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.]
Thursday, May 24, 2012
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.]
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