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.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Miami Artist Edouard Duval Carrie Featured at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery
Today I am thrilled to be blogging chiefly about Edouard Duval Carrie, a Miami artist I have known for years and always admired. Even though I was always picky about my stories when they were finally published in The Miami Herald, and tended to mope about things that were cut or that I had left out, this profile is one that even I could not find a lot to complain about. (Find it after current news items in this blog post.)
It's great that everyone in Miami has a chance to see more of what Edouard is doing lately with his exhibit "The Three Dimensional Gods and Goddesses Meet Their Cousins The Trees." (What an incredible title! Who would not like to read a novel or see a movie with a title like that??!!) As the press release says, the show depicts "his unique universe" peopled by "anthropomorphic flamboyant characters." This show runs April 14 to May 31, 2012 at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, 3550 North Miami Avenue, Miami Fl 33127. Opening is Saturday, April 4, 2012 from 2 to 9 pm. Valet parking available. In addition to that, be sure not to miss new work by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Nova, in his exhibit at the gallery, "Novo Aniversario." More info: see www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com
First thing first: More visual arts news in Miami
This news item is actually more appropriate for South Florida. Recently heard via email from Irvin Lippman, Executive Director of Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University about this impressive development. So very fab to see how this museum is maturing under his dynamic leadership. Try not to miss this: upcoming Pearl and Stanley Goodman Lecture on Latin American Art, "Between Two Dimensions: The Paintings and Sculpture of Isabel De Obaldia" by Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. Lecture is 6-7 pm Thursday, April 19, at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University, One East Las Olas, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301. Lecture is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To RSVP for lecture, contact Holly Giuliano at 954-262-0241 or education1@moafl.org Dress code: Business attire. Following the lecture is a toast to Pearl and Stanley Goodman. Lecture is funded in part by Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Contemporary Studio Glass Movement.
And there's more exciting artcentric news: On April 2, 2012, this museum announced that the Pearl and Stanley Goodman Latin American Collection is a promised gift. As the press release states, "This impressive collection of over 75 works includes masters such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Wifredo Lam. The Goodmans, long-time residents of Fort Lauderdale, began to collect in the 1980s, attracted to Latin American art because it tells 'a story usually with a clear political and social message.' They are keen that their collection be of benefit to the people of South Florida and serve as a focus for educational programs at the museum and NSU." For more info, check the "Events" section of the museum website at www.moafl.org
WALL OF VODOU by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald, November 2000
With his quick wit and deep, infectious laugh, Edouard Duval Carrie would be a perfect fit as a social director on a Caribbean cruise.
You can imagine him introducing guests to one another, cajoling people to share a drink or tell a story and chatting up an audience in English or French--or even in the Spanish he learned as a teenager living in Puerto Rico.
He became an artist instead although he aims to make plenty of introductions these days. He indicated as much to a standing-room-only crowd at the opening of his latest exhibition, "New Work: Edouard Duval Carrie, Migrations," an exploration of Haitian culture, Vodou spirits, and the current desperation on the island, now on view at the Miami Art Museum. But these introductions concern desperate travelers in rickety flotillas and vivid migratory Haitian Vodou spirits of love and death, not tanned passengers sipping rum on multi-million dollar ships.
"Here is this whole culture that you might not be aware of," said Duval Carrie, a wordly and jocular figure dressed in a natty black suit. "But it may be heading your way, so let's get accustomed to each other."
Presented as a tour de force combination of painting and sculpture, "Migrations" is a spirited encounter made for South Florida, a community of immigrants suffused with much of the Caribbean. (Another collection of Duval Carrie's work, "Edouard Duval Carrie: Landscapes, Real & Imagined," is also showing at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Wynwood.)
And fittingly, the MAM show is scheduled for its own significant encounter. In the spring of 2002, "Migrations" will meet up with three of the artist's previous installations that probe complex African, American, and European strands interlacing Haitian culture and its history, born from Middle Passage horrors. The quartet is uniting for a show organized by the Davenport Museum, a venue known for its large collection of Haitian art, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, which owns the artist's caustic portrait of deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his family, a seminal riff on European court painters.
MILESTONE EXHIBITION
Duval Carrie's first traveling museum exhibit will mark a milestone in a prolific career, and both "Migrations" and the traveling show should solidify Duval Carrie's reputation as a major voice sifting the New World-Old World melange of the Caribbean with the inventive materials and international outlook of contemporary art.
The just-published Oxford History of Western Art, in fact, is already linking Duval Carrie's art to the blend of European Modernism and Afro-Cuban rites forged by Cuban master Wifredo Lam.
"It's very second millenium," MAM senior curator Peter Boswell says of the artist's work. "He's a great synthesizer. He's bringing in those influences from other countries. "This is really a dominant trend in art right now, with artists who are global but also regional at the same time."
And the polyglot, Caribbean-colored lanscape of Miami, Boswell adds, "is very good at fostering that type of sensibility."
"It's so refreshing to have a voice like Edouard's, that openly talks about Vodou and treats it with the respect it deserves," says Leonie Hermantin, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation, which today is co-sponsoring a round-table discussion on issues raised by Duval Carrie's exhibition. "His art shows us that when we move to another land we used our memories of religion to help us adapt."
As Duval Carrie spoke at MAM, subdued laughter rippled through the crowd. The artist may be a clever charmer, but the urgent reasons behind his get-accustomed offer are close to the surface.
"In time, God knows, the island will get its act straight," but for now, he continued, "the crisis in Haiti seems unending."
The artist puts it more emphatically in an interview in his Design District studio, a work space lined with art books, antique maps of Port-au-Prince and an orange I-Mac computer.
"The Vodou spirits are splitting! I am having the whole pantheon pick up and leave," he says of the premise driving "Migrations," in which the Vodou spirits flee the island. "It's funny, but at the same time it's very tragic. I decided to address the problem of Haiti losing itself, of dying. Peope are in total dire straits."
BITTERSWEET STORIES
During Duval Carrie's visit to Port-au-Prince five months ago, a gunman fatally shot his cousin, a prominent radio newscaster critical of the Duvalier regime. That violent scene--and many others--are rendered in the MAM show in painted panels that include a faux marble wall relief reminiscent of a Roman Catholic altarpiece.
In one panel, a lush tropical forest smolders while in others a tatooed goddess dances in a South Beach strip joint and a warrior spirit in gold epaulets mans a tank in the Gulf war.
They deliver bittersweet stories of a besieged country, represented by rural spirits migrating into new urban contexts. The spirits are testament to the fluid energies of Vodou that Duval Carrie has always admired. He calls Vodou--with its syncretic assortment of Yoruba, Kongo and Roman Catholic deities--"a guerilla religion."
"It refuses to have strict cannons," he says. "You have new gods coming in, other gods forgotten. It recovers anything that might be of use to survival of the people."
Loosely reminiscent of a Vodou temple, "Migrations" is perfumed with lilies strewn on the floor like offerings and fraught with the rococo curves of crumbling colonial French architecture, replicated in ornate urns laden with more offerings of glazed fruit.
Throughout is the festive sparkle of Vodou altars to "Mistress" Ezili Freda, the vampish light-skinned Goddess of love and luxury. A devotee of pink cake, lace hankies, and Anais-Anais perfume, she is a poor country's fantasy of ravishing wealth--and emblematic of colonial Haiti's vanished natural resources.
At MAM, she's the dominant voyager in a peculiar flotilla of boats suspended from the ceiling, their hulls glistening in melting pink shades of mock marble and inscribed with lacy ritual drawings that invoke Vodou spirits. And like the glowering, scar-faced Bawon Samedi, a Vodou spirit at home in cemeteries but tucked here in a listing skiff, Ezili is heading for the exit and away from Haiti.
Their uprootedness is familiar to Duval Carrie, 45. He is, writes Latin American art historian Edward J. Sullivan, "acutely familiar of the disorientations caused by migration [which is] the defining issue in the history of the islands."
STUDIED ABROAD
After spending his boyhood in Haiti and his adolescence in Puerto Rico, the artist shipped out to college in Montreal to study urban planning though he was more engaged in painting than in planning. In the 1980s, he returned to Haiti to help manage his father's construction business, where he witnessed the downfall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the chaos that followed.
Two years later the French government invited him to a formative residency at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris. In 1992, he traveled to Benin, home to Haiti's African ancestors, for an international reunion of Vodou cultures, and a year after that he settled in Miami with his second wife Nina, an English film producer, and their sons, now 8 and 10.
Along the way, he has exhibited at the contemporary art museum in Monterrey, Mexico, biennials in Sao Paulo and Havana, and the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta.
Raised Roman Catholic in an upper-middle-class family that typically finds his interest in Vodou "off the wall," Duval Carrie recalls constant drumming coming from the mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince.
"You got to know it, if you liked it or not. There's no way you can be shielded," he says. "When I was a kid the maids took me to somethiing that was supposedly church-related, but it was really a pilgrimage to Ezili . . . . It was just like a party, and they would serve you a Coke.
"You could even visit the tmples and go into the back rooms where the sacred objects are. There would be tables full of cakes for Ezili, and you'd have rows of perfume bottles, some appropriated from my mother. Visually, it's very stunning."
SCARRED BY BRUTALITY
Affected by the flashy panoply of altars and fantastic colors of traditional Haitian painting, the artist was also scarred by brutalities of the Duvaliers, who jailed his brother Robert for more than a year. And while his is not unique among Haitian artists of his generation in reinventing his country's intensely visual heritage, Duval Carrie is a leader in this trend, says Veerle Poupeye in the 1998 book Caribbean Art.
"His work evokes," she writes, "the magic and mystery of the Vodou universe and comments on Haiti's history and sociopolitical realities with sharp, surreal wit."
In his first show in 1980 at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, his evocations went too far. Centre director Francine Muerat advised him against adding his portrait of Baby Doc in lacy drag with a pistol pointed to his head, a nod to rumors that the iron-fisted dictator was gay and to Ezili's patronage of homosexuals.
"Do you want to have us all disappeared?" Duval Carrie remembers Muerat asking. "That would be signing our death warrant."
Six years later, the portraits finally surfaced publicly as a poster celebrating Duvalier's flight from power. Vodou scholar Donald J. Cosentino says it shrewdly indicated how Duvalier's lavish kleptocracy kept itself afloat by playing into Ezili-inspired fantasies of Haiti's poor.
Given his view of Haiti's current fortunes, Duval Carrie says migration is a more pressing issue that ever. But by devising a scenario in which even the country's spiritual essence is departing, the artist has delayed his own dream of painting murals in a Vodou temple in Haiti. The stay is only temporary, he promises. As icons of Haitian culture, the spirits are, he insists, international and can return to the island just as easily as they left.
"They can travel back and forth," he says. "That's the state of things these days. Nobody's stuck in one place."
It's great that everyone in Miami has a chance to see more of what Edouard is doing lately with his exhibit "The Three Dimensional Gods and Goddesses Meet Their Cousins The Trees." (What an incredible title! Who would not like to read a novel or see a movie with a title like that??!!) As the press release says, the show depicts "his unique universe" peopled by "anthropomorphic flamboyant characters." This show runs April 14 to May 31, 2012 at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, 3550 North Miami Avenue, Miami Fl 33127. Opening is Saturday, April 4, 2012 from 2 to 9 pm. Valet parking available. In addition to that, be sure not to miss new work by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Nova, in his exhibit at the gallery, "Novo Aniversario." More info: see www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com
First thing first: More visual arts news in Miami
This news item is actually more appropriate for South Florida. Recently heard via email from Irvin Lippman, Executive Director of Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University about this impressive development. So very fab to see how this museum is maturing under his dynamic leadership. Try not to miss this: upcoming Pearl and Stanley Goodman Lecture on Latin American Art, "Between Two Dimensions: The Paintings and Sculpture of Isabel De Obaldia" by Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. Lecture is 6-7 pm Thursday, April 19, at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University, One East Las Olas, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301. Lecture is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To RSVP for lecture, contact Holly Giuliano at 954-262-0241 or education1@moafl.org Dress code: Business attire. Following the lecture is a toast to Pearl and Stanley Goodman. Lecture is funded in part by Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Contemporary Studio Glass Movement.
And there's more exciting artcentric news: On April 2, 2012, this museum announced that the Pearl and Stanley Goodman Latin American Collection is a promised gift. As the press release states, "This impressive collection of over 75 works includes masters such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Wifredo Lam. The Goodmans, long-time residents of Fort Lauderdale, began to collect in the 1980s, attracted to Latin American art because it tells 'a story usually with a clear political and social message.' They are keen that their collection be of benefit to the people of South Florida and serve as a focus for educational programs at the museum and NSU." For more info, check the "Events" section of the museum website at www.moafl.org
WALL OF VODOU by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald, November 2000
With his quick wit and deep, infectious laugh, Edouard Duval Carrie would be a perfect fit as a social director on a Caribbean cruise.
You can imagine him introducing guests to one another, cajoling people to share a drink or tell a story and chatting up an audience in English or French--or even in the Spanish he learned as a teenager living in Puerto Rico.
He became an artist instead although he aims to make plenty of introductions these days. He indicated as much to a standing-room-only crowd at the opening of his latest exhibition, "New Work: Edouard Duval Carrie, Migrations," an exploration of Haitian culture, Vodou spirits, and the current desperation on the island, now on view at the Miami Art Museum. But these introductions concern desperate travelers in rickety flotillas and vivid migratory Haitian Vodou spirits of love and death, not tanned passengers sipping rum on multi-million dollar ships.
"Here is this whole culture that you might not be aware of," said Duval Carrie, a wordly and jocular figure dressed in a natty black suit. "But it may be heading your way, so let's get accustomed to each other."
Presented as a tour de force combination of painting and sculpture, "Migrations" is a spirited encounter made for South Florida, a community of immigrants suffused with much of the Caribbean. (Another collection of Duval Carrie's work, "Edouard Duval Carrie: Landscapes, Real & Imagined," is also showing at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Wynwood.)
And fittingly, the MAM show is scheduled for its own significant encounter. In the spring of 2002, "Migrations" will meet up with three of the artist's previous installations that probe complex African, American, and European strands interlacing Haitian culture and its history, born from Middle Passage horrors. The quartet is uniting for a show organized by the Davenport Museum, a venue known for its large collection of Haitian art, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, which owns the artist's caustic portrait of deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his family, a seminal riff on European court painters.
MILESTONE EXHIBITION
Duval Carrie's first traveling museum exhibit will mark a milestone in a prolific career, and both "Migrations" and the traveling show should solidify Duval Carrie's reputation as a major voice sifting the New World-Old World melange of the Caribbean with the inventive materials and international outlook of contemporary art.
The just-published Oxford History of Western Art, in fact, is already linking Duval Carrie's art to the blend of European Modernism and Afro-Cuban rites forged by Cuban master Wifredo Lam.
"It's very second millenium," MAM senior curator Peter Boswell says of the artist's work. "He's a great synthesizer. He's bringing in those influences from other countries. "This is really a dominant trend in art right now, with artists who are global but also regional at the same time."
And the polyglot, Caribbean-colored lanscape of Miami, Boswell adds, "is very good at fostering that type of sensibility."
"It's so refreshing to have a voice like Edouard's, that openly talks about Vodou and treats it with the respect it deserves," says Leonie Hermantin, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation, which today is co-sponsoring a round-table discussion on issues raised by Duval Carrie's exhibition. "His art shows us that when we move to another land we used our memories of religion to help us adapt."
As Duval Carrie spoke at MAM, subdued laughter rippled through the crowd. The artist may be a clever charmer, but the urgent reasons behind his get-accustomed offer are close to the surface.
"In time, God knows, the island will get its act straight," but for now, he continued, "the crisis in Haiti seems unending."
The artist puts it more emphatically in an interview in his Design District studio, a work space lined with art books, antique maps of Port-au-Prince and an orange I-Mac computer.
"The Vodou spirits are splitting! I am having the whole pantheon pick up and leave," he says of the premise driving "Migrations," in which the Vodou spirits flee the island. "It's funny, but at the same time it's very tragic. I decided to address the problem of Haiti losing itself, of dying. Peope are in total dire straits."
BITTERSWEET STORIES
During Duval Carrie's visit to Port-au-Prince five months ago, a gunman fatally shot his cousin, a prominent radio newscaster critical of the Duvalier regime. That violent scene--and many others--are rendered in the MAM show in painted panels that include a faux marble wall relief reminiscent of a Roman Catholic altarpiece.
In one panel, a lush tropical forest smolders while in others a tatooed goddess dances in a South Beach strip joint and a warrior spirit in gold epaulets mans a tank in the Gulf war.
They deliver bittersweet stories of a besieged country, represented by rural spirits migrating into new urban contexts. The spirits are testament to the fluid energies of Vodou that Duval Carrie has always admired. He calls Vodou--with its syncretic assortment of Yoruba, Kongo and Roman Catholic deities--"a guerilla religion."
"It refuses to have strict cannons," he says. "You have new gods coming in, other gods forgotten. It recovers anything that might be of use to survival of the people."
Loosely reminiscent of a Vodou temple, "Migrations" is perfumed with lilies strewn on the floor like offerings and fraught with the rococo curves of crumbling colonial French architecture, replicated in ornate urns laden with more offerings of glazed fruit.
Throughout is the festive sparkle of Vodou altars to "Mistress" Ezili Freda, the vampish light-skinned Goddess of love and luxury. A devotee of pink cake, lace hankies, and Anais-Anais perfume, she is a poor country's fantasy of ravishing wealth--and emblematic of colonial Haiti's vanished natural resources.
At MAM, she's the dominant voyager in a peculiar flotilla of boats suspended from the ceiling, their hulls glistening in melting pink shades of mock marble and inscribed with lacy ritual drawings that invoke Vodou spirits. And like the glowering, scar-faced Bawon Samedi, a Vodou spirit at home in cemeteries but tucked here in a listing skiff, Ezili is heading for the exit and away from Haiti.
Their uprootedness is familiar to Duval Carrie, 45. He is, writes Latin American art historian Edward J. Sullivan, "acutely familiar of the disorientations caused by migration [which is] the defining issue in the history of the islands."
STUDIED ABROAD
After spending his boyhood in Haiti and his adolescence in Puerto Rico, the artist shipped out to college in Montreal to study urban planning though he was more engaged in painting than in planning. In the 1980s, he returned to Haiti to help manage his father's construction business, where he witnessed the downfall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the chaos that followed.
Two years later the French government invited him to a formative residency at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris. In 1992, he traveled to Benin, home to Haiti's African ancestors, for an international reunion of Vodou cultures, and a year after that he settled in Miami with his second wife Nina, an English film producer, and their sons, now 8 and 10.
Along the way, he has exhibited at the contemporary art museum in Monterrey, Mexico, biennials in Sao Paulo and Havana, and the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta.
Raised Roman Catholic in an upper-middle-class family that typically finds his interest in Vodou "off the wall," Duval Carrie recalls constant drumming coming from the mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince.
"You got to know it, if you liked it or not. There's no way you can be shielded," he says. "When I was a kid the maids took me to somethiing that was supposedly church-related, but it was really a pilgrimage to Ezili . . . . It was just like a party, and they would serve you a Coke.
"You could even visit the tmples and go into the back rooms where the sacred objects are. There would be tables full of cakes for Ezili, and you'd have rows of perfume bottles, some appropriated from my mother. Visually, it's very stunning."
SCARRED BY BRUTALITY
Affected by the flashy panoply of altars and fantastic colors of traditional Haitian painting, the artist was also scarred by brutalities of the Duvaliers, who jailed his brother Robert for more than a year. And while his is not unique among Haitian artists of his generation in reinventing his country's intensely visual heritage, Duval Carrie is a leader in this trend, says Veerle Poupeye in the 1998 book Caribbean Art.
"His work evokes," she writes, "the magic and mystery of the Vodou universe and comments on Haiti's history and sociopolitical realities with sharp, surreal wit."
In his first show in 1980 at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, his evocations went too far. Centre director Francine Muerat advised him against adding his portrait of Baby Doc in lacy drag with a pistol pointed to his head, a nod to rumors that the iron-fisted dictator was gay and to Ezili's patronage of homosexuals.
"Do you want to have us all disappeared?" Duval Carrie remembers Muerat asking. "That would be signing our death warrant."
Six years later, the portraits finally surfaced publicly as a poster celebrating Duvalier's flight from power. Vodou scholar Donald J. Cosentino says it shrewdly indicated how Duvalier's lavish kleptocracy kept itself afloat by playing into Ezili-inspired fantasies of Haiti's poor.
Given his view of Haiti's current fortunes, Duval Carrie says migration is a more pressing issue that ever. But by devising a scenario in which even the country's spiritual essence is departing, the artist has delayed his own dream of painting murals in a Vodou temple in Haiti. The stay is only temporary, he promises. As icons of Haitian culture, the spirits are, he insists, international and can return to the island just as easily as they left.
"They can travel back and forth," he says. "That's the state of things these days. Nobody's stuck in one place."
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