative. Very poetic and inspiring, actually. I think it is one of my very favorite works by him. It depicts a boy on crutches bearing a house--really a home--on his back. As the press release explains, "Burdened but resilient and resourceful, the boy raises the idea of displacement and loss as well as possibility and redemption." Isn't that an idea inspiring to all of us, for WHATEVER reason??
ShoeboxLA presents "Joshua Levine: Monumental," opens Saturday, May 12, 2012 from 4 to 7 pm at The Studio for Southern California History-Chinatown, 818 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Josh is so talented. . .wish I could fly out there to see this. We had such a blast when we hung out together during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. With my VIP card, I could get him into the VIP lounge where we had such a fab lunch together. . .His show in Los Angeles is a series of 12 sculptures that continue his investigation of genetic animal hybrids. Now here's a really cool concept: ShoeboxLA gives Los Angeles artists an opportunity to do one-day site-specific exhibitions outside traditional gallery settings. See more at www.shoeboxla.blogspot.com
Don't miss this Miami show: "lynne golob gelfman: scapes" at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum of Florida International University, running May 16 through September 2, 2012. Opening is May 16, from 6-9 pm. For more on museum, see http://thefrost.fiu.edu As the release tells us, "Lynne Golob Gelfman makes abstract paintings that are rooted in the visible world. . .In recent years, inspired by morning walks along the Miami shore, she has been making works that evoke the reflection of light on water. But as a result of their repetitive markings, her works become as much about the process of their own making as about any outside source." Lynne is yet another artist I have known for years--more years than I want to count--and I have been fascinated to watch her exquisite work evolve--plus she is one of my neighbors! See her website at www.lynnegolobgelfman.com
You never know where you will find art that moves you. . .Recently at the Wirtz Gallery of First National Bank of South Miami on 5750 Sunset Drive in South Miami, FL 33143, I happened across a quietly stunning solo show by painter Reisha Leize Perlmutter. I understand she received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Check out her website www.ReishaArt.com
This just in. . . SUPER CONGRATS TO MY BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace!! She has been recognized as a Distinguished Achiever at the ICABA Salutes South Florida's 100 Most Accomplished Caribbean Americans Recognition Event. This is a black-tie reception and recognition program at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on June 29, 2012. For more info about ICABA, see www.icabaworld.com
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Jose Bedia loves to tell a story--or is it several stories at once? His plots and protagonists melt and nestle together as he talks about his sinuous imagery of mermaids and deer, oceans and earth. People and animals cross-dress, the way they do in American Indian myths and African masks. Stories overlap, like one blue Caribbean wave cresting into another, or like a serpent coiling back on itself. The remarkable connections can span continents in a single brushstroke or breath. Like the one about the mythical prince at the peak of his manhood who must trade in his royal crown for a leper's crutch after making an arrogant mistake. Now revered for his healing powers, this fallen figure is known as San Lazarus in Spanish Roman Catholicism, Babaluaye in the Afro-Cuban lore of Santeria, and Obaluaiye in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, homeland of many slaves brought to Cuba in the 19th Century.
Leaning on a ladder splattered with the black paint that's a constraint in his vivid visual narratives, the Cuban-born South Florida artist tilts his head back reflectively. His thick, brown, wavy hair seems to curl even closer to his waist. He is getting ready to tell the tale of San Lazarus, subject of a still-wet silhouette he's painted on the gallery walls of the Art Museum at Florida International University, site of "Jose Bedia," the fierce and fascinating solo show of his never-exhibited personal collection of paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks. [Note that this museum now has its own stunning building on campus, the Frost Museum at FIU.]
His eyes widen. The story begins.
"San Lazarus was a prince--a rich, wealthy, handsome man. He had a lot of lovers, a lot of women. So he was asking a favor from Olofi [the Yoruba god], if he can have all the lovers he wants."
Bedia goes on. The favor was granted, so long as San Lazarus reserved Thursday as a day of rest from his lovemaking, and prayed to God instead. But San Lazarus forgot his promise, and soon became sick with leprosy. Forgiveness was granted again, but his rich grandeur did not return. "He loses his crown," Bedia says. "He was homeless, a lone traveler, lying down in the street."
In Cuba, Bedia says, "they have two San Lazaruses," referring to the Saint Lazarus in traditional holy robes. "But the San Lazarus of the people is the guy with crutches, Babaluaye. He looks so weak, but he is powerful. If you promise something to him, you have to pay for it. Otherwise you'll be in trouble."
LEGENDARY INSTALLATION
The Lazarus legend comes to new life in "Mi Coballende (Protector of Patron Saint)," an installation Bedia created at FIU, dominated by an engulfing, electrifying silhouette. A man's black torso rises from the floor, tattoed with curvy chalk lines pointing to earth and sky, emblazoned with Afro-Cuban symbols standing for the crossroads between life and death. Vast arms extend around corners, one morphing into a giant dog's head, another draped with a tattered roll of burlap, emblems of the humbled but now beneficient Lazarus. Outlines of thorny trees sprout from his body; a tiny leggy man seems to race desperately along one gangly arm. As the work tells its story, boundaries between myth and man and forest blur.
It's a vivid example of the sort of work that's brought Bedia international acclaim--particularly since he left Cuba for Mexico in 1991, eventually settling in Miami with his wife and son. His art stands out for its elegant and assertive draftsmanship, and the way it's often laced with deft homages to American Indian drawings on animal hide and to action-figure comic books. Even more striking, though, is the way Bedia transforms eloquent scenarios expressing Afro-Cuban imagery and spiritual values into his own brand of contemporary art. This comes through in his direct graphic style, which he compares to "a primitive comic." It also surfaces in his love of symbolically loaded materials--whether it's the beaded Afro-Cuban ritual staff or even the weighted diving shoes (metaphors for mining personal myths) that are part of his installation here.
"For me, the object is very important," Bedia says. "It's a fetish--to have this thing that connects you with people even though they lived hundreds or thousands of years ago."
NON-WESTERN VIEW
His is an alchemical process that is gaining more notice amid the art world's current interest in work removed from the dominant American culture.
"I think Bedia's art is actually about providing an alternative, even a warning against Western culture," says South Florida art historian Roni Feinstein, who wrote the catalog essay for the FIU show.
In Bedia's primal universe, no one is truly disconnected from the natural world. In the handsomely rhythmic and bilingual "Nkunia Brava (Fierce Forest)," a wilderness of angular branches is rendered as an elaborate network of limbs and heads, so that plant, animal and person become one vital hybrid.
"In a world where everyone is sending each other e-mail and going shopping on the Internet, his work is a reminder that there's another world out there with real, physical experience, with spiritual values," Feinstein says.
Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, author of essential books on African and African-American culture and the opening-night lecturer for the Bedia show, gives lavish praise to Bedia's fluid adaptation of image and idea from non-Western sources--and especially from the rich Kongo culture of West Africa, carried across the Atlantic to merge in the Afro-Cuban religion of Palo Monte. (Palo Monte, meaning "trees of the sacred forest," venerates spirits living outside crowded cities.)
This is not a matter of amateur anthropology--even though the artist himself jokes that if he hadn't been so seduced by filling up sketchbook after sketchbook with restless drawings, he might have entered that field. A friend even once called him a frustrated anthropologist, Bedia says. And certainly, he's fed his muse with what some might call field studies. These include an apprenticeship in 1985 to a Lakota shaman on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and, more recently, a visit to the Southwestern Yaqui tribe during Easter week, when the Yaqui mount their own "Days of the Deer" festival.
"I learn things from my eyes and ears. This is different from when you learn only from books," he says of his travels. Archaeology, another way to recover the past, has also fascinated him, ever since he began finding carved shards of Cuba's native Taino and Siboney history buried in the island's soil and sand. An endlessly inventive artist, Bedia has dedicated his career to alternative ways of digging, and his creative excavations have struck not only past but present truths. Deeply influenced by his direct involvement with American Indian and Palo Monte rituals, his art is in synch with the changing uban landscape.
"Bedia's right at the forefront of contemporary art and culture. America has become the first universal nation on this planet," says Thompson, noting the evermore visible presence of people with Asian, American Indian, African and Hispanic roots. "Particularly in Miami. Miami is teaching the world what it will be like in the 21st century, and Jose is teaching us how to move into this multiethnic situation. He is at the very least trilingual."
Bedia's paintings and drawings are nearly always inscribed with sayings in Spanish or the Kongo language, so that their observations and admonitions mingle with scenes of people and animals negotiating crossings of earth, sea and sky. Their migrations tell not only the story of exiles and immigrants, but of moral choices that define life's journeys through a universe fraught with intricate connections.
"Who knows more, Isabel or Isabelita, who knows more?" is a typical, translated inscription. "It's a sermon about paying attention to our elders," says Thompson, "instead of just shoving them into a condo for old people."
THE OTHER 'MAMBO'
This query is called a mambo, a Kongo expression meaning "most important matters." These mambos are not the foot-tapping dances of 1930s Cuba but moral guides for living. Often, they remind us that time is running out for everyone. Even for the rich and handsome.
The cautionary tale of the once-handsome Lazarus, steeped as it is in Afro-Cuban lore carried so long ago to the Caribbean, is really not so different--as Bedia will tell you with a burst of wry laughter--from the catastrophe that beset a famous fallen charmer of Irish extraction, the terribly two-faced Dorian Gray. The "Cuban Dorian Gray," which Bedia's syncretic mind has suddenly dubbed Babaluaye, is just one example of his love of layered narratives.
Another is the story about a 10-year-old Cuban kid who recklessly clambered up a fence, only to fall and chip his two front teeth so that, forever after, they formed an odd little space, shaped like a triangle. "He was so spoiled," Bedia confesses. When the kid grew up and found himself doing a six-month compulsory military stint in Angola for Cuba in 1985, imagine his surprise to see tribesmen in southern Angola pointing at him. "They made a joke about my teeth," he said. "Mostly the men speak Portuguese, but my Portuguese was so bad, we were just talking to each other by gestures and laughing."
It turned out that the soldier's smile bore an uncanny likeness to those of various tribesmen in Angola. In the southern part of the country, men customarily cut their teeth to form a similar triangular pattern, as a way of paying homage to the cattle that are the focus of their nomadic life. In the north, men of another tribe cut their teen so that they form a triangular opening, making it easier to chew a sugar cane-like fruit during ritual ceremonies.
The 10-year old kid was Bedia, of course. His tale of the chipped teeth resonates as an especially striking coincidence, for Bedia's work is marked by his passionate fascination with the art and culture of West Africa, and by his profound awareness of how that intricate system of imagery and values has wound its way into the Afro-Cuban religions of Santeria and Palo Monte. Frustrated with the academic approach offered by his art training in Havana, Bedia was grateful when one teacher introduced him to the links between Cuban and African art. His later initiation into Palo Monte, he recalls, "was a conscious idea to recover my culture. When you are connected with [this tradition], many things develop for you. You can read reality in nontraditional ways. They teach you many things about the forces of nature in the river, the mountain, the sea, the ocean, the wind."
Not only does Bedia collect cross-cultural stories, he collects objects, too. His Miami home is filled with dozens of African as well as American Indian artifacts, from painted drums used by the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico to carved shell objects of Taino and Siboney origin, which the artist found as a teenager along beaches and hills in Cuba.
"When you live inside this environment, you must learn something," Bedia has said. "For at some moment, the symbol must open up to you. That is my technique. I try to find knowledge from many different places."
Perhaps the place that's given him the most knowledge is the sacred shrines of Palo Monte, which he began visiting in Havana at age 16 with his mother. Less than 10 years later, in 1983, Bedia was initiated into the priesthood of Palo Monte. A night of song and dance unfolded in a room painted brilliant blue with blazing stars, evoking the world's wheeling cycles between night and day, life and death.
Thompson, who was initiated with Bedia at his side a few years later, recalls the circular and cross-shaped Kongo designs, drawn in white chalk on the floor. Called "cosmograms," they represent the intersecting forces of life and death, God and man. "That's where you stand and swear to be a better person," Thompson says.
The cosmograms, also sliced with a knife into an initiate's skin as signs of spiritual strength, appear on figures in countless paintings and drawings by Bedia. At FIU, they score the shoulders of a lone, lean silhouetted figure in the painting "De Vuelta al Barrio" (Return to the Neighborhood). Carrying a suitcase in each hand, he seems nearly trapped in a chasm of bleak apartment buildings, their windows resembling ominous eyes--yet this figure's restless, taut posture suggests a defiant and mobile vitality very much at odds with the barren cityscape.
More Kongo circles, spun into a concentric maze, appear in another painting at FIU, "Isla Sola" (Lone Island). The circles revolve inside the silhouette of a large, disembodied head, which appears to be watching a swimmer fleeing a moonlit shipwreck. It's a dream-like scene, with the man's head seemingly laced together by a network of tree branches, so that he also resembles a forested island.
Both paintings pull us into a vortex of unsettling migration and cyclical motion, themes that South Florida poet Adrian Castro--a Bedia admirer--considers both consumately Caribbean and truly universal. Born and raised in Miami by parents from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Castro shares Bedia's deep sensitivity to the rich themes of Afro-Caribbean culture. Not only has Castro translated into English the Spanish works, laced with African expressions, by 1930s Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Mato, but the Miami poet is a Babalawo Ifa priest of Santeria.
IMMIGRANT LIFE
Asked to read from his new book of poems at this exhibit on March 17, Castro also wrote the poem "Para la installation de Jose Bedia" for a 1996 Miami Light Project performance at the Rubell Family Collection soon after Bedia created a room-sized installation, "Naufragios" (Shipwrecks), for the collection. Inspired by the deathly "rafter season" of 1994, "Naufragios" also comments on the pervasive presence of immigrants in world history, a fertile topic for the poet as well.
"Migration is really the story of humanity, of moving from one place to another," Castro says. "No one is from a single place."
That sense of movement is sounded like a steady drumbeat through so much of Bedia's art because, he says, "I am involved in the same thing. This is the drama of my people, and not only of the Cuban people but of so many around the whole world.
"From the moment I left Cuba, I started to study this feeling. I feel like this tiny little guy who's carrying his luggage with him wherever he goes. You always have to carry a little part of your country with you."
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Born in Havana in 1959, Jose Bedia studied art at Escuela de Arte de San Alejandro and at the Instituto Superior de Arte. He is the best known among the group of "80's generation" Cuban artists, whose work represented a significant break with tradition.
In the late 1980s, Bedia began to chart a place on the art world map when his work appeared in biennials in Havana and Sao Paulo and in the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre, a prominent show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1993, he was the youngest of five Cuban-born artists tapped for the landmark "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. His art is in the permanent collections of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and in museums in Mexico, Germany and Finland.
For the past two years, Bedia has been developing designs for the Opera and Symphony Hall lobbies of Miami's new Performing Arts Center, projects commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places.
This June, his work will go on exhibit at P.S. 1 in Queens, N.Y., a mammoth venue for contemporary art that recently announced a merger with New York's Museum of Modern Art. His piece will be part of the traveling group show, "Animal. Anima. Animus," which also includes installations by Maria Abramovic and Dennis Oppenheim and was organized by the Pori Art Museum in Finland.
"Jose Bedia will measure up as very important," says Amy Cappellazzo, director of the Rubell Family Collection, though she admits that, despite Bedia's growing reputation, vistors to the collection aren't always familiar with his distinctive style and materials. "A lot of Europeans see the work by Jeff Koons here and they nod approvingly, but when they see Jose they fall off the map. It has a whole different set of African and Caribbean references that don't even register on their scale."
Bedia's accomplishments register for Matta, the legendary Latin American master and 1940s Surrealist. After a meeting was arranged between the two artists at Matta's request, the elder Latin American attended a brunch at Bedia's home in January 1998. The dozen guests included Bedia's dealer, Fred Snitzer. "Matta was very charming, holding court," says Snitzer, "and he loved Jose's collection [of African and Native American art]. He kept saying, 'Ooh, can you get me one of those?' But it was clear that he recognized something in Bedia as very special."
[Blogger's Note: My goal is to post a new blog entry every other Thursday. That's my plan, anyway--we all know that things do not always turn out the way they have been planned. If I've made any mistakes, you can post a comment on my blog post informing readers and me what is correct. You can also post comments about other artcentric events or issues you would like to let readers know about. This is YOUR opportunity to inform the art community, since my newspaper deadline-filled days are over for good.]
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Miami Artist Enrique Martinez Celaya Announces Art Lecture
Today I am blogging about Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya because he has been making quite impressive contributions to Miami's art community. Mark your calendar for lecture #10 in Enrique Martinez Celaya's outstanding Whale & Star Studio Lecture Series. At 7 pm on Wednesday May 16, 2012, his studio will present art historian and critic Matthew Biro discussing "La Ribaute," Anselm Kiefer's studio-estate in Barjac, France, which has been called Kiefer's total work of art. Lecture open to the public for $5 admission fee. RSVP's required; to RSVP call the studio at 305-576-6160. Whale and Star Studio is located at 2215 NW 1st Place, Miami, FL. Note that Biro is Chair and Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Michigan. Some of his bio info from press release: "Originally trained as a continental philosopher, he came to art history through an interest in aesthetics and visual thinking." For more info, see www.whaleandstar.com and www.thelectureproject.com
First things first: More visual arts news in Miami
When I was recently on assignment in Wynwood for ARTnews, so glad that my BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace and I could visit this most intriguing solo show for Onajide Shabaka, also in Wynwood. He is showing his numerous black synthetic rubber cutouts and monochromatic acrylic drawings on paper, loosely depicting Florida flora such as banana trees and mangrove leaves. It is on view through May 12, 2012 at GalerieSchusterMiami, 2051 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. See also www.galleryschuster.com To get in touch with this excellent artist, who certainly deserves more recognition in Miami than he has received, email him at onajide@gmail.com or see his website at www.art3st.com
Antonia Wright must be completing her one-month stint living a new life as a homeless woman while she is an artist-in-residence, a residency she began April 2, at Lotus House Women's Shelter, again in Wynwood. I understand that she is the first artist to do this--what an remarkable project. For more info about her experiences at Lotus House, see www.antoniawright.com (click on Projects). For more info about this wonderful example of philanthropy in Miami, see www.lotushouseshelter.org.
Here's an event with a lecture and panel discussion I wish I could attend, but with my wack-o driving issues, most likely will not. But maybe readers who can easily get to Boca Raton will. Event is "Feeling the Squeeze: The Future of the Beaches in Florida" at 8 pm on May 3, at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Catch this event in Building #51, Rm 101, next to the Schmidt Center Gallery of FAU. For 1/2 hr before and after the panel discussion, you can see the related and surely thought-provoking exhibit, "Surfing Florida: A Photographic History," which will be on view through May 12. Lecture is by Tom Anderson, a legal skills professor and director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He is one of several humanities scholars who have contributed to the exhibit "Surfing Florida" by putting together this May 3 panel discussion. This lecture and panel will address environmental issues, including environmental law and the legal concerns of Florida's surfers. For more info on the panelists, this event, and the exhibit, see www.fau.edu/galleries/
So sad to reflect on the recent passing of art collector Richard Shack, 1926-2012. I simply find it so hard to believe that we will never again have one of our conversations about the Miami art scene. I always learned so much from his astute observations, and whenever I needed to speak to him about some issue on my visual arts beat, he was unfailingly generous with his time. Go to the home page of The Miami Foundation at www.miamifoundation.org to learn more about this courageous man and how you can honor his legacy to Miami with a contribution to The Miami Foundation. There you will also find a link to The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor J. Brecher.
This just in. . .Michelle Weinberg tells me via email that her show at Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24th St in Miami's Wynwood) opens May 11. For more info see www.michelleweinberg.com and www.dorschgallery.com Also: At Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, 158 NW 91st St in Miami, there's an opening Friday, April 27 from 7-10 pm. See drawings and mixed media collages by Shoshanna Weinberger, also in the Project Space see group show curated by Alice Raymond, with work by artists Antonia Wright, Kerry Phillips, Loriel Beltran, Dogan Arslanoglu. More info at www.cjazzart.com
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald March 2004
His paintings come from places where most of the lights have flickered and died.
Looking at them, you feel as if you've stumbled in from a leafy outdoors noisy with sunlight bouncing off cars and kids, having just pushed the door open onto a house boarded up for years. Other paintings can make you feel as you've left a familiar kitchen, bright and busy with pots simmering and knives chopping, and then stepped into a living room just as the power fails, when armchairs and family photos vanish into a chilly black hole.
The heavy darkness in the paintings of Enrique Martinez Celaya can make you blink and squint. You want to peer into their light-devouring voids, trying to make out the telltale surroundings for his chalky white outlines of men, women, and children, trying to figure out where these hollowed-out families, who are really more phantom than flesh, belong.
The tantalizing pleasures and secrets gingerly offered by this dark art, part of the artist's "October Cycle" now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, are dense with layers of oil paint and emulsified tar. They usually outweigh the annoying way their murky, mucky surfaces can trigger eye-strain. As your eyes become accustomed to Martinez Celaya's moody nighttime palette, the artist lures you into the delicate task of refocusing, of starting to see absence as well as presence, to recognize how even a contrasting, glowering abyss of loss, of black near-nothingness, can pump rare strength into the faint glow of what has survived.
In a talk last week at the Museum of Art, the artist tried to illuminate his aesthetic of absence and loss in a body of work that includes photography and sculpture as well as painting. Based in Los Angeles, Martinez Celaya has seen his career take off in the past decade, with his art entering museum collections in Germany and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. One of his paintings also hangs in the striking corporate collection at Miami's Four Seasons Hotel.
"I was fascinated by the way he changes from one exhibition to another," said Jorge Santis, a curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, who invited the artist to create a large-scale mural near the entrance to the exhibit. "There are so many facets to his work. It's realistic, it is minimalist, but it is also romantic, passionate. I think there's an inner suffering in many of his pieces that comes from his Cuban roots."
During his time in Fort Lauderdale, Martinez Celaya wanted to eat only Cuban food, explaining that it was hard to come by where he lives now, Santis said. In talking about his own varied work, Martinez Celaya doesn't express such visceral desires. He can wax into a passionate but windy philosopher, even a killjoy when it comes to understanding why some visual artists get their kicks from tweaking the excesses of pop culture, a subject his severe, almost monastic paintings avoid.
MISERY IN MADRID
The absence of another subject dramatically shadowed his talk. He barely grazed over his memories of leaving his boyhood home in Palos, Cuba, a small town surrounded by sugar-cane fields and located on a road leading to Varadero Beach. In 1972, when Martinez Celaya was 8, he and his family moved from Cuba to Madrid. It was a miserable life of severe poverty, played out against seasons of cold and early dusk, beginning with the month of October. That's the telling namesake for his series of 22 paintings now at the museum, in a show organized by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska.
"I have fought so hard to make the painings not just be about exile," he explained, with an expression that combined frown, sigh, and a quick, rueful smile. "Exile implies loss but there are other ways of loss. In each talk I add something and I take something out of the story."
But his is a story, like the "October Cycle," about etching thin rays of light in dark times and places. Sometimes those rays of light are as weak as the winter sun, like those outlining a father and son in his painting "The Distance."
"Spain was such a shock. We were beyond poor. My father couldn't find a job. We lived in a storage place without a place to take a bath. It was not just exile, it was the sense of being completely dispossessed," he recalled, as he walked around his show at the museum. "Creditors were coming to the house banging on the door."
Their digs in Madrid had no windows. Tensions flared. It was such a contrast to life at his grandfather's home in Palos, where Martinez Celaya spent much of his time, while his father worked on a cane plantation and his mother taught school. Comfortable despite its layers of peeling paint, the house opened onto a sunny courtyard shaded lightly by a fir tree.
In Madrid, Martinez Celaya looked to art as an escape, though he didn't care to paint the courtyards of his past. Somehow he laid his hands on a book about Leonardo da Vinci and spent hours trying to mimic the secret of Mona Lisa's smile in his own drawings. In a talk he shows a skillful drawing he made after arriving in Spain. It was the face of someone sleeping, but the slumber seemed so airless and final. Its disembodied clarity resembled a death mask. "Definitely our life there [in Spain] was a death," he said. "There was a hopeless kind of life. Every day was the same as the day before. I was just waiting for something to change."
SCIENTIFIC TRAINING
Change came in 1975, when the family moved to Puerto Rico. Martinez Celaya studied art but develped another passion: science. Bright and creative, he built a laser for a 10th grade science project and won an award from the National Congress of Science. He graduated from high school as valedictorian and headed off to Cornell to study applied physics. Next came graduate school in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a job at a laser company, where he patented four inventions. But much of this time he was still painting, selling art in San Francisco parks.
In the late 1980s, he left scientific academe and returned full-time to art, and later earned an MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I did it because I simply couldn't afford to leave my life outside once I entered the door of the lab, which is something you have to do as a physicist," he said. "I did it because I wanted to bring my life into my work."
In the "October Cycle," Martinez Celaya paints the mysteries, sorrows, and longings of life as both parent and child. At 37, he is a stocky man with short dark hair and a penchant for soft-spoken but intense conversation, voicing surprise at how much life as a father has seeped into his life as an artist. He and his wife of five years, Alexandra Williams, have two small children, Sebastian and Gabriela. "Gabriela (First)" is one of the most memorable paintings here. It shows a mother tossing a baby in the air, or perhaps catching her as she falls. It is not sentimental. The figures gleam as the barest suggestions of life, their reaching-but-not-touching-hands more vivid than their faces. Six small dashes of light float across the black void cloaking these figures.
As an aside, the artist explains that the points of light represent his daughter's six birthmarks, the possible symptom of a congenital disease. When he painted this work, he and his wife were in the midst of determining whether she had the disease--learning eventually that she did not.
But whether you know this or not, the painting is a hauntingly spare scene of life's fragile bonds, of gifts that come and go, and of the capacity of art to say much with a few threads of light that are deceptively simple. Like the pinpoint beams of a laser, Martinez Celaya's pale brushstrokes pierce their target, life, at its core.
First things first: More visual arts news in Miami
When I was recently on assignment in Wynwood for ARTnews, so glad that my BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace and I could visit this most intriguing solo show for Onajide Shabaka, also in Wynwood. He is showing his numerous black synthetic rubber cutouts and monochromatic acrylic drawings on paper, loosely depicting Florida flora such as banana trees and mangrove leaves. It is on view through May 12, 2012 at GalerieSchusterMiami, 2051 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. See also www.galleryschuster.com To get in touch with this excellent artist, who certainly deserves more recognition in Miami than he has received, email him at onajide@gmail.com or see his website at www.art3st.com
Antonia Wright must be completing her one-month stint living a new life as a homeless woman while she is an artist-in-residence, a residency she began April 2, at Lotus House Women's Shelter, again in Wynwood. I understand that she is the first artist to do this--what an remarkable project. For more info about her experiences at Lotus House, see www.antoniawright.com (click on Projects). For more info about this wonderful example of philanthropy in Miami, see www.lotushouseshelter.org.
Here's an event with a lecture and panel discussion I wish I could attend, but with my wack-o driving issues, most likely will not. But maybe readers who can easily get to Boca Raton will. Event is "Feeling the Squeeze: The Future of the Beaches in Florida" at 8 pm on May 3, at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Catch this event in Building #51, Rm 101, next to the Schmidt Center Gallery of FAU. For 1/2 hr before and after the panel discussion, you can see the related and surely thought-provoking exhibit, "Surfing Florida: A Photographic History," which will be on view through May 12. Lecture is by Tom Anderson, a legal skills professor and director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He is one of several humanities scholars who have contributed to the exhibit "Surfing Florida" by putting together this May 3 panel discussion. This lecture and panel will address environmental issues, including environmental law and the legal concerns of Florida's surfers. For more info on the panelists, this event, and the exhibit, see www.fau.edu/galleries/
So sad to reflect on the recent passing of art collector Richard Shack, 1926-2012. I simply find it so hard to believe that we will never again have one of our conversations about the Miami art scene. I always learned so much from his astute observations, and whenever I needed to speak to him about some issue on my visual arts beat, he was unfailingly generous with his time. Go to the home page of The Miami Foundation at www.miamifoundation.org to learn more about this courageous man and how you can honor his legacy to Miami with a contribution to The Miami Foundation. There you will also find a link to The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor J. Brecher.
This just in. . .Michelle Weinberg tells me via email that her show at Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24th St in Miami's Wynwood) opens May 11. For more info see www.michelleweinberg.com and www.dorschgallery.com Also: At Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, 158 NW 91st St in Miami, there's an opening Friday, April 27 from 7-10 pm. See drawings and mixed media collages by Shoshanna Weinberger, also in the Project Space see group show curated by Alice Raymond, with work by artists Antonia Wright, Kerry Phillips, Loriel Beltran, Dogan Arslanoglu. More info at www.cjazzart.com
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald March 2004
His paintings come from places where most of the lights have flickered and died.
Looking at them, you feel as if you've stumbled in from a leafy outdoors noisy with sunlight bouncing off cars and kids, having just pushed the door open onto a house boarded up for years. Other paintings can make you feel as you've left a familiar kitchen, bright and busy with pots simmering and knives chopping, and then stepped into a living room just as the power fails, when armchairs and family photos vanish into a chilly black hole.
The heavy darkness in the paintings of Enrique Martinez Celaya can make you blink and squint. You want to peer into their light-devouring voids, trying to make out the telltale surroundings for his chalky white outlines of men, women, and children, trying to figure out where these hollowed-out families, who are really more phantom than flesh, belong.
The tantalizing pleasures and secrets gingerly offered by this dark art, part of the artist's "October Cycle" now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, are dense with layers of oil paint and emulsified tar. They usually outweigh the annoying way their murky, mucky surfaces can trigger eye-strain. As your eyes become accustomed to Martinez Celaya's moody nighttime palette, the artist lures you into the delicate task of refocusing, of starting to see absence as well as presence, to recognize how even a contrasting, glowering abyss of loss, of black near-nothingness, can pump rare strength into the faint glow of what has survived.
In a talk last week at the Museum of Art, the artist tried to illuminate his aesthetic of absence and loss in a body of work that includes photography and sculpture as well as painting. Based in Los Angeles, Martinez Celaya has seen his career take off in the past decade, with his art entering museum collections in Germany and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. One of his paintings also hangs in the striking corporate collection at Miami's Four Seasons Hotel.
"I was fascinated by the way he changes from one exhibition to another," said Jorge Santis, a curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, who invited the artist to create a large-scale mural near the entrance to the exhibit. "There are so many facets to his work. It's realistic, it is minimalist, but it is also romantic, passionate. I think there's an inner suffering in many of his pieces that comes from his Cuban roots."
During his time in Fort Lauderdale, Martinez Celaya wanted to eat only Cuban food, explaining that it was hard to come by where he lives now, Santis said. In talking about his own varied work, Martinez Celaya doesn't express such visceral desires. He can wax into a passionate but windy philosopher, even a killjoy when it comes to understanding why some visual artists get their kicks from tweaking the excesses of pop culture, a subject his severe, almost monastic paintings avoid.
MISERY IN MADRID
The absence of another subject dramatically shadowed his talk. He barely grazed over his memories of leaving his boyhood home in Palos, Cuba, a small town surrounded by sugar-cane fields and located on a road leading to Varadero Beach. In 1972, when Martinez Celaya was 8, he and his family moved from Cuba to Madrid. It was a miserable life of severe poverty, played out against seasons of cold and early dusk, beginning with the month of October. That's the telling namesake for his series of 22 paintings now at the museum, in a show organized by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska.
"I have fought so hard to make the painings not just be about exile," he explained, with an expression that combined frown, sigh, and a quick, rueful smile. "Exile implies loss but there are other ways of loss. In each talk I add something and I take something out of the story."
But his is a story, like the "October Cycle," about etching thin rays of light in dark times and places. Sometimes those rays of light are as weak as the winter sun, like those outlining a father and son in his painting "The Distance."
"Spain was such a shock. We were beyond poor. My father couldn't find a job. We lived in a storage place without a place to take a bath. It was not just exile, it was the sense of being completely dispossessed," he recalled, as he walked around his show at the museum. "Creditors were coming to the house banging on the door."
Their digs in Madrid had no windows. Tensions flared. It was such a contrast to life at his grandfather's home in Palos, where Martinez Celaya spent much of his time, while his father worked on a cane plantation and his mother taught school. Comfortable despite its layers of peeling paint, the house opened onto a sunny courtyard shaded lightly by a fir tree.
In Madrid, Martinez Celaya looked to art as an escape, though he didn't care to paint the courtyards of his past. Somehow he laid his hands on a book about Leonardo da Vinci and spent hours trying to mimic the secret of Mona Lisa's smile in his own drawings. In a talk he shows a skillful drawing he made after arriving in Spain. It was the face of someone sleeping, but the slumber seemed so airless and final. Its disembodied clarity resembled a death mask. "Definitely our life there [in Spain] was a death," he said. "There was a hopeless kind of life. Every day was the same as the day before. I was just waiting for something to change."
SCIENTIFIC TRAINING
Change came in 1975, when the family moved to Puerto Rico. Martinez Celaya studied art but develped another passion: science. Bright and creative, he built a laser for a 10th grade science project and won an award from the National Congress of Science. He graduated from high school as valedictorian and headed off to Cornell to study applied physics. Next came graduate school in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a job at a laser company, where he patented four inventions. But much of this time he was still painting, selling art in San Francisco parks.
In the late 1980s, he left scientific academe and returned full-time to art, and later earned an MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I did it because I simply couldn't afford to leave my life outside once I entered the door of the lab, which is something you have to do as a physicist," he said. "I did it because I wanted to bring my life into my work."
In the "October Cycle," Martinez Celaya paints the mysteries, sorrows, and longings of life as both parent and child. At 37, he is a stocky man with short dark hair and a penchant for soft-spoken but intense conversation, voicing surprise at how much life as a father has seeped into his life as an artist. He and his wife of five years, Alexandra Williams, have two small children, Sebastian and Gabriela. "Gabriela (First)" is one of the most memorable paintings here. It shows a mother tossing a baby in the air, or perhaps catching her as she falls. It is not sentimental. The figures gleam as the barest suggestions of life, their reaching-but-not-touching-hands more vivid than their faces. Six small dashes of light float across the black void cloaking these figures.
As an aside, the artist explains that the points of light represent his daughter's six birthmarks, the possible symptom of a congenital disease. When he painted this work, he and his wife were in the midst of determining whether she had the disease--learning eventually that she did not.
But whether you know this or not, the painting is a hauntingly spare scene of life's fragile bonds, of gifts that come and go, and of the capacity of art to say much with a few threads of light that are deceptively simple. Like the pinpoint beams of a laser, Martinez Celaya's pale brushstrokes pierce their target, life, at its core.
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