Well, I have taken the plunge, and I must say the water feels just fine. I am actually well into what I hope may be my third chapter, but because I only have so much time to blog (and I am sure readers only have so much time to read my blog!!) I am posting below about half of my first chapter. Of course this digital "ms." is still in a fluid state, and subject to more revision I know, but I am quite pleased with my progress so far.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Events I hope I do not miss. . .
Miami Art Museum Staff Art Exhibition at University of Miami Gallery, 2750 NW 3rd Avenue, Suite 4, Miami. Opening reception is July 14, 6-9 pm. On view through Aug. 24. Hours are Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm.
What's new with ArtCenter/South Florida at 800/810/924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Look for Studio Crawl, 7-10 pm July 7: Visit resident artists in studios and hear performance by Greater Miami Youth Symphony; also look for David Zalben as he continues his "free-wheeling poetic installation" re love and relationships in his "signature wire-graffiti style." Note also that the "Afterlife" is on view through Aug. 5, 2012, presenting these artists' distinctive take on the hereafter: Byron Keith Byrd, Alex Heria, and Franklin Sinanan at the ArtCenter's Richard Shack Gallery on 800 Lincoln Road.
"Outside the Box: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art" at PanAmericanArtProjects, 2450 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 28. For more info call 305-573-2400 or see www.panamericanart.com Show includes art by Jasmin Joseph, George Liautaud, Andre Pierre.
"lynne golob gelfman: sand" at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, 2630 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 31. I've known Lynne for years, and she makes absolutely exquisite abstract paintings. Hours are Tues-Friday 11 am to 6 pm; Saturday noon to 5 pm. For more info call 305-438-0220 or see www.alejandravonhartz.net
Frost Art Museum's Target Wednesday After Hours celebrates two new exhibitions. Mark your calendar for 6-9 pm July 18 for this free and open-to-the-public event at the Frost at Florida International University, located at 10975 SW 17th Street in Miami, across from the Blue garage and adjacent to Wertheim Performing Arts Center on the Modesto A. Maidique campus.
Exhibitions:
"This and That: Unconventional Selections from the Permanent Collection." Includes art by Guerra de la Paz, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Bert Rodriguez, Graham Hudson. Curated by Klaudio Rodriguez. On view through Oct. 21, 2012.
"Shared Threads: Maria Lino's Portrait of a Shipibo Healer." This documents a collaborative experience during which two artists from vastly different cultural and artistic traditions came together in the Amazon region of Pucallpa, Peru. Maria Lino has twice been named a Cintas Fellow. In 2011, she was awarded a Fullbright US Scholar Grant and spent 8 months working in Peru on an ongoing series of video portraits. The exhibit, curated by Ana Estrada and sponsored by Latino Magazine, runs through Sept. 30, 2012.
For more info, call 305-348-2890 or visit http://thefrost.fiu.edu
Check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com
Don't forget to mark your calendar for the memorial service for feminist art historian Paula Harper. It is set for noon July 20 at the Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info about this, see my previous blog post.
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally a working title!)
Chapter One
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place. When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up north." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers," who theatrically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things I was not good at when I moved to Miami in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
Earlier in that summer of '84, a moving van had pulled up in front of the 19th Century brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my husband Eric Smith and I had become one of the first owners of the building's newly remodeled co-op apartments in 1979. Five years after we moved in, I watched with amazement and more than a little anxiety as movers efficiently packed up most of our belongings, including treasured antique furniture from my family in the Midwest. By Madison Avenue standards, these were not really antiques at all. I can imagine an East Side dealer dismissing some as "white trash country oak."
In a much later visit back to New York from Miami, my husband and I discovered that our dining room table that has been in my mother's rural Illinois family for several generations was a dead ringer for a kitchen table in a Lower East Side museum about that neighborhood's early tenement life. We shared an affectionate giggle about our "tenement table."
Nevertheless, our bedroom furniture, with the high four-poster bed, came from my great-grandparents' stately brick 19th Century two-story mansion on Main Street in Shelbyville, Illinois. I can assure you that no one then or even now would ever look at that home and think of it as a tenement. The tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite were part of many reminders of my past that I still treasure and have since imported to our home in Miami.
Even more so than that furniture, I've made a long and circuitous journey from the Midwest, with many unexpected twists. But when the tenement table and I were fixing to leave Brooklyn for Miami, I remember looking out the third-story window of our walk-up brownstone apartment with sadness. Even the red geraniums in our window boxes I had so carefully tended, perhaps as an unconscious homage to the way my mom used to grow red geraniums in clay pots when I was growing up in Shelbyville, seemed to look a bit wilted and out of sorts.
When the moving van drove down Berkeley Place and disappeared out of sight, I wondered melodramatically if I would ever see that furniture again. Was I saying good-bye forever to this part of my life?
I had always loved living in that brownstone with its high ceilings and ornate architectural details. No matter how tired I was from arriving home in the evening from my book publishing job in Manhattan, riding that screeching D train to the 7th Avenue stop in Park Slope until I was blue in the face, I always took special pleasure in opening the grandly carved dark wooden double doors gracing the entrance to our building at 210 Berkeley Place. Forever the bookish English major, I felt as if I were opening the door to a Henry James novel. My knees were not as creaky as they are now, so I really did not mind--too much anyway--climbing the many steps to our apartment.
So in the summer of 1984, we were on the move again, and my life was in flux once more. Before arriving in New York in 1979, I had spent four years living in North Carolina while I attended graduate school in literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I steeped myself in literature with the intensely overachieving zeal of a grad student, and along the way I encountered many eccentricities of the American South.
I learned that the expression "might could" was sometimes called the "Southern subjunctive." I discovered the thrill of reading poetry by Baudelaire and Rimbaud in French, threaded my way through the rich metaphorical language of "King Lear" and "Othello," and heard people smirk about a woman driving past tobacco fields while getting drunk on Rebel Yell.
But I also learned that I was not willing to struggle for who-knows-how-much-longer to earn a PhD, having worried myself sick over the process of writing my MA thesis in Comparative Literature on the visual imagery of sacrifice and saintliness in short fiction by Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce. I had no intention of becoming a PhD "gypsy scholar," bouncing from one non-tenure track position to another in remote corners of this country. Earlier I had spent four years studying English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small Midwestern town that reminded me too much of Shelbyville, Illinois.
The summer we left Brooklyn, I was beginning to wonder if my fate was to undergo major upheavals every four years. I even made Eric promise me that we could reconsider moving back to New York after four or five years in Miami--which he reluctantly did, even though we both knew that his bred-in-Miami body would never consent to enduring another cold and snowy winter in New York.
When we had decided to get married in 1979 and move to New York, I was thrilled to leave behind the obsessive craziness of academia and pursue a new dream, working for book publishers in New York. Eric had just received his MD degree from University of Miami and was ready for a change, too.
I became thoroughly smitten by the bright lights and big city life of The Big Apple.
TO BE CONTINUED, PROBABLY BY JULY 19, 2012
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