The last official day of the Miami Art Museum was June 3, 2013. For over fifteen years MAM has been located at the downtown Miami-Dade Cultural Center. Before this institution was renamed MAM and announced its plans to begin a permanent collection of art, it was known as the Center for the Fine Arts (CFA) at the same location. How things change when time passes in the Magic City. In December 2013, concurrent with Art Basel Miami Beach 2013, this museum will reopen with yet another new name as well as in a new location. Perez Art Museum Miami will open its doors this December in a new, state-of-the-art facility further downtown at the bayfront Museum Park. For more updates, check www.miamiartmuseum.org
On Saturday, June 1, 2013, so glad I was able to catch "Frames of Reference: Latin American Art from the Jorge M. Perez Collection," at Miami Art Museum, before this exhibit came down, as well as to see one last time "New Work Miami 2013." Want to say how pleased I was to purchase a copy of the handsome catalog for the Perez exhibit. It's beautifully illustrated. Additionally, I've been thoroughly enjoying the elegant and insightful essay catalog essay, "Collecting Moments: Unraveling Stories from the Jorge M. Perez Collection of Latin American Art" by my dear artcentric friend, Elizabeth Cerejido. Quite sure that I will read it more than once! Also found in the catalog "History and Heritage: A conversation between Jorge M. Perez and Tobias Ostrander" so instructive and informative that at times I felt as if I were reading a textbook. The text of this conversation, indeed the catalog and show, brought back memories I have of The Miami Herald story I wrote about the Perez collection, in which Perez told me about how much he loved Impressionism in addition of course to Latin American art, so I thought I would post that today on my blog. That story is part of a Herald series I wrote called "Profiles in Collecting."
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS CONNECTED TO MIAMI
This just in from another dear artcentric friend, Asser Saint-Val. The "International Biennale Artists Exhibition Miami" runs June 6 to 14, 2013. Theme is "Coexistence of Traditional and Modern Values in Contemporary Society." Venue is Miami Iron Side, Main Gallery, 7600 NE 4th Ct., Miami, Florida 33138. Opening reception is TONIGHT, June 6, from 7 to 10 p.m. There's an auction on Thursday, June 13, 6 to 10 p.m., which benefits Art and Entertainment Council of the City of Miami. Info I received says to please RSVP to IBAEM20013@gmail.com and that this is endorsed by the City of Miami. Valet parking available.
Yesterday I was delighted to visit this exhibit in the Design District, "DIRT Yuta Suelo Udongo Te," curated by Broward County visual artist Onajide Shabaka. Venue is Spear Building, 3815 NE Miami Court, Miami Design District, Miami 33137. Although it's been on view since June 1, the actual opening reception is June 8, 2013, 7-9 p.m. on the Second Saturday Art Walk. It's up through June 28, 2013. Must say I was quite impressed by the innovative yet down-to-earth (yes, pun is VERY much intended!) concept of this show and how that concept was thoughtfully executed. Here's some text from the press release: "Statements about life, death, history and the ephemerality of it all are loaded with symbolic baggage before you do anything with them. Visual artist and curator Onajide Shabaka invited artists to take up the challenge and investigate various aspects of dirt, and certainly not all on the physical level."
Here's what the press release says about participating artists: Dona Altemus - mixed media (Miami), Edouard Duval-Carrie - painting (Haiti/Miami), Robert Chambers - mixed media (Miami/Denmark), William Cordova - mixed media (Miami), Veronica Scharf Garcia - ceramics, sculpture (W. Palm Beach), Mark Hahn - photography (Arizona), Alette Simmons-Jimenez - mixed media (Miami), Lori Nozick - sculpture (Miami), Kim Nicolini - photography, drawing (Miami), David Rohn - photography, performance (Miami), Onajide Shabaka - mixed media, drawing (Fort Lauderdale), Jovan Karlo Villalba - painting, sculpture (Miami), Debra Wilk - poetry (Sanford)
KUDOS to Onajide Shabaka for taking the initiative to organize this exhibit and KUDOS to the Design District for supporting his efforts by providing a venue. Exhibit open weekdays Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday noon to 6 p.m. or by appointment. Contact Onajide Shabaka, editor@miamiartexchange.com or Twitter: @onajide
Not on assignment: I recently returned from Ecuador, visiting Quito and Cuenca. How interesting to realize that even there, we do live in such a small world, as someone I admire very much recently reminded me. Saw the remarkable installation, located in its own building, "Chapel of Man" by late Ecuador artist Oswaldo Guayasamin. As I recall, support for the "Chapel of Man" was provided by many funders including the governments of Chile and Cuba, as well as Florida Atlantic University. Also saw this artist's home and thoroughly stunning art collection, which I understand has been on view to the public only for the past five months.
AN INDELIBLE IMPRESSION copyright by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, Sunday, April 28, 2002
Profiles in Collecting
Name: Jorge Perez
Profession: Developer and CEO of The Related Group of Florida, a real estate development company
Focus: Latin American Art
First Purchase: Lithograph by Joan Miro
Most Recent Purchases: Sculpture by Edouard Duval-Carrie of Miami and painting by Francisco Toledo of Mexico
Tip: Don't try to start out with costly masters. Ask the better dealers in Miami for information on new, up-and-coming artists and then meet them.
Jorge Perez admits he is afflicted with long-lasting Monet envy, yet the confession seems so out of character.
Perez has amassed an outstanding collection of Latin American art in his Coconut Grove home, a three-story Mediterranean-styled villa painted the color of mango sorbet. And while it offers spectacular views of Biscayne Bay, those views can't compete with the art that's everywhere inside, from new work by rising stars to glowing paintings by such masters as Wifredo Lam and Diego Rivera.
There's a Jose Bedia and a Botero by the front door. Further inside is a sassy mock Botero portrait of Perez and Darlene, his wife, smiling and uncharacteristically corpulent. A present for their wedding last year, this one hangs above the treadmill in their exercise room.
And still, says Perez, his ultimate collector's fantasy would transport him to a lush garden in Giverny, France.
"Would I have liked to throw away the whole Latin American concept if I had billions of dollars and dedicate myself to being an Impressionist collector, which is the period I love most? And fill my house with Monet, who is probably my favorite artist?" he asks. "Yes."
So far it's been a dream too big for this extraordinarily successful South Florida developer, known for revitalizing downtown areas. In recent years his company, The Related Group of Florida, has moved into the luxury condo market, posting revenues of $400 million in 1999. That led Miami Business magazine to name him Business Leader of the Year in 2001.
And with that success has come the means to buy art in abundance.
"It's one of the most substantial collections of Latin American art in Miami," says Suzanne Delehanty, director of the Miami Art Museum, where Perez has been a board member since the early 1990s. "He's so enthusiastic about putting it together. It's a creative calling, and he has great respect for the historic origins of Latin American art."
EARLY EXPOSURE
An early exposure to art may explain his Monet-driven dream. This passion for Impressionism is not so strange when you learn that Perez came to art early, and that it was filtered through a distinctly Latin American lens.
Born to Cuban parents, Perez spent his early childhood in Buenos Aires, where he grew up "around art and people who talked about art."
His bookish mother talked to him about her favorite artists, Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as well as others less famous but more influenced by the French.
"A lot of South American countries, especially Argentina and Uruguay, kept close ties with Europe," Perez says. "And in the 1940s and 1950s they were still doing a lot of very fine Impressionism."
Historical connections like these weave through the art in his home, and Perez clearly relishes the fact that they suggest stories of creative young ambition. A gem usually found in the family's formal living room is Matta's first oil painting, made in Paris in 1938 and currently on loan to the Matta survey at MAM. Perez learned of its historic significance when MAM curator Lorie Mertes connected the piece with research for the museum's exhibit.
Also in the room is an early, pivotal 1936 Lam painting, a cityscape glimpsed from a balcony and done in modulated shades of blue with Moorish flourishes.
Titled "The Window," the painting is a testament to Lam's early fascination with Matisse.
"I just love that Lam period when he was in Europe, the same way I love the Diego Rivera period when he was there," Perez says, gesturing toward a 1908 still life by Rivera, with fruit nestled among indigo shadows of white cloth.
"That piece," he exults, "is pure Cezanne."
HUGE COLLECTION
A restless man who moves with the lithe step of a tennis player, Perez points out a tiny Surrealist treasure by Remedios Varo in the library as he tries to power-walk a visitor through a tour of all the art in his home. But it's impossible to see everything in one visit.
At the top of a stairway is a classic masterwork of geometric design by Joaquin Torres-Garcia of Uruguay. In horizontal bands of gray and pinkish terra cotta, the painting lays out the influential vocabulary of Torres-Garcia's Constructive Universalism. The artist developed it in the 1930s by fusing a dynamic range of sources, from Cubism to pre-Columbian art, and it reflects his own respect for Latin America's indigenous cultures.
Perez also owns sculpture by one of Torres-Garcia's best-known students, Gonzalo Fonseca.
"This is a little jewel," he says, gingerly lifting a Plexiglas case from a miniature ceramic obelisk by Fonseca that's displayed on a table in the foyer.
It was made in 1963 Paris, with resolute disregard for Pop Art's cheeky twists. Instead it carries a primeval aura, as if pulled from the dusty trenches of an archaeological site.
"It's got every constructivist symbol possible," Perez marvels.
More symbols are incised on a 5 1/2-foot-tall snowy marble sculpture by Fonseca, which stands sentinel a few steps outside the front door.
Perez is eager to champion another artist from Uruguay, the lesser-known Jose Cuneo whose reputation rests on his 1930s paintings of expressive scenes of lonely ranches dwarfed by the eerie glow of a huge crescent moon.
"This is one of my very favorites," he says, standing before the brooding and bizarre Cuneo moonscape. "I love the way you see the trees moving in the coming storm. It's very van Gogh-ish. It just hits you."
Other works in Perez's collection subvert their European ties and are more tropical, as luxuriant as the ripe pomegranates and bananas in an exquisite 1940s drawing by Cuban modernist Amelia Pelaez, produced after the artist returned to Havana from studying in Paris.
"To me this says sensuality. Some of her [paintings of] interiors don't do anything for me, but the moment I saw this I wanted to have it," he recalls. "It has a sexual exuberance."
CONTEMPORARY, TOO
The lively contemporary side of his collection, which includes a conceptual "good luck charm" by Miami-based artist Ruben Torres Llorca, also springs from long family ties.
In 1959, Perez's family briefly returned to Cuba but "lost what they came to get," he says, after Fidel Castro came to power. They fled to Bogota, where his father ran a branch of an American pharmaceutical company and Perez attended high school.
Money was too tight to collect art then, but "I remember going to innumerable gallery exhibits," Perez says. "They were fun. I liked some of the cutting-edge things you were starting to see."
Perez later attended Miami-Dade Community College and the C.W. Post College on Long Island. And though art remained mostly out of reach, it was not out of sight. While other students decorated their dorm rooms with rock band posters, Perez put up a poster of Picasso's "Guernica." About this time he also bought his first artwork. It was, he recalls, "a great Miro lithograph. It was $150 and that was a fortune."
The Miro still hangs in his office, alongside a vast, verdant landscape by contemporary artist Tomas Sanchez.
"I think the process of collecting, for me, is almost as important as the art," he says. "It's definitely almost as pleasurable--the research, the books, seeing how the artists progressed in their techniques.
"I don't think a museum curator can describe better than you what you like. So you have to take information from them, but at the same time if it doesn't mean anything to you personally, then you are just collecting for someone else or to show off."
He searches the room for an example to illustrate his point.
"I love these apples by Botero," he says, referring to an amber-tinted still life in his dining room that picks up the dark, rich finish of the antique mahogany table. "But I also know I have been following Botero for a very long time. This is an important piece. The brush strokes are much rougher than when he finally generates his way of painting."
These days, Perez busies himself following new artists in the galleries--much to the delight of the gallery owners.
"I am the worst guy," he says with a chuckle. "Every time I go I end up with something. Other people can just look at something and say, "It's great," but I am a collector. I have to have it."
