December's announcement that U.S. and Cuba are renewing diplomatic relations has generated much controversy in Miami's Cuban exile community, as well as considerable press in Miami and beyond. As someone who's lived in Miami for 30 years and has experienced the peculiar position of being, in various degrees, both inside and outside the Cuban exile community, I am well aware of the profound grief Castro's regime has brought to my half-Cuban husband's extended Cuban American family in South Florida.
Havana Memories
In addition, that historic December news brought back memories of my trip to cover the 7th Havana Biennial in late 2000 for The Miami Herald. My editor at the time really wanted me to attend, but I was told under no circumstances could I go as a Miami Herald journalist because the MH was not allowed in the country. Then it was suggested that perhaps I could go undercover. . . .well, I did love my job but certainly was not willing to risk jail time in Cuba for it!!
So I did go, but legally. I used connections with a southwest Florida university group and traveled with them. My husband came along as a translator, although it turned out many Cuban artists and curators I met spoke English, so I did not need him to translate as much as I thought I would. While we were there, we visited a few of his relatives who had not chosen exile. We brought them a small suitcase of meds--we had learned from one of his Miami Cuban relatives that these meds were badly needed.
Today I am posting my two articles about that trip to cover the 7th Havana Bienal (that's the spelling I used, in reference to the catalog I brought home with me). One thing I did not report was how many Miami people I saw on that trip to Havana! Most of them looked horrified to see me and begged me not to write in the MH that I saw them in Havana!
What I did report was the impressive number of art museum groups, from outside Miami, I encountered. It did seem to me that Miami's art museum community was missing out on provocative, intriguing cultural exchanges that many other art communities were going to great lengths to experience. So many things have changed here in Miami since I went to Havana. It's no longer the kiss of death for artists to exhibit here if they have exhibited or worked in Cuba.
I also reported on how artists, including Tania Bruguera, were censored at that event. Very interesting, and surely not surprising, to see how censorship is still taking place in Cuba since this historic December announcement regarding thaw in Cuba and U.S. relations. Once again, Bruguera is involved in censorship in Cuba.
Current Situation in Cuba: Various Views
On Friday, January 2, 2015, Randal C. Archibold reported in The New York Times that "Human rights monitors said that up to 50 government opponents were arrested around the time that Ms. Bruguera was detained Tuesday before she could carry out an open mike performance in Havana's Revolution Square in which she planned to ask citizens to speak about their visions of the country."
For this blog post, I've emailed several members of Miami's art community scanned copies of my MH articles about my trip to Havana, explaining I thought that now was an appropriate time to post them on my blog. In light of that, I asked them to email me comments about how they think December's news will affect the art scene in Cuba as well as Miami's innumerable artcentric connections to Cuba. I also asked them to offer any reflections they might have on the Havana Biennial as a cultural institution since the 12th Havana Biennial will take place May 22 - June 22, 2015. So here are their comments.
From a longtime member of Miami's diverse art community:
"There could be a comparison with the 25th anniversary of the Berlin wall falling Nov. 2014 and the beginning of diplomatic relations with Cuba. The coming years in all likelihood will be confused, chaotic and, for some, deeply unfair, but 25 years from now the possibilities are endless for Havana. If the Fanjul family (Cuban-American sugar barons), as reported in the Washington Post, are considering business relations under the right circumstances, then why not for Cuban artists?"
From Howard Farber, collector of Cuban art, who calls both Miami and New York home:
"In the past, I attended my first Havana Biennial with very little expectation. However, when I arrived in Havana, I was very impressed with not only the venue (the historic Morro Castle), but with the amount of energy put forth by a country that has minimal financial resources to compete with other venues like Venice, etc.
"A movie theatre is only as good as the films they play, and any Biennial is only as good as the quality of art it exhibits. Cuba has always done a wonderful job of marketing and exhibiting the best of the best of international as well as Cuban contemporary art. To me, it's amazing. . . . It's like 'the little engine that could.'
"Collectors, journalists and museum curators have always attempted to make it a 'must see' visit.
"So now, we are entering 2015 and a new era of U.S. and Cuban relations, which is long past due.
"Some of us older collectors of Cuban contemporary art have waited for years to see this occur. . . . I know that many collectors are always looking for the next 'big thing.'
"Well, the next 'big thing' to me since late 2001 has always been Cuban contemporary art. It will be an exciting time for all that have devoted their time, efforts and money to see the 2015 Havana Biennial surpass our most hidden fantasies of what a market can become.
"There is a new dawn for Cuban contemporary art, and I'm so thrilled to be a witness to it."
From Tami Katz-Freiman, independent contemporary art curator based in Miami, and who also attended the 7th Havana Biennial when I was there:
"It's very interesting what's going on now and how this new relationship will impact the art scene." Referring to a recent New York Times article reporting that "Cuba's art scene awaits a travel boom," she says, "As you can see it's all about the impact on the art scene and basically I agree--it will be booming for a while until 'everybody' will come, and then it will be like any other country . . . for the long run--I am sure it will also impact the content of the works.
"As for censorship--I don't think government policies will be evaporated suddenly--but hopefully this new agreement is a sign for a change and it might take time and Cuba will be more open and more tolerant to the freedom of speech."
From widely exhibited artist William Cordova--who spent two weeks in Cuba in 2012 and visited Havana, Matanzas, and Ceiba Mocha--and who has also spent much time living and working in Miami:
"The Cold War never ended for the U.S. and Cuban governments or for most Cubans in South Florida. There are many ways in which some have benefited politically and financially. This is not exclusive to the arts at all but in reference to state and local politics and government policies."
Cordova thinks that, when I quote Cuban-American artist Tony Labat saying that Cuban artists "don't even know what paying dues is. . . . Busloads of collectors are buying work from artists that are not ready to show," this situation, Cordova says, "echoes strategies applied since then towards the booming Asian art market in the early 2000s or the NY East Village buying boom in the early 1980s. Most of that art never saw the light of day after being purchased but was a byproduct of buying frenzy and opportunism."
A further example of such frenetic opportunism in the art market, Cordova says, is "what occurred in Miami in the early 1990s when many young Cuban artists decided to establish themselves in South Florida. Some experienced severe culture shock. . . capitalism has its pros and cons but many were not prepared for a foreign system that took advantage of their previous success.
"This phenomenon was and is not exclusive to Cuban artists at all. Most immigrants who migrate to any country have to adapt and understand new systems. For some Cuban artists, though, it was more traumatic because in Cuba some artists 'are privileged and able to travel' as artist Jose Toirac stated in your article. The difference in the U.S. is that nothing is free and the government does not value or support visual culture in most capacities.
"Luis Camnitzer's New Art of Cuba (1993) gave us a glimpse of many of those artists who eventually left the safety of the island. It's interesting to see how some of those same artists focused on subversive themes related to government policies in Cuba. Those same artists were unable to evolve thematically once they left Cuba. . . you can see how derivative some of their work has become because they had no time to evolve and were very young when they left their country. I see similar situations with Chinese artists because they're not fully informed about how commerce is applied to the arts in a Western market."
So, without further ado, here are my MH articles:
A NEW PICTURE by Elisa Turner
COPYRIGHT BY ELISA TURNER
Published Sunday, January 28, 2001, in The Miami Herald
HAVANA
Cuban art in enjoying widespread popularity, and, at a recent Havana showcase, the booming scene was on display for curious Americans.
Savvy Americans art lovers can't get enough of Cuba these days.
"Cuban art is hot," says Ricardo Viera, director and curator of Pennsylvania's Lehigh University Art Galleries, who traveled here this fall to visit family and friends. "The amount of Cuban art selling in this country [the United States] is unreal."
Cuban artists "don't even know what paying dues is," adds Tony Labat, a Cuban American artist who teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and who brought his students to the capital city to work with artists. "Busloads of collectors are buying work from artists that are not ready to show."
International fascination with the art and artists of Cuba, which has been building for a decade, reached a crescendo this fall at the 7th Havana Bienal, a series of exhibitions that drew more than 1,500 foreign visitors, according to director Nelson Herrera Ysla. More than 1,000 of those came from the United States--the highest number of Americans ever to attend the Bienal--including groups from New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
The past 10 years have also seen German chocolate baron Peter Ludwig create the Ludwig Foundation in Havana to support Cuban artists; group shows at the Bronx Museum, the University of Florida and in Barcelona; and also solo shows in the United States and Europe for celebrated Cuban sculptor Kcho.
There also have been residencies and exhibits for Cuban artists in U.S. cities organized by Art in General, a nonprofit organization in lower Manhattan. And, in April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will stage "Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution," a major show that includes black-and-white images of Havana's Malecon by Manuel Pina, and New York publisher Harry N. Abrams will release Art Cuba: The New Generation, an illustrated survey of 67 artists working in Cuba, by Art in General Director Holly Block.
Closer to home, the traveling exhibit "Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island" comes in May to the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa while the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art [now known as the Nova Southeastern University Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale] recently added works from nearly a dozen Cuban artists to its permanent collection.
But has that interest been sparked by the quality of art and the artists or by Cuba's forbidden allure, something given greater emphasis in this country by the island's status as a renegade outlaw, off-limits to U.S. citizens without special permission?
"I think the curiosity factor was strong," says Dan Cameron, curator of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, who attended the Bienal with a group from the New Orleans Museum of Art. "Cuba has been very much in the news, with Buena Vista Social Club and Elian Gonzalez. Suddenly people who hadn't given Cuba very much thought took this as an opportunity to find out what was going on."
New Opportunities
Art, like most everything in Cuba, is run by the state, which manages 21 art schools, organized regionally with at least one per province. Budding talent is identified at an early age, and the most gifted children are boarded at these special schools.
The pre-eminent school is Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), a tattered Utopian masterwork of sensual domes built in the 1960s by now-exiled architect Ricardo Porro on the greens of the former Havana Country Club. ISA produced most of the so-called 1990s generation of Cuban artists, the first post-revolutionary artists allowed to travel to the United States and Europe for exhibits and residencies and to legally receive coveted American dollars for their work--although the government can still claim a sizable cut of the artists' earnings.
Because the artists bring much-needed hard currency to Cuba, at home they're an elite that enjoys latitude--up to a point--to address themes such as materialism, politics and identity with ingenious metaphors rather than strident attacks that characterized so much work by Cuba's vaunted 1980s generation.
In a conundrum typical of this swiftly changing island, where totalitarianism and tourism make odd dance partners, there is a mantra you hear about the students of ISA: Their art is terrific, and their access to art materials is terrible.
But deprivation has been the mother of creative invention for these artists, who receive an in-depth cultural education and are taught to draw with exquisite skill. In an art world that prizes unconventional materials, scarcity has become a curious boon.
Kcho, by far the most internationally famed of this group, recycles rum bottles, planks from broken- down docks and twisted mangrove stumps to craft large installations that evoke the experience of being uprooted and the tragic travails of the balseros, or rafters.
Jose Toirac, whose spectral portraits of slain revolutionaries sold for $9,500 at auction at Havana's Casa de las Americas, painted them with wine and blood, though he also paints with oils.
Recycling isn't just a matter of convenience, it's an aesthetic statement that allows artists to produce compelling objects that allude to personal and political pasts--the contrast between Western consumerism and Third World want as well as internationally topical issues of migration and identity.
Abel Barroso uses cedar panels from old armoires to craft his wry hybrids of sculpture and woodcut prints. Rene Francisco turns empty paint tubes into robotic figures. Yamilys Brito paints her works on 45 rpm records. And in a startling mix of art and design, the Havana design team known as Cabinete Ordo Armoris has sculpted a baroque pink lamp from tubes used to inseminate cows.
Art and Revolution
The 7th Havana Bienal was an ambitious if disorganized collection of exhibits by more than 170 artists from 42 countries, emphasizing work from Cuba and elsewhere in the Third World. But several museum officials admitted the mixed bag of the Bienal was not the real draw for visitors; it was the chance to see Havana and artists working there.
Across town from the narrow tourist-filled streets of Old Havana, Jose Toirac shares his studio and home with his wife, art historian Meira Marrero. It's a modest walk-up apartment with a Sony TV, gray peeling window shutters and a vintage General Electric refrigerator next to a wooden easel.
Wearing a white T-shirt speckled with black dots in a pattern matching the bullet holes in the uniform Che Guevara was wearing when he was killed, Toirac is showing his most recent paintings--portraits of Fidel Castro within the iconography of Western advertising.
Many began as precisely painted copies of shots from Korda's "One Hundred Images of the Revolution" before morphing into something like miniature, hand-crafted billboards. Here was Castro standing tall as the Marlboro Man, or glowing as a vision in red, hawking Calvin Klein's Obsession cologne.
An artist who appropriates and analyzes stock images of the Cuban revolution, Toirac has been linked to Goya by Marilyn A. Zeitlin, the Miami-educated curator of "Contemporary Art from Cuba," who finds the artist's ironic works analogous to the Spanish master's subtly derisive court portraits.
"Every artist has to find a way to mix the revolution and art," Toirac says. Still, he admits, "It's not possible to show all these together. It's not the right political time."
Though he has visited the United States, Toirac remains in Havana now that he can sell his art for dollars. "Artists are privileged and able to travel. It's not expensive to live here," he says. "My rent is paid for. Everyone can't go and be successful like Bedia (Miami-based artist Jose Bedia, Toirac's former teacher).
Artists really want to stay and take part in the Cuban art phenomenon. "When I go to the United States, I knock on gallery doors and they don't want to open the door," adds Toirac, "but here they knock on my door."
Independent Display
In Havana's Vedado district, a hilly, formerly middle-class neighborhood with sidewalks upturned by the untrammeled roots of ficus trees, stands a Mediterranean-style home that houses Espacio Aglutinador, a gallery created in 1994 when artists Ezequiel Suarez and Sandra Ceballos divided their one-room apartment in half.
Ceballos and Suarez have since parted ways. Now she runs the gallery with partner and fellow artist Rene Esteban Quintana. Old pink and floral tiles cover the floor; a Hewlet Packard computer and printer rest on a desk next to shelves packed with art books.
Known for mounting unusual exhibitions, Ceballos said she launched the gallery because she was frustrated with the official mechanisms for showing art.
"I wanted to be more independent," she says.
The current show features small objects and mementos such as invitations saved by Havana critics and art supporters. The opposite of trendiness, the show is engaging and intimate.
But it remains a challenge, Ceballos says, to raise an independent voice now that the art market is more available.
"It depends on what kind of artist you want to be," she says with a shrug. "If you want to be an artist influenced by foreign galleries and curators looking for a type of Cuban art," she continues, "you'll produce a certain kind of work."
"The galleries are looking for names, not artists," she adds, a lament that could be heard almost anywhere.
Are artists free to criticize the government?
"Some artists can, some cannot," she says. "If the money comes, they can do what works. [But] it's got to be metaphorical, like Kcho."
Also in Vedado is a sagging, 19th Century villa scarred by a gingerbread front porch that had rotted. Its open door led to "This is Your House Vicenta," a memorable show of work by seven artists timed to attract Bienal visitors.
In this ghostly house--where elegant faded wallpaper stirred speculation about plusher days--lives Vicente, the 80-year-old former maid of the home's late owner. Though Vicente has done nothing to repair the house in more than 50 years, she allowed artists to make installations in several first-floor rooms.
These rooms proved especially compelling because they were woven into the home's ruined charm, though Angel Delgado's piece would have been riveting anywhere. His was a trestle table laid with metal plates filled with soap crafted to resemble prison food, a formally austere homage to Delgado's six nonths in prison, punishment for having defecated in a performance on a photo of Fidel Castro. A small photo of Che hung over the table, though a government official later insisted it be removed, apparently disturbed by what appeared to be an illusion to Delgado's past insurgence.
Mapping Nostalgia
Vibora, a neighborhood of modest residential architecture, lies a bumpy, 25-minute, exhaust-filled trip southwest of Old Havana. There, in a white-columned home, artist Ibrahim Miranda lives and works. Early on a November day he finds himself playing host to two Los Angeles dealers, a handful of collectors from California and New York, and Laurel J. Reuter, director of the North Dakota Museum of Art. Miranda is one of the first Cuban artists to make prints at Tampa's Graphicstudio.
Hanging in his dining room above a mahogany sideboard is his 2000 Graphicstudio woodcut in shades of pink and black. A surreal image calculated to appeal to exile nostalgia, the woodcut is based on a strangely proportioned 18th Century map of Cuba and Florida. Dark waters separate the two land masses and floating in the water are giant eyeballs, from which roll oily black tears that swamp Cuba's coastline.
The title, "Lagrimas negras" ("Black Tears"), he explained, is also the title of a nostalgic and passionate Cuban song from the 1930s. It's an "emotional view," he adds, of the relationship between Cuba and Florida.
Back at the Bienal, Abel Barroso's clever "Third World Internet Café," occupying a dank space that was once a prison in the Castillo del Morro, gently skewered the presence of so many digitally advanced Westerners flocking to a poor country like Cuba. His collection of "Mango" brand computers, fax machines and printers were hand-crafted from wood--like precious low-tech islands themselves.
Barroso's unusual adaptation of techniques for printing woodcuts prompted Graphicstudio to invite him to Tampa to make new work and speak to local art students.
However much they neglect artists who left Cuba before this burgeoning U.S. interest, cultural exchanges like Graphicstudio's and other signs of support continue to flow north and south--opening doors, many believe, to a more open atmosphere in Cuba.
"If you make Cuban artists international, it will be the best for them," Cuban art critic Alejandro Rios says, alluding to the protection fame can provide.
"Who's going to touch Kcho now?"
Elisa Turner is the Herald's art critic.
OUTSIDE ARTISTS FACE CENSORSHIP WHEN EXHIBITING WORKS IN CUBA
by Elisa Turner
COPYRIGHT BY ELISA TURNER
Published Sunday, January 28, 2001, in The Miami Herald
HAVANA
Although Havana's 7th Bienal was dedicated to the theme of communication, censorship compromised the images and ideas some artists hope to communicate.
Albert Chong, a Jamaican-born artist who teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said he ran afoul of Cuban censors and feels "betrayed."
The trouble arose when he altered his installation, "Winged Evocations," months after it had been chosen by Bienal curators. In Havana, Chong added letters from Cuban artists on and off the island whom he'd asked to comment about their country. Especially objectionable was one from a Cuban American, who wrote "freedom" and "libertad" all over a photocopy of his Cuban passport.
According to Chong, Bienal officials asked him to remove the letters, saying he was "being insensitive to the situation in Cuba." He refused, citing his artistic freedom.
In another case, Israeli artist David Reeb was asked to make "a small concession" and remove a portrait of Fidel Castro from a series of paintings. Reeb refused, reported the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, sending another work called "Censorship in Other Places," which deals with events in South Africa and Czechoslovakia.
The piece was untouched, though Bienal officials changed the title to "Untitled."
"Art is one of the last spaces where you can speak your mind," Chong said. "I felt like I was an outsider and had no right to question their society, but I had asked Cubans for their views. The responses from Cubans in Cuba were very poetic. . . if you are a citizen or artist you have to deal with these situations poetically.
"I didn't do this, so I guess I was at fault. People understand how to read between the lines."
After a restless night, Chong decided to cover up the letters, partly out of fear that his Cuban assistants would be punished for working with him.
"I didn't have a choice," he says. "I can leave but they have to live with it."
His solution layered irony upon irony: He and his crew covered the letters with paper boats--icons of freedom--made from pages ripped from Inside the Company, a book critical of the CIA's involvement in Latin America.
Still, the experience left him with "grief for the lost human potential. There are a lot of people who are very intelligent who are stagnating on the island because they have no outlet."
A performance and installation piece by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera also generated talk about censorship when it was shut down temporarily on the Bienal's first day.
Situated in La Cabana, a former prison, Bruguera's intentionally ambiguous piece required viewers to walk down a dark tunnel over a floor covered with pungent sugar cane. Near the end, light shone from a video monitor mounted on the ceiling, flickering Cuban TV footage of Castro.
Near the screen and hard to see in the dark, four naked men repeated gestures as if they were washing their mouths or hands.
Visitors were curious about why the work's ominous title, "Engineer of Souls," was scratched out on the label and replaced by "Untitled." In an e-mail, Bruguera said the initial title referred to another work she had planned to show in a smaller space; only after the label was up did she notice the error and it was corrected. She said she was told the piece was shut down by the military, not the Bienal, because of the nude men.
Bienal director Nelson Herrera Ysla acknowledged that the Bienal and artists don't always agree on what to show. While he and his staff talked both Chong and Reeb into changing what they exhibited, "they were free," he wrote in an e-mail, "to exhibit their artworks or not."
Herrera said he preferred to talk about "negotiations" rather than "censorship."
"I talk about ethics in curating," he wrote. "Everyone has their own principles. We do, as [do] many others in the world."
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Miami Art Museum Closes; Reopens in December as Perez Art Museum Miami
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."
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."
Monday, April 15, 2013
Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Begins Second Chapter of Memoir
Yes, I know that I promised to take myself out of the headlines for this post, but, well, as we all know, things don't always go the way you planned them. Life has a way of getting in the way of big ambitions. Since my last blog post in July 2012, I have been extremely busy with all sorts of personal and professional issues that just did not allow me the time for blogging.
I am quite excited that I have signed up for yet another Memoir Writing Workshop at The Writers Institute of Miami Dade College. This workshop will be taught by Rosecrans Baldwin, May 8 - 11, 2013. Check out more about The Writers Institute of MDC at www.flcenterlitarts.com
Nevertheless, now that I am back blogging, this post will include both "vintage blogging" as well as new material from the second chapter of my memoir.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS ABOUT MIAMI
ART@WORK Presents Light Boxes, Exhibition of Works by Miami Artist Kevin Arrow. On view April 1 to June 7, 2013.
This should be a wonderfully artcentric event, and I certainly hope my readers will attend! Opening reception is 7-9 p.m. Friday, May 3, at Art@Work, 1245 Galloway Road (87th Avenue), Miami (Free parking is available across the street at the Central Bible Assembly of God on opening night.) It's possible to see this exhibit weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. by appointment. Email is artatwork@bellsouth.net or phone is 305-264-3355. As the press release tells us, "Kevin Arrow lives and works in Miami. He has studied studio art, anthropology, Tibetan and Bhutanese design and painting, photography and graphic design in the United States and India." Moreover, as I know for a fact, his totally intriguing art has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Carol Jazzar Contempory Art, and many other places.
Kudos to Rene Morales of Miami Art Museum for curating "Kimsooja: A Needle Woman," which I reviewed for the October 2012 issue of ARTnews. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced that Kimsooja is one of 175 Guggenheim Fellows for 2013. She won in the field of Creative Arts - Film and Video. Fellowships were awarded to scholars, artists and scientists, chosen this year from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. For more info, see www.gf.org/fellows/current/
Here's my ARTnews review: (copyright Elisa Turner)
South Korean artist Kimsooja's subversively poetic exhibition, "Kimsooja: A Needle Woman," combined performance art with multichannel video installations to document how congested cities are transforming the globe. Organized by Miami Art Museum associate curator Rene Morales, it highlighted the destructive consequences of an expanding international urban population.
In A Needle Woman (1999-2001), eight silent, synchronized videos capture busy city streets in Cairo, Delhi, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Life in some cities appears more comfortable than in others: smog coats Shanghai, and Delhi laborers struggle with cargo, while New Yorkers strut around in fancy sunglasses. In each video, the artist stands at the screen's center with her back to viewers. Her straight black hair flows down her spine in a ponytail. Passersby ignore or jostle her; others stare crudely or laugh. A car nearly hits her but she doesn't flinch, her rigid posture recalling the fearless performances of Marina Abramovic. Like a compass needle always pointing forward, the steady form of her body against the urban mayhem is a testament to personal courage.
A Needle Woman's eight videos were divided into two galleries and separated by a "buffer zone" that showed two single-channel videos on opposite walls. In A Needle Woman (Kitakyushu), 1999, the artist lies prone on a large boulder as clouds drift above her. The work's idyllic setting in a Japanese city known for its prominent steel industry underscores the fragility of earth's natural resources in the face of industry. This was echoed in A Laundry Woman (Yamuna River, India), 2000, in which the artist watches debris floating in the sacred, but polluted, Yamuna River. A "needle woman" indeed, Kimsooja gracefully stitched together moving portraits of an embattled planet.
Current working title: WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? MY LIFE IN MIAMI AS A JOURNALIST AND ART CRITIC, A Memoir by Elisa Turner copyright Elisa Turner
Chapter Two
Once we settled in Miami in the scoring hot summer of 1984, all the summers thereafter would be insufferably sticky scorchers, 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."
My first weeks in a place I would later learn had been christened "the Magic City" were not magical at all. Since the previous owners of our vintage cottage in Coconut Grove were not yet ready to leave the home they had lived in for years, we set up temporary camp in an apartment belonging to Eric's sister across the street from the Kendall campus of Miami Dade College--or Miami Dade Community College, as it was known then. How ironic, in a way, that this is where I have been teaching since 2009 for around 10 to 15 hours a week, now that my newspaper days are over for good. Because of ongoing health issues, I can't hold down a full-time job and now could certainly not do all the driving I once did as art critic for The Miami Herald, not to mention the overseas travel.
When I drove to Miami Dade College from my current home in Coral Gables for my job interview, once again I was back in that Kendall neighborhood during a blazing summer day. The intense Miami sunlight glared so brightly on cars parked on this commuter campus that it hurt my eyes and gave me a headache. When I returned a few days later to fill out more paperwork, I wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses. I stopped by an office to get directions to a specific building and then asked for a campus map, which I received from someone who gave me the directions but wasn't sure I really needed a map. He assumed I wouldn't be returning to campus since I looked like "a lady from Coral Gables." "Oh, no," I replied, "I'm going to work here!"
But during that summer over 20 years earlier, we were more or less camped out in a confusing maze of boxes stacked throughout a Kendall apartment. Apparently all the boxes that the movers had packed up in our Brooklyn apartment and carried down the many steps to that moving van on Berkeley Place had reached Miami, but I still could not open the contents of most of them to make sure everything had arrived safely. I had to trust that the dismantled parts of our tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite had indeed come along for the ride with our other belongings. Eventually I would see everything all put back together, as Eric and his family kept assuring me.
In this small apartment, we did open a few boxes so that we could give ourselves some semblance of a daily routine. Tucked somewhere in the barely organized mess were my beloved winter clothes in shades of deep purple, cranberry, and forest green. They included sweaters, scarves, and the new royal blue wool coat I had bought shortly before we left New York, wanting to make sure I would have some elegant cold weather attire when I returned for what I had the audacity to hope would be frequent visits. That coat, with its dated 1980s shoulder pads, still hangs in my closet. I have worn it so infrequently that a fine layer of dust covers the coat's bulky shoulders, making its heavy royal blue fabric look a bit anemic. Now the garment I had once thought so stylish betrays the laughable similarity to padding for a NFL linebacker.
Once I became pregnant and was the mother of two small children, frequent trips to New York from Miami were an impossible dream. After more or less getting used to life in this city where, as a long ago tourist brochure once boasted, "summer spends the winter," I found to my chagrin that I had little wish to battle the weather in wintry New York again. The few winter clothes I still possessed were hopelessly out of style, and many of the others I had packed so carefully for their long trip to Florida I no longer owned. Not only did they look ridiculously dated, but they took up too much space in my closet. I gave boxes of them away to church-operated thrift shops.
During the day, while Eric was gone to his new job working with a family medicine physician in his office a few minutes away from our Kendall apartment, I moped around this temporary "home." It was furnished in classic 1970s décor, with screamingly loud "touches" of avocado green, yellow, and orange wherever I looked. This color scheme made my eyes hurt. When I tried to go outside to escape it, the humid heat hit me like a brick wall. You could practically see heat waves boiling up from the concrete sidewalks and parking lot surrounding the apartment complex. I do not see how Henry James could have written a novel in this place! In fact, on the hottest days of that summer, I swear I saw shimmering bands of heat coiling up from the roof of a parked car, distorting the air with queasy waves and slow wiggles.
Unlike Brooklyn and my beloved Manhattan, there was really no placed for walkers in the city to explore these outer reaches of Kendall, a sprawling suburb of Miami where we were temporary residents for a few weeks. Kendall seemed like such a wasteland to me then, with one nearly identical strip mall and apartment complex after another. I must say it is not all that different now, except that there's just more of this urban sprawl, especially given how real estate prices have climbed so high over the years in Miami's tourism and real estate-driven boom 'n' bust economy.
Yes, of course there are real neighborhoods in Kendall, but these can rarely be glimpsed when one navigates the busy six-lane highway of SW 104th Street running past the apartment complex where we first lived when we moved to Miami. A sidewalk next to this street, where cars whiz past, did and still does connect the apartment complex to a small mall opposite MDC, the favored short-hand name for this school now. When I first moved to Miami, I would occasionally venture out to that mall. All the sun, heat, and noise during that short walk to pick up some groceries or fruitlessly look for a copy of The New York Times made me more homesick than ever for New York. Now I think college students can congregate there to grab a latte at Starbucks, but of course back in 1984 Starbucks didn't exist.
Usually these brief outings on what passed for a sidewalk on a block in Kendall left me more cross and out-of-sorts than ever. I missed my friends in New York, I missed my favorite restaurants and bookstores, and I missed the fascinating sense of discovery that a walk down almost any Manhattan block would deliver. Hot and sweaty, I trudged back to our temporary home, carrying a bag of groceries with instant coffee, sugar, and half-and-half to support my caffeine habit, which I still possess, and a carton of Tropicana orange juice for Eric. No cans of frozen orange juice concentrate for this Florida boy! When we first met in college, he was appalled to learn that once upon a time I had actually liked Tang, the orange drink of 1960s era astronauts, which my mom would serve us for breakfast in Shelbyville. I had never tasted fresh orange juice, and I thought Tang was a fun alternative to those chilly cylinders of frozen orange juice concentrate that would plop heavily out of their icy cans into a pitcher of cold water, after we extricated them from our freezer.
When I opened the door to our Kendall apartment, I was glad at least to escape the relentless summer sun for the blast of cool air from our air-conditioned home for the moment. Ok, so maybe Henry James could have liked air-conditioning now and then if he had spent much time in the summer in Venice, but I am quite sure he would not have liked living among stacks of brown cardboard boxes and trying to make dinner in an avocado green kitchen. Thankfully, that summer the Olympics were being broadcast from Los Angeles.
I have never been much of a sports fan, but I do like watching some Summer Olympics sports, especially synchronized swimming, gymnastics, and diving. Diving and gymnastics especially always remind me now, as they did then, of ballet. So at least if I could not watch Baryshnikov or Peter Martins whirl through the air in person anymore, that summer there was the fabulous diver Greg Louganis to watch on TV. And guess what? Although he graduated from college at University of California, Irvine, he had attended University of Miami! So, as I recall, local TV stations seemed to give his spectacular diving wall-to-wall coverage. I had lots of chances to watch him, as well as other uncommonly toned and graceful divers, take running leaps off the diving tower and then fold his body into an impressive variety of shapes, almost like calligraphy in motion, before dropping headlong into the sparkling pool, toes pointed to perfection, creating barely a splash of water.
Years later, I would occasionally be reminded of those days, when I took my children for swimming lessons at the University of Miami swimming pool, where I saw a mural of Louganis and other famous athletes who had trained there. I may also have briefly recalled my rocky introduction to life in Miami when I negotiated the traffic on SW 104th Street to visit Miami Dade College Kendall campus art gallery in order to review an exhibit there for The Miami Herald. I'm sure I drove past that apartment complex, but I don't remember if I thought too much about our brief life there. Most likely I would have been thinking about the constant pressure of newspaper deadlines, what to cook for dinner that night, and calculating how long I should spend at the gallery taking notes so that I could still pick up my kids on time from school. I might have also been chastising myself about recently having arrived breathlessly with my son to his orthodontist's office, thinking that we were finally on time only to learn that his appointment had been the day before.
About the time Greg Louganis won his famous gold medals for spring board and tower diving, our Kendall sojourn ended, so we could finally begin our new lives in Miami in earnest. With lots of help from Eric's friends and family, we eventually moved all those boxes to our new home in Coconut Grove on Royal Palm Avenue, about five minutes away from the pink house on Natoma Street where Eric had grown up and where my in-laws still lived with the family matriarch, Mama.
While we were sorting out the logistics of this new life, I began my new job, teaching one course at
8 a.m. in writing, for freshmen at University of Miami. Desperate for at least some professional activity and identity when it was clear our move to Miami was going to happen, I had sent my resume/CV to the novelist Evelyn Mayerson in the University of Miami English Department. She was in charge of hiring for the freshman writing classes. In my cover letter and newly revised resume for life as a displaced New Yorker, I played up my teaching experience as a grad student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where as a teaching assistant for the English Department I had taught classes in writing for freshmen. Additionally, I had worked as a "style grader" for the UNC School of Business, meeting students enrolled in the MBA program for tutorials about the stylistic and grammatical deficits in their papers, which had also undergone what was called "content grading" by business professors. To my surprise, I discovered that at least one MBA student thought that writing a sentence meant starting with a capital letter and then cramming together logic-defying strings of words into a chunk of prose that ended with a period halfway down the page. Despite my earnest attempts to persuade this student, whose earning potential was at least a zillion times more than mine would ever be, that this notion of sentence structure produced a mind-boggling mess, I do not think I really made much of a dent changing his already ingrained "style."
TO BE CONTINUED
I am quite excited that I have signed up for yet another Memoir Writing Workshop at The Writers Institute of Miami Dade College. This workshop will be taught by Rosecrans Baldwin, May 8 - 11, 2013. Check out more about The Writers Institute of MDC at www.flcenterlitarts.com
Nevertheless, now that I am back blogging, this post will include both "vintage blogging" as well as new material from the second chapter of my memoir.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS ABOUT MIAMI
ART@WORK Presents Light Boxes, Exhibition of Works by Miami Artist Kevin Arrow. On view April 1 to June 7, 2013.
This should be a wonderfully artcentric event, and I certainly hope my readers will attend! Opening reception is 7-9 p.m. Friday, May 3, at Art@Work, 1245 Galloway Road (87th Avenue), Miami (Free parking is available across the street at the Central Bible Assembly of God on opening night.) It's possible to see this exhibit weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. by appointment. Email is artatwork@bellsouth.net or phone is 305-264-3355. As the press release tells us, "Kevin Arrow lives and works in Miami. He has studied studio art, anthropology, Tibetan and Bhutanese design and painting, photography and graphic design in the United States and India." Moreover, as I know for a fact, his totally intriguing art has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Carol Jazzar Contempory Art, and many other places.
Kudos to Rene Morales of Miami Art Museum for curating "Kimsooja: A Needle Woman," which I reviewed for the October 2012 issue of ARTnews. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced that Kimsooja is one of 175 Guggenheim Fellows for 2013. She won in the field of Creative Arts - Film and Video. Fellowships were awarded to scholars, artists and scientists, chosen this year from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. For more info, see www.gf.org/fellows/current/
Here's my ARTnews review: (copyright Elisa Turner)
South Korean artist Kimsooja's subversively poetic exhibition, "Kimsooja: A Needle Woman," combined performance art with multichannel video installations to document how congested cities are transforming the globe. Organized by Miami Art Museum associate curator Rene Morales, it highlighted the destructive consequences of an expanding international urban population.
In A Needle Woman (1999-2001), eight silent, synchronized videos capture busy city streets in Cairo, Delhi, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Life in some cities appears more comfortable than in others: smog coats Shanghai, and Delhi laborers struggle with cargo, while New Yorkers strut around in fancy sunglasses. In each video, the artist stands at the screen's center with her back to viewers. Her straight black hair flows down her spine in a ponytail. Passersby ignore or jostle her; others stare crudely or laugh. A car nearly hits her but she doesn't flinch, her rigid posture recalling the fearless performances of Marina Abramovic. Like a compass needle always pointing forward, the steady form of her body against the urban mayhem is a testament to personal courage.
A Needle Woman's eight videos were divided into two galleries and separated by a "buffer zone" that showed two single-channel videos on opposite walls. In A Needle Woman (Kitakyushu), 1999, the artist lies prone on a large boulder as clouds drift above her. The work's idyllic setting in a Japanese city known for its prominent steel industry underscores the fragility of earth's natural resources in the face of industry. This was echoed in A Laundry Woman (Yamuna River, India), 2000, in which the artist watches debris floating in the sacred, but polluted, Yamuna River. A "needle woman" indeed, Kimsooja gracefully stitched together moving portraits of an embattled planet.
Current working title: WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? MY LIFE IN MIAMI AS A JOURNALIST AND ART CRITIC, A Memoir by Elisa Turner copyright Elisa Turner
Chapter Two
Once we settled in Miami in the scoring hot summer of 1984, all the summers thereafter would be insufferably sticky scorchers, 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."
My first weeks in a place I would later learn had been christened "the Magic City" were not magical at all. Since the previous owners of our vintage cottage in Coconut Grove were not yet ready to leave the home they had lived in for years, we set up temporary camp in an apartment belonging to Eric's sister across the street from the Kendall campus of Miami Dade College--or Miami Dade Community College, as it was known then. How ironic, in a way, that this is where I have been teaching since 2009 for around 10 to 15 hours a week, now that my newspaper days are over for good. Because of ongoing health issues, I can't hold down a full-time job and now could certainly not do all the driving I once did as art critic for The Miami Herald, not to mention the overseas travel.
When I drove to Miami Dade College from my current home in Coral Gables for my job interview, once again I was back in that Kendall neighborhood during a blazing summer day. The intense Miami sunlight glared so brightly on cars parked on this commuter campus that it hurt my eyes and gave me a headache. When I returned a few days later to fill out more paperwork, I wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses. I stopped by an office to get directions to a specific building and then asked for a campus map, which I received from someone who gave me the directions but wasn't sure I really needed a map. He assumed I wouldn't be returning to campus since I looked like "a lady from Coral Gables." "Oh, no," I replied, "I'm going to work here!"
But during that summer over 20 years earlier, we were more or less camped out in a confusing maze of boxes stacked throughout a Kendall apartment. Apparently all the boxes that the movers had packed up in our Brooklyn apartment and carried down the many steps to that moving van on Berkeley Place had reached Miami, but I still could not open the contents of most of them to make sure everything had arrived safely. I had to trust that the dismantled parts of our tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite had indeed come along for the ride with our other belongings. Eventually I would see everything all put back together, as Eric and his family kept assuring me.
In this small apartment, we did open a few boxes so that we could give ourselves some semblance of a daily routine. Tucked somewhere in the barely organized mess were my beloved winter clothes in shades of deep purple, cranberry, and forest green. They included sweaters, scarves, and the new royal blue wool coat I had bought shortly before we left New York, wanting to make sure I would have some elegant cold weather attire when I returned for what I had the audacity to hope would be frequent visits. That coat, with its dated 1980s shoulder pads, still hangs in my closet. I have worn it so infrequently that a fine layer of dust covers the coat's bulky shoulders, making its heavy royal blue fabric look a bit anemic. Now the garment I had once thought so stylish betrays the laughable similarity to padding for a NFL linebacker.
Once I became pregnant and was the mother of two small children, frequent trips to New York from Miami were an impossible dream. After more or less getting used to life in this city where, as a long ago tourist brochure once boasted, "summer spends the winter," I found to my chagrin that I had little wish to battle the weather in wintry New York again. The few winter clothes I still possessed were hopelessly out of style, and many of the others I had packed so carefully for their long trip to Florida I no longer owned. Not only did they look ridiculously dated, but they took up too much space in my closet. I gave boxes of them away to church-operated thrift shops.
During the day, while Eric was gone to his new job working with a family medicine physician in his office a few minutes away from our Kendall apartment, I moped around this temporary "home." It was furnished in classic 1970s décor, with screamingly loud "touches" of avocado green, yellow, and orange wherever I looked. This color scheme made my eyes hurt. When I tried to go outside to escape it, the humid heat hit me like a brick wall. You could practically see heat waves boiling up from the concrete sidewalks and parking lot surrounding the apartment complex. I do not see how Henry James could have written a novel in this place! In fact, on the hottest days of that summer, I swear I saw shimmering bands of heat coiling up from the roof of a parked car, distorting the air with queasy waves and slow wiggles.
Unlike Brooklyn and my beloved Manhattan, there was really no placed for walkers in the city to explore these outer reaches of Kendall, a sprawling suburb of Miami where we were temporary residents for a few weeks. Kendall seemed like such a wasteland to me then, with one nearly identical strip mall and apartment complex after another. I must say it is not all that different now, except that there's just more of this urban sprawl, especially given how real estate prices have climbed so high over the years in Miami's tourism and real estate-driven boom 'n' bust economy.
Yes, of course there are real neighborhoods in Kendall, but these can rarely be glimpsed when one navigates the busy six-lane highway of SW 104th Street running past the apartment complex where we first lived when we moved to Miami. A sidewalk next to this street, where cars whiz past, did and still does connect the apartment complex to a small mall opposite MDC, the favored short-hand name for this school now. When I first moved to Miami, I would occasionally venture out to that mall. All the sun, heat, and noise during that short walk to pick up some groceries or fruitlessly look for a copy of The New York Times made me more homesick than ever for New York. Now I think college students can congregate there to grab a latte at Starbucks, but of course back in 1984 Starbucks didn't exist.
Usually these brief outings on what passed for a sidewalk on a block in Kendall left me more cross and out-of-sorts than ever. I missed my friends in New York, I missed my favorite restaurants and bookstores, and I missed the fascinating sense of discovery that a walk down almost any Manhattan block would deliver. Hot and sweaty, I trudged back to our temporary home, carrying a bag of groceries with instant coffee, sugar, and half-and-half to support my caffeine habit, which I still possess, and a carton of Tropicana orange juice for Eric. No cans of frozen orange juice concentrate for this Florida boy! When we first met in college, he was appalled to learn that once upon a time I had actually liked Tang, the orange drink of 1960s era astronauts, which my mom would serve us for breakfast in Shelbyville. I had never tasted fresh orange juice, and I thought Tang was a fun alternative to those chilly cylinders of frozen orange juice concentrate that would plop heavily out of their icy cans into a pitcher of cold water, after we extricated them from our freezer.
When I opened the door to our Kendall apartment, I was glad at least to escape the relentless summer sun for the blast of cool air from our air-conditioned home for the moment. Ok, so maybe Henry James could have liked air-conditioning now and then if he had spent much time in the summer in Venice, but I am quite sure he would not have liked living among stacks of brown cardboard boxes and trying to make dinner in an avocado green kitchen. Thankfully, that summer the Olympics were being broadcast from Los Angeles.
I have never been much of a sports fan, but I do like watching some Summer Olympics sports, especially synchronized swimming, gymnastics, and diving. Diving and gymnastics especially always remind me now, as they did then, of ballet. So at least if I could not watch Baryshnikov or Peter Martins whirl through the air in person anymore, that summer there was the fabulous diver Greg Louganis to watch on TV. And guess what? Although he graduated from college at University of California, Irvine, he had attended University of Miami! So, as I recall, local TV stations seemed to give his spectacular diving wall-to-wall coverage. I had lots of chances to watch him, as well as other uncommonly toned and graceful divers, take running leaps off the diving tower and then fold his body into an impressive variety of shapes, almost like calligraphy in motion, before dropping headlong into the sparkling pool, toes pointed to perfection, creating barely a splash of water.
Years later, I would occasionally be reminded of those days, when I took my children for swimming lessons at the University of Miami swimming pool, where I saw a mural of Louganis and other famous athletes who had trained there. I may also have briefly recalled my rocky introduction to life in Miami when I negotiated the traffic on SW 104th Street to visit Miami Dade College Kendall campus art gallery in order to review an exhibit there for The Miami Herald. I'm sure I drove past that apartment complex, but I don't remember if I thought too much about our brief life there. Most likely I would have been thinking about the constant pressure of newspaper deadlines, what to cook for dinner that night, and calculating how long I should spend at the gallery taking notes so that I could still pick up my kids on time from school. I might have also been chastising myself about recently having arrived breathlessly with my son to his orthodontist's office, thinking that we were finally on time only to learn that his appointment had been the day before.
About the time Greg Louganis won his famous gold medals for spring board and tower diving, our Kendall sojourn ended, so we could finally begin our new lives in Miami in earnest. With lots of help from Eric's friends and family, we eventually moved all those boxes to our new home in Coconut Grove on Royal Palm Avenue, about five minutes away from the pink house on Natoma Street where Eric had grown up and where my in-laws still lived with the family matriarch, Mama.
While we were sorting out the logistics of this new life, I began my new job, teaching one course at
8 a.m. in writing, for freshmen at University of Miami. Desperate for at least some professional activity and identity when it was clear our move to Miami was going to happen, I had sent my resume/CV to the novelist Evelyn Mayerson in the University of Miami English Department. She was in charge of hiring for the freshman writing classes. In my cover letter and newly revised resume for life as a displaced New Yorker, I played up my teaching experience as a grad student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where as a teaching assistant for the English Department I had taught classes in writing for freshmen. Additionally, I had worked as a "style grader" for the UNC School of Business, meeting students enrolled in the MBA program for tutorials about the stylistic and grammatical deficits in their papers, which had also undergone what was called "content grading" by business professors. To my surprise, I discovered that at least one MBA student thought that writing a sentence meant starting with a capital letter and then cramming together logic-defying strings of words into a chunk of prose that ended with a period halfway down the page. Despite my earnest attempts to persuade this student, whose earning potential was at least a zillion times more than mine would ever be, that this notion of sentence structure produced a mind-boggling mess, I do not think I really made much of a dent changing his already ingrained "style."
TO BE CONTINUED
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Concludes First Chapter of Memoir
Okay, so after this blog post I will take myself out of the headlines for the forseeable future, and return to more of my "vintage" blogging. Meanwhile (back at the ranch??!! no, I don't think so! I am a city girl through and through, except of course when I go back to Shelbyville, Illinois to see my VERY DEAR high school buddies!!). . . .I am going to be working away on my memoir. And of course teaching and tutoring at Miami Dade College, Kendall campus. Want to say THANKS SO MUCH to my dear friends, current colleagues, and former esteemed colleagues (one for whom I am sorry I never got to work for that much time because now in our post-Herald life he is exceptionally thoughtful) who have taken the time to read some or most of what I have written so far, and to offer helpful encouragement. Yes, I know very well I am in for a LONG haul . . . . and it may never see the light of day as a published book.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ART NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Thanks to my terrific artcentric buddy Sergio Garcia for this news: The website for Triennial Miami is now up and running. Visit www.triennialmiami.org
From Miami gallery Spinello Projects, this news: Congrats to Manny Prieres as his "Black Book" series is now on view in the summer show "HELP/LESS" (opened July 14, up through Sept. 29) at Printed Matter, Inc., 195 Tenth Ave., NYC, ph. 212-925-0325. As the press release tells us: This show is curated by Chris Habib, hosted by Printed Matter. The store-wide show includes over 180 books "that explore the fluidity of authorship in artists' books and multiples. . . .In the spirit of books, ephemera and multiples it presents, HELP/LESS reconsiders the exhibition space as an object to upset. It considers its viewers and featured artists accomplices."
The "Black Book" series by Manny Prieres comprises book cover reproductions of novels that have been censored or marginalized. The covers are intricately rendered by hand with black graphite and gouache on paper. Among the books: The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Ulysses by James Joyce, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Another book-related show, this time in Miami: "Summer Reading" at Black Square Gallery, 2248 NW 1st Place, Miami, Wynwood Art District. See www.blacksquaregallery.com or call 305-424-5002. It features text-based art, now on view and up through Sept. 5. Includes work by artists from USA, Italy, Argentina, and Korea, with various work including objects and installations. Artists are Claire Satin, Kyu Hak Lee, Pablo Lehmann, Patrizia Giambi, Ryan McCann, Tony Vazquez. (I've known Claire's remarkable work for years.)
Odalys Valdivieso, a terrific photographic artist and curator, tells me via email that she is partnering with her friend Gady Alroy, widely known in Venezuela for his services in high quality image related processes. Together they offer scanning, retouching, and printing services at the ArtMedia Studio in The Wynwood Building, 2750 NW 3rd Ave., Suite 12. Stop by during business hours or call 786-210-3535. Their website is in progress but can be surfed now: http://www.artmediaus.com/site/
Calling all digital dinosaurs!! Mark your calendar for screening of film "Linotype" and talk with director at Wolfsonian-FIU on July 27 at 7 pm. Museum promises an engaging evening re the once-revolutionary Linotype type casting machine, which is now practially an endangered species, even though it was once called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Thomas Edison. The Linotype type casting machine revolutionized printing, communication, and, yes, even society. But now we must ask, especially those digital dinosaurs who surely scratch their heads in total puzzlement, what place does this machine possibly have in today's world?? Maybe this event will help answer those questions. . . . On Friday, July 27 at 7 pm The Wolfsonian will screen the new documentary "Linotype: The Film" (75 mins), followed by a talk with film's director Doug Wilson. After the talk there's reception at the nearby hotel Betsy-South Beach. This, as the press release tells us, is surely a rare chance to view the film on a large screen; after a limited run, it will be released digitally and on DVD in October.
Event is free and open to the public. Due to limited seating, RSVP suggested at www.tinyurl.com/linotypeMIAMI The Wolfsonian-FIU is located at 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info, see www.wolfsonian.org
Some background info on this machine, courtesy of The Wolfsonian's press release: Before the Linotype machine, typesetting for newspapers and books was a time-consuming process done by hand. The Linotype casts an entire line of type at one time, producing printable type six times faster than a person. The invention of the Linotype galvanized the printing of newspapers [hey, remember those??] and books, quickly became an indispensable part of the printing industry, and dramatically changed journalism and society [and now so much is changing AGAIN!!] as a whole. . . . However, in the 1950s photo-typesetting technology began to take over the industry. By the 1970s, the Linotype was no longer state-of-the-art and the machines were scrapped and melted down by the thousands. Today, very few machines exist and even few are in operation.
Cool show coming soon, with related panel discussion happening even sooner: Note that "Trading Places 2" will be on view in North Miami at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), from Sept. 13 to Nov. 11, 2012. In this promising exhibit, South Florida artists swap their studio spaces for the museum's galleries for a period of two months. Artists taking part: Dona Altemus, Onajide Shabaka, Magnus Sigurdson, Rick Ulysse, Antonia Wright.
On Wednesday, July 25 at 7 pm Magnus Sigurdson and Rick Ulysse will speak in panel discussion about the upcoming exhibit. Discussion moderated by MOCA Executive Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents and City of North Miami employees. Cost is $3 for seniors and students with ID. To reserve a seat, visit www.mocanomi.org or call 305-893-6211. MOCA is located at 770 NE 125th St., North Miami, FL.
This fascinating series was launched in 2005, when I was still writing for The Miami Herald. Artists then were Salvatore La Rosa, Maria Martinez-Canas in collaboration with Alaskan artist Kim Brown, and Frances Trombly.
Cool websites for the co-authors Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow of that essential book Miami Contemporary Artists with my foreword: www.paulclemence.com and www.juliedavidow.com
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW: A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally my working title!!) (this is second half of my first chapter; to read first half, see previous blog post)
There was nothing I did not like about living in New York. I loved exploring Manhattan's many neighborhoods, discovering Gotham Book Mart amid stores lining West 47th Street in the Diamond Distric, poking among shops selling buttons and sequins in the Garment District, catching a glimpse of Toni Morrison in the elevator when we both had jobs at Random House, even though she worked in the far more glamorous Trade Division while I toiled away in the College Textbook Division.
Often I would meet Eric after work on the plaza at Lincoln Center so that we could see a performance of the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater. Such a good sport but exhausted after driving to Manhattan while he completed his medical training in Brooklyn or after working in a clinic in Paterson, New Jersey, he sometimes settled into his seat and began to snore soon after the lights dimmed and the curtains opened.
I didn't mind, really, because I knew he had battled heavy traffic to get there that night, plus I was thrilled to see performances by now legendary dancers: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins. And I knew it was too much to expect my husband to be as nuts about ballet as I was--he grew up boating and watching football in sunny Miami, while I grew up studying ballet and reading tons of books in the Midwest, where for many days it was just too cold or rainy to do anything outside.
But was I really ready to leave New York?
I was not so sure. Yes, I had finally quit my job in textbook publishing at Random House several months ago, disilllusioned with the grind it had become, thinking I would follow my dream of becoming a writer. After all, even as a cadet Girl Scout eager to earn as many badges as she could to decorate that geeky forest green sash, I had rushed to earn the "Writer" badge right away. Somehow, I found its delicately embroidered black and white scrolls curiously appealing. But as anyone who knows who's tried it, being a free-lance writer in New York is a lonely feast-or-famine kind of occupation. Already I had published at least one art book review in the magazine ARTnews, thanks to a connection I had made through a former colleague at Random House, and other jobs had come my way, but it was still a frustrating and solitary endeavor.
I had even paid good money to attend a conference for professional journalists and authors at a swanky hotel in Manhattan. I remember going to a session on conducting an interview, and that a journalist explained how she always got her best comments at the end of the interview and that a good strategy to elicit more comments was simply to wait after a particularly revealing remark and invariably more would follow to fill in the silence. Little did I know then that I would use the same strategy about a decade later in Miami, when I was interviewing internationally-known artists describing how horrific experiences in Argentina and Rwanda had shaped their riveting art.
No doubt about it, however, in the early 1980s I was intimidated by the dazzling talent already active in New York and did not see how I could ever acquire the many editorial connections and writing assignments that "real writers" seemed to have in such abundance. Once again, I was sure I had traveled to a dead-end in my so-called career. For sure, I had run out of things I was not good at.
Worst of all, my biological clock was ticking louder all the time. We knew we could not finally swing the challenges of raising children in Brooklyn, let alone Manhattan, and life in bedroom communities outside the city didn't appeal to us at all.
So whether or not I was truly on board, we were bound for Miami. Eric had already lined up a job there and found us a darling wood-frame cottage with a fireplace, built about a decade after Miami was incorporated in 1896. A key lime tree and grapefruit tree grew in the yard. Dozens of folks from his Cuban-American family were thrilled that he was returning home, especially his Cuban grandmother we all called Mama. She lived with his father Fred and Fred's charming second wife, Gerry, in the pink house were Eric grew up on Natoma Street in Coconut Grove--a quaint, leafy neighborhood near downtown Miami.
In Miami, Eric had childhood friends still living in the city who shared his love of boating and watching football, adoring relatives who could make his favorite Cuban dishes with a skill I could never match. He had many threads from a life there to pick up and fashion into a promising future.
But what would my future be in Miami? I knew I would never be happy being known solely as "Eric's wife" or worse, as my defiantly feminist self grumbled quietly, "a doctor's wife." To the ever-so-polite consternation of my parents and in-laws, I had refused to drop my maiden name and become Mrs. Smith when we tied the knot in 1979. Everyone had pretty much gotten used to this when we picked up and settled in Miami for good in 1984. Yet even then I knew I was not willing to be identified as simply someone's wife or someone's mom.
[Blogger's Note: Yes, even unpaid bloggers need to take a break. I don't expect to blog again until the first Thursday in September or October, 2012. Really need a big chunk of time now to work on my book-length memoir.]
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ART NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Thanks to my terrific artcentric buddy Sergio Garcia for this news: The website for Triennial Miami is now up and running. Visit www.triennialmiami.org
From Miami gallery Spinello Projects, this news: Congrats to Manny Prieres as his "Black Book" series is now on view in the summer show "HELP/LESS" (opened July 14, up through Sept. 29) at Printed Matter, Inc., 195 Tenth Ave., NYC, ph. 212-925-0325. As the press release tells us: This show is curated by Chris Habib, hosted by Printed Matter. The store-wide show includes over 180 books "that explore the fluidity of authorship in artists' books and multiples. . . .In the spirit of books, ephemera and multiples it presents, HELP/LESS reconsiders the exhibition space as an object to upset. It considers its viewers and featured artists accomplices."
The "Black Book" series by Manny Prieres comprises book cover reproductions of novels that have been censored or marginalized. The covers are intricately rendered by hand with black graphite and gouache on paper. Among the books: The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Ulysses by James Joyce, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Another book-related show, this time in Miami: "Summer Reading" at Black Square Gallery, 2248 NW 1st Place, Miami, Wynwood Art District. See www.blacksquaregallery.com or call 305-424-5002. It features text-based art, now on view and up through Sept. 5. Includes work by artists from USA, Italy, Argentina, and Korea, with various work including objects and installations. Artists are Claire Satin, Kyu Hak Lee, Pablo Lehmann, Patrizia Giambi, Ryan McCann, Tony Vazquez. (I've known Claire's remarkable work for years.)
Odalys Valdivieso, a terrific photographic artist and curator, tells me via email that she is partnering with her friend Gady Alroy, widely known in Venezuela for his services in high quality image related processes. Together they offer scanning, retouching, and printing services at the ArtMedia Studio in The Wynwood Building, 2750 NW 3rd Ave., Suite 12. Stop by during business hours or call 786-210-3535. Their website is in progress but can be surfed now: http://www.artmediaus.com/site/
Calling all digital dinosaurs!! Mark your calendar for screening of film "Linotype" and talk with director at Wolfsonian-FIU on July 27 at 7 pm. Museum promises an engaging evening re the once-revolutionary Linotype type casting machine, which is now practially an endangered species, even though it was once called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Thomas Edison. The Linotype type casting machine revolutionized printing, communication, and, yes, even society. But now we must ask, especially those digital dinosaurs who surely scratch their heads in total puzzlement, what place does this machine possibly have in today's world?? Maybe this event will help answer those questions. . . . On Friday, July 27 at 7 pm The Wolfsonian will screen the new documentary "Linotype: The Film" (75 mins), followed by a talk with film's director Doug Wilson. After the talk there's reception at the nearby hotel Betsy-South Beach. This, as the press release tells us, is surely a rare chance to view the film on a large screen; after a limited run, it will be released digitally and on DVD in October.
Event is free and open to the public. Due to limited seating, RSVP suggested at www.tinyurl.com/linotypeMIAMI The Wolfsonian-FIU is located at 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info, see www.wolfsonian.org
Some background info on this machine, courtesy of The Wolfsonian's press release: Before the Linotype machine, typesetting for newspapers and books was a time-consuming process done by hand. The Linotype casts an entire line of type at one time, producing printable type six times faster than a person. The invention of the Linotype galvanized the printing of newspapers [hey, remember those??] and books, quickly became an indispensable part of the printing industry, and dramatically changed journalism and society [and now so much is changing AGAIN!!] as a whole. . . . However, in the 1950s photo-typesetting technology began to take over the industry. By the 1970s, the Linotype was no longer state-of-the-art and the machines were scrapped and melted down by the thousands. Today, very few machines exist and even few are in operation.
Cool show coming soon, with related panel discussion happening even sooner: Note that "Trading Places 2" will be on view in North Miami at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), from Sept. 13 to Nov. 11, 2012. In this promising exhibit, South Florida artists swap their studio spaces for the museum's galleries for a period of two months. Artists taking part: Dona Altemus, Onajide Shabaka, Magnus Sigurdson, Rick Ulysse, Antonia Wright.
On Wednesday, July 25 at 7 pm Magnus Sigurdson and Rick Ulysse will speak in panel discussion about the upcoming exhibit. Discussion moderated by MOCA Executive Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents and City of North Miami employees. Cost is $3 for seniors and students with ID. To reserve a seat, visit www.mocanomi.org or call 305-893-6211. MOCA is located at 770 NE 125th St., North Miami, FL.
This fascinating series was launched in 2005, when I was still writing for The Miami Herald. Artists then were Salvatore La Rosa, Maria Martinez-Canas in collaboration with Alaskan artist Kim Brown, and Frances Trombly.
Cool websites for the co-authors Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow of that essential book Miami Contemporary Artists with my foreword: www.paulclemence.com and www.juliedavidow.com
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW: A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally my working title!!) (this is second half of my first chapter; to read first half, see previous blog post)
There was nothing I did not like about living in New York. I loved exploring Manhattan's many neighborhoods, discovering Gotham Book Mart amid stores lining West 47th Street in the Diamond Distric, poking among shops selling buttons and sequins in the Garment District, catching a glimpse of Toni Morrison in the elevator when we both had jobs at Random House, even though she worked in the far more glamorous Trade Division while I toiled away in the College Textbook Division.
Often I would meet Eric after work on the plaza at Lincoln Center so that we could see a performance of the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater. Such a good sport but exhausted after driving to Manhattan while he completed his medical training in Brooklyn or after working in a clinic in Paterson, New Jersey, he sometimes settled into his seat and began to snore soon after the lights dimmed and the curtains opened.
I didn't mind, really, because I knew he had battled heavy traffic to get there that night, plus I was thrilled to see performances by now legendary dancers: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins. And I knew it was too much to expect my husband to be as nuts about ballet as I was--he grew up boating and watching football in sunny Miami, while I grew up studying ballet and reading tons of books in the Midwest, where for many days it was just too cold or rainy to do anything outside.
But was I really ready to leave New York?
I was not so sure. Yes, I had finally quit my job in textbook publishing at Random House several months ago, disilllusioned with the grind it had become, thinking I would follow my dream of becoming a writer. After all, even as a cadet Girl Scout eager to earn as many badges as she could to decorate that geeky forest green sash, I had rushed to earn the "Writer" badge right away. Somehow, I found its delicately embroidered black and white scrolls curiously appealing. But as anyone who knows who's tried it, being a free-lance writer in New York is a lonely feast-or-famine kind of occupation. Already I had published at least one art book review in the magazine ARTnews, thanks to a connection I had made through a former colleague at Random House, and other jobs had come my way, but it was still a frustrating and solitary endeavor.
I had even paid good money to attend a conference for professional journalists and authors at a swanky hotel in Manhattan. I remember going to a session on conducting an interview, and that a journalist explained how she always got her best comments at the end of the interview and that a good strategy to elicit more comments was simply to wait after a particularly revealing remark and invariably more would follow to fill in the silence. Little did I know then that I would use the same strategy about a decade later in Miami, when I was interviewing internationally-known artists describing how horrific experiences in Argentina and Rwanda had shaped their riveting art.
No doubt about it, however, in the early 1980s I was intimidated by the dazzling talent already active in New York and did not see how I could ever acquire the many editorial connections and writing assignments that "real writers" seemed to have in such abundance. Once again, I was sure I had traveled to a dead-end in my so-called career. For sure, I had run out of things I was not good at.
Worst of all, my biological clock was ticking louder all the time. We knew we could not finally swing the challenges of raising children in Brooklyn, let alone Manhattan, and life in bedroom communities outside the city didn't appeal to us at all.
So whether or not I was truly on board, we were bound for Miami. Eric had already lined up a job there and found us a darling wood-frame cottage with a fireplace, built about a decade after Miami was incorporated in 1896. A key lime tree and grapefruit tree grew in the yard. Dozens of folks from his Cuban-American family were thrilled that he was returning home, especially his Cuban grandmother we all called Mama. She lived with his father Fred and Fred's charming second wife, Gerry, in the pink house were Eric grew up on Natoma Street in Coconut Grove--a quaint, leafy neighborhood near downtown Miami.
In Miami, Eric had childhood friends still living in the city who shared his love of boating and watching football, adoring relatives who could make his favorite Cuban dishes with a skill I could never match. He had many threads from a life there to pick up and fashion into a promising future.
But what would my future be in Miami? I knew I would never be happy being known solely as "Eric's wife" or worse, as my defiantly feminist self grumbled quietly, "a doctor's wife." To the ever-so-polite consternation of my parents and in-laws, I had refused to drop my maiden name and become Mrs. Smith when we tied the knot in 1979. Everyone had pretty much gotten used to this when we picked up and settled in Miami for good in 1984. Yet even then I knew I was not willing to be identified as simply someone's wife or someone's mom.
[Blogger's Note: Yes, even unpaid bloggers need to take a break. I don't expect to blog again until the first Thursday in September or October, 2012. Really need a big chunk of time now to work on my book-length memoir.]
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Begins First Chapter of Memoir
Well, I have taken the plunge, and I must say the water feels just fine. I am actually well into what I hope may be my third chapter, but because I only have so much time to blog (and I am sure readers only have so much time to read my blog!!) I am posting below about half of my first chapter. Of course this digital "ms." is still in a fluid state, and subject to more revision I know, but I am quite pleased with my progress so far.
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Events I hope I do not miss. . .
Miami Art Museum Staff Art Exhibition at University of Miami Gallery, 2750 NW 3rd Avenue, Suite 4, Miami. Opening reception is July 14, 6-9 pm. On view through Aug. 24. Hours are Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm.
What's new with ArtCenter/South Florida at 800/810/924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Look for Studio Crawl, 7-10 pm July 7: Visit resident artists in studios and hear performance by Greater Miami Youth Symphony; also look for David Zalben as he continues his "free-wheeling poetic installation" re love and relationships in his "signature wire-graffiti style." Note also that the "Afterlife" is on view through Aug. 5, 2012, presenting these artists' distinctive take on the hereafter: Byron Keith Byrd, Alex Heria, and Franklin Sinanan at the ArtCenter's Richard Shack Gallery on 800 Lincoln Road.
"Outside the Box: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art" at PanAmericanArtProjects, 2450 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 28. For more info call 305-573-2400 or see www.panamericanart.com Show includes art by Jasmin Joseph, George Liautaud, Andre Pierre.
"lynne golob gelfman: sand" at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, 2630 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 31. I've known Lynne for years, and she makes absolutely exquisite abstract paintings. Hours are Tues-Friday 11 am to 6 pm; Saturday noon to 5 pm. For more info call 305-438-0220 or see www.alejandravonhartz.net
Frost Art Museum's Target Wednesday After Hours celebrates two new exhibitions. Mark your calendar for 6-9 pm July 18 for this free and open-to-the-public event at the Frost at Florida International University, located at 10975 SW 17th Street in Miami, across from the Blue garage and adjacent to Wertheim Performing Arts Center on the Modesto A. Maidique campus.
Exhibitions:
"This and That: Unconventional Selections from the Permanent Collection." Includes art by Guerra de la Paz, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Bert Rodriguez, Graham Hudson. Curated by Klaudio Rodriguez. On view through Oct. 21, 2012.
"Shared Threads: Maria Lino's Portrait of a Shipibo Healer." This documents a collaborative experience during which two artists from vastly different cultural and artistic traditions came together in the Amazon region of Pucallpa, Peru. Maria Lino has twice been named a Cintas Fellow. In 2011, she was awarded a Fullbright US Scholar Grant and spent 8 months working in Peru on an ongoing series of video portraits. The exhibit, curated by Ana Estrada and sponsored by Latino Magazine, runs through Sept. 30, 2012.
For more info, call 305-348-2890 or visit http://thefrost.fiu.edu
Check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com
Don't forget to mark your calendar for the memorial service for feminist art historian Paula Harper. It is set for noon July 20 at the Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info about this, see my previous blog post.
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally a working title!)
Chapter One
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place. When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up north." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers," who theatrically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things I was not good at when I moved to Miami in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
Earlier in that summer of '84, a moving van had pulled up in front of the 19th Century brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my husband Eric Smith and I had become one of the first owners of the building's newly remodeled co-op apartments in 1979. Five years after we moved in, I watched with amazement and more than a little anxiety as movers efficiently packed up most of our belongings, including treasured antique furniture from my family in the Midwest. By Madison Avenue standards, these were not really antiques at all. I can imagine an East Side dealer dismissing some as "white trash country oak."
In a much later visit back to New York from Miami, my husband and I discovered that our dining room table that has been in my mother's rural Illinois family for several generations was a dead ringer for a kitchen table in a Lower East Side museum about that neighborhood's early tenement life. We shared an affectionate giggle about our "tenement table."
Nevertheless, our bedroom furniture, with the high four-poster bed, came from my great-grandparents' stately brick 19th Century two-story mansion on Main Street in Shelbyville, Illinois. I can assure you that no one then or even now would ever look at that home and think of it as a tenement. The tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite were part of many reminders of my past that I still treasure and have since imported to our home in Miami.
Even more so than that furniture, I've made a long and circuitous journey from the Midwest, with many unexpected twists. But when the tenement table and I were fixing to leave Brooklyn for Miami, I remember looking out the third-story window of our walk-up brownstone apartment with sadness. Even the red geraniums in our window boxes I had so carefully tended, perhaps as an unconscious homage to the way my mom used to grow red geraniums in clay pots when I was growing up in Shelbyville, seemed to look a bit wilted and out of sorts.
When the moving van drove down Berkeley Place and disappeared out of sight, I wondered melodramatically if I would ever see that furniture again. Was I saying good-bye forever to this part of my life?
I had always loved living in that brownstone with its high ceilings and ornate architectural details. No matter how tired I was from arriving home in the evening from my book publishing job in Manhattan, riding that screeching D train to the 7th Avenue stop in Park Slope until I was blue in the face, I always took special pleasure in opening the grandly carved dark wooden double doors gracing the entrance to our building at 210 Berkeley Place. Forever the bookish English major, I felt as if I were opening the door to a Henry James novel. My knees were not as creaky as they are now, so I really did not mind--too much anyway--climbing the many steps to our apartment.
So in the summer of 1984, we were on the move again, and my life was in flux once more. Before arriving in New York in 1979, I had spent four years living in North Carolina while I attended graduate school in literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I steeped myself in literature with the intensely overachieving zeal of a grad student, and along the way I encountered many eccentricities of the American South.
I learned that the expression "might could" was sometimes called the "Southern subjunctive." I discovered the thrill of reading poetry by Baudelaire and Rimbaud in French, threaded my way through the rich metaphorical language of "King Lear" and "Othello," and heard people smirk about a woman driving past tobacco fields while getting drunk on Rebel Yell.
But I also learned that I was not willing to struggle for who-knows-how-much-longer to earn a PhD, having worried myself sick over the process of writing my MA thesis in Comparative Literature on the visual imagery of sacrifice and saintliness in short fiction by Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce. I had no intention of becoming a PhD "gypsy scholar," bouncing from one non-tenure track position to another in remote corners of this country. Earlier I had spent four years studying English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small Midwestern town that reminded me too much of Shelbyville, Illinois.
The summer we left Brooklyn, I was beginning to wonder if my fate was to undergo major upheavals every four years. I even made Eric promise me that we could reconsider moving back to New York after four or five years in Miami--which he reluctantly did, even though we both knew that his bred-in-Miami body would never consent to enduring another cold and snowy winter in New York.
When we had decided to get married in 1979 and move to New York, I was thrilled to leave behind the obsessive craziness of academia and pursue a new dream, working for book publishers in New York. Eric had just received his MD degree from University of Miami and was ready for a change, too.
I became thoroughly smitten by the bright lights and big city life of The Big Apple.
TO BE CONTINUED, PROBABLY BY JULY 19, 2012
FIRST THINGS FIRST: MORE VISUAL ARTS NEWS RELATED TO MIAMI
Events I hope I do not miss. . .
Miami Art Museum Staff Art Exhibition at University of Miami Gallery, 2750 NW 3rd Avenue, Suite 4, Miami. Opening reception is July 14, 6-9 pm. On view through Aug. 24. Hours are Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm.
What's new with ArtCenter/South Florida at 800/810/924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Look for Studio Crawl, 7-10 pm July 7: Visit resident artists in studios and hear performance by Greater Miami Youth Symphony; also look for David Zalben as he continues his "free-wheeling poetic installation" re love and relationships in his "signature wire-graffiti style." Note also that the "Afterlife" is on view through Aug. 5, 2012, presenting these artists' distinctive take on the hereafter: Byron Keith Byrd, Alex Heria, and Franklin Sinanan at the ArtCenter's Richard Shack Gallery on 800 Lincoln Road.
"Outside the Box: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art" at PanAmericanArtProjects, 2450 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 28. For more info call 305-573-2400 or see www.panamericanart.com Show includes art by Jasmin Joseph, George Liautaud, Andre Pierre.
"lynne golob gelfman: sand" at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, 2630 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, on view through July 31. I've known Lynne for years, and she makes absolutely exquisite abstract paintings. Hours are Tues-Friday 11 am to 6 pm; Saturday noon to 5 pm. For more info call 305-438-0220 or see www.alejandravonhartz.net
Frost Art Museum's Target Wednesday After Hours celebrates two new exhibitions. Mark your calendar for 6-9 pm July 18 for this free and open-to-the-public event at the Frost at Florida International University, located at 10975 SW 17th Street in Miami, across from the Blue garage and adjacent to Wertheim Performing Arts Center on the Modesto A. Maidique campus.
Exhibitions:
"This and That: Unconventional Selections from the Permanent Collection." Includes art by Guerra de la Paz, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Bert Rodriguez, Graham Hudson. Curated by Klaudio Rodriguez. On view through Oct. 21, 2012.
"Shared Threads: Maria Lino's Portrait of a Shipibo Healer." This documents a collaborative experience during which two artists from vastly different cultural and artistic traditions came together in the Amazon region of Pucallpa, Peru. Maria Lino has twice been named a Cintas Fellow. In 2011, she was awarded a Fullbright US Scholar Grant and spent 8 months working in Peru on an ongoing series of video portraits. The exhibit, curated by Ana Estrada and sponsored by Latino Magazine, runs through Sept. 30, 2012.
For more info, call 305-348-2890 or visit http://thefrost.fiu.edu
Check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com
Don't forget to mark your calendar for the memorial service for feminist art historian Paula Harper. It is set for noon July 20 at the Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. For more info about this, see my previous blog post.
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR BY ELISA TURNER (Totally a working title!)
Chapter One
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place. When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up north." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers," who theatrically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things I was not good at when I moved to Miami in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
Earlier in that summer of '84, a moving van had pulled up in front of the 19th Century brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my husband Eric Smith and I had become one of the first owners of the building's newly remodeled co-op apartments in 1979. Five years after we moved in, I watched with amazement and more than a little anxiety as movers efficiently packed up most of our belongings, including treasured antique furniture from my family in the Midwest. By Madison Avenue standards, these were not really antiques at all. I can imagine an East Side dealer dismissing some as "white trash country oak."
In a much later visit back to New York from Miami, my husband and I discovered that our dining room table that has been in my mother's rural Illinois family for several generations was a dead ringer for a kitchen table in a Lower East Side museum about that neighborhood's early tenement life. We shared an affectionate giggle about our "tenement table."
Nevertheless, our bedroom furniture, with the high four-poster bed, came from my great-grandparents' stately brick 19th Century two-story mansion on Main Street in Shelbyville, Illinois. I can assure you that no one then or even now would ever look at that home and think of it as a tenement. The tenement table and Shelbyville bedroom suite were part of many reminders of my past that I still treasure and have since imported to our home in Miami.
Even more so than that furniture, I've made a long and circuitous journey from the Midwest, with many unexpected twists. But when the tenement table and I were fixing to leave Brooklyn for Miami, I remember looking out the third-story window of our walk-up brownstone apartment with sadness. Even the red geraniums in our window boxes I had so carefully tended, perhaps as an unconscious homage to the way my mom used to grow red geraniums in clay pots when I was growing up in Shelbyville, seemed to look a bit wilted and out of sorts.
When the moving van drove down Berkeley Place and disappeared out of sight, I wondered melodramatically if I would ever see that furniture again. Was I saying good-bye forever to this part of my life?
I had always loved living in that brownstone with its high ceilings and ornate architectural details. No matter how tired I was from arriving home in the evening from my book publishing job in Manhattan, riding that screeching D train to the 7th Avenue stop in Park Slope until I was blue in the face, I always took special pleasure in opening the grandly carved dark wooden double doors gracing the entrance to our building at 210 Berkeley Place. Forever the bookish English major, I felt as if I were opening the door to a Henry James novel. My knees were not as creaky as they are now, so I really did not mind--too much anyway--climbing the many steps to our apartment.
So in the summer of 1984, we were on the move again, and my life was in flux once more. Before arriving in New York in 1979, I had spent four years living in North Carolina while I attended graduate school in literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I steeped myself in literature with the intensely overachieving zeal of a grad student, and along the way I encountered many eccentricities of the American South.
I learned that the expression "might could" was sometimes called the "Southern subjunctive." I discovered the thrill of reading poetry by Baudelaire and Rimbaud in French, threaded my way through the rich metaphorical language of "King Lear" and "Othello," and heard people smirk about a woman driving past tobacco fields while getting drunk on Rebel Yell.
But I also learned that I was not willing to struggle for who-knows-how-much-longer to earn a PhD, having worried myself sick over the process of writing my MA thesis in Comparative Literature on the visual imagery of sacrifice and saintliness in short fiction by Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce. I had no intention of becoming a PhD "gypsy scholar," bouncing from one non-tenure track position to another in remote corners of this country. Earlier I had spent four years studying English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small Midwestern town that reminded me too much of Shelbyville, Illinois.
The summer we left Brooklyn, I was beginning to wonder if my fate was to undergo major upheavals every four years. I even made Eric promise me that we could reconsider moving back to New York after four or five years in Miami--which he reluctantly did, even though we both knew that his bred-in-Miami body would never consent to enduring another cold and snowy winter in New York.
When we had decided to get married in 1979 and move to New York, I was thrilled to leave behind the obsessive craziness of academia and pursue a new dream, working for book publishers in New York. Eric had just received his MD degree from University of Miami and was ready for a change, too.
I became thoroughly smitten by the bright lights and big city life of The Big Apple.
TO BE CONTINUED, PROBABLY BY JULY 19, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Miami Contemporary Art Museum Presents Ed Ruscha Paintings
In North Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), is now presenting "Ed Ruscha: On the Road," a collection of drawings and paintings inspired by passages from famed novel by Jack Kerouac. This exhibit is organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, curated by Douglas Fogle. It's up though Sept. 2, 2012. For more info, see www.mocanomi.org
As a follow-up to my previous blog post, I'm refining the book pitch for my memoir. I know it's not in good-to-go shape yet, but it is much better than the previous one I made at the Pitch-o-Rama at the Writers Institute in early May at MDC. I really fell flat on my ass with that one (figuratively, I mean).
So here's my current book pitch (a very short summary of the essence of the book someone wants to write, designed to interest a book publisher, or not):
I wake up every morning and praise God that I'm not dead or drooling in a wheelchair, and that the rest of my family is alive and well. One rainy day our lives changed instantly in a car crash as we drove our son to start college. Yet I'll never remember this life-changing event. In a flash I was knocked into the black nothingness of a coma and hospitalized for a month while I tried to remember who I was and re-learn basic skills I'd always taken for granted, like talking, walking, sipping coffee, even the typing I did as a journalist. Today I'm blessed to look as if my life has returned to normal, but now I live with my "new normal": dealing with the post-traumantic stress disorder dreadfully familiar to those who've suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, football game, or war zone. I've said good-bye to my former life and income: I lost my newspaper job. Driving on expressways gives me the creeps. Painful reminders of my past trigger flashbacks, also bad dreams that seem real until I wake up to realize I'm not being strangled, or that someone I know isn't amputating my feet.
First things first: More visual arts news connected to Miami
So very sad to report the death of feminist art historian and retired University of Miami professor Paula Hays Harper on June 3, 2012. When I read The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor Brecher in the paper on June 13, 2012, I cried and cried, even though I had known she had been quite sick for such a long time. Mark your calendar, if you will be in Miami then, for the memorial service her friends are planning at noon on July 20 at The Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach 33139.
Had to share this touching email comment I received re Paula from Billie G. Lynn, Associate Professor of Sculpture at University of Miami:
"She was a great teacher and I loved her sense of humor. . .sooooo wicked and yet right on! The students of the future will miss her and not know quite what is missing, but I'll be sure to tell them about her. As you well know, no one knows the hour of their death, as the bumper sticker says: 'Live like it's your last day on Earth because one day you'll be right.'
"She as a great woman, let's honor her by living outrageously."
For particularly noteworthy exhibits in Miami this summer, check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com In the June ARTnews, you might like to catch my review of Rita Ackermann solo show at MOCA in North Miami, page 98. Also note in that issue on page 42 story about how ARTnews has won a prize for its excellence in journalism.
Sebastian Spreng tells me about an exhibit of 150 artworks by Julio Larraz, who lives in Miami, opening July 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm and up through the last week in Sept. 2012 at Galleria D'Arte Contini, Via S. Marco 2765 / 30124 in Venice, Italy. To rsvp call this Miami ph number: 305-665-3334. For more info about this exhibit, see www.continiarte.com
Tina Spiro tells me she has been invited for the second time in a row to exhibit at Beijing Biennale, this time for 2012, at the National Museum of China. Her tryptych oil painting "Rembrandt 2012: Back to the Future" will be featured to represent Jamaica. Other news: Tina (who used to live and work here and has since moved to Jamaica but we keep in touch via email) has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Gallery of Jamaica and asked to serve as the chair of the Exhibitions Committee of that institution.
Joel Hoffman, director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, has created a blog to document the process of replacing Vizcaya's Courtyard skylight. It's really been an eyesore for years in that quite beautiful place. Plans are to finish this project in September. Find the link to his blog at the homepage at www.vizcaya.org
My BFF Rosie Gordon-Wallace tells me about this exhibit, which sounds quite exciting and impressive. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator presents this in partnership with the Miami Dade College Art Gallery System and MDC Live!:
"Milagros: Portal Culture" by Felici Asteinza
National Performance Network / Visual Artists Network Residency
Opening night reception is Thurs. June 28, from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd. Artist Talk is Friday, June 29 at 1 pm. This exhibit continues through July 27, 2012 as a DVCAI Caribbean Crossroads exhibition series. All programs are free and open to the public.
Milagros: Portal Culture
Felici Asteinza, Caribbean artist whose one week NPN/VAN community residency is June 24-30, 2012 will create Milagros: Portal Culture, presenting a series of community partnership projects and programs, including a collaborative community-making / collecting project where artists and musicians guide participants through creation and collection of art and sound. Working with her artist group Alvin Fillastre, Evan Galbick and Elestial Sound, visitors to MDC Art Gallery System at the Freedom Tower will experience first hand the process and creation of building the installation performance space, culminating in an on-site, one-night artist musician performance.
Felici's artwork explores the ritualistic nature of creating. These multi-layered collages are embedded with re-discovered residue from the artist's studio as well as images reflecting anxieties and greed. Elaborate, precise lines become the glue between elements, creating a rhythmic, activated field.
Elestial Sound Records is a sustainable record label run by solar panels in the northern California mountains, also supporting an abundane of cutting-edge musicians from Florida. Their music plays while the installation is created, making a truly collaborative venture between the visual and music arts. The Freedom Tower's architecture has guided this site-specific installation.
WOULD LOVE TO GET COMMENTS FOR MY BLOG ABOUT WHAT READERS THOUGHT ABOUT THIS EVENT: The live performance will take place ONLY during the opening reception, Thursday, June 28 from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne, 3rd Floor.
For more info about Felici, see www.milagrosartcollective.blogspot.com For more info about Diaspora Cultural Arts Incubator, see www.diasporavibevirtualgallery.com For more info about Miami Dade College Art Gallery system, see http://www.mdc.edu/ags For more info about MDC Live! Performing Arts Series, see http://www.mdc.edu/main/mdclive
This program is sponsored by the National Performance Network (NPN) Visual Arts Network (VAN) funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, partnered with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. For more info about NPN and VAN, please see http://www.npnweb.org
Rustin Levenson, that art conservator extraordinaire, tells me how she is cleaning up Salvador Dali, his artwork, that is! See "Four Salvador Dali masterworks cleaned, repaired in public" by Lennie Bennett, Tampa Bay Times Art Critc (thank goodness Tampa residents have one for THEIR paper!) See http://www.tampabay.com
Cernuda Arte and Cernuda Family Collection have loaned 13 artworks to "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," a remarkable collaborative group of exhibitions in New York now on view at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Queens Museum of Art. Congrats to this gallery and collection! The loaned artworks are by Esteban Chartrand, Victor Patricio Landaluze, Domingo Ramos, Jose Cuchi Arnau, Oscar Garcia Rivera, Carlos Enriquez, Rene Portocarrero, Fedelio Ponce, Roberto Diago, Jose Bedia.
And now here's the "vintage" part of my blog. . .
CINEMATIC IN STYLE AND SIZE, RUSCHA'S ART ADMIRED WORLDWIDE by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald April 2001
"Ed Ruscha" at the Miami Art Museum is a traveling survey that charts one American artist's journeys along open roads and crowded urban intersections.
Often characterized as a Los Angeles practitioner of Pop art, Ruscha (pronounced ROO-shay) resists that label, as does the lyrical and deadpan variety of the 50-plus paintings, books, drawings and photography that make up this survey covering nearly 40 years of an inventive and internationally admired career.
Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, this not-to-be-missed show is accompanied by a 196-page hard-bound catalog. Unusual among museum tomes, this catalog contains essays of exceptional insight and clarity by Kerry Brougher, chief curator at the Hirshhorn, and Neal Benezra, the Art Institute of Chicago's deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art.
They discuss important precedents for Ruscha's work, including Jasper Johns's famous 1955 Pop painting, "Target with Four Faces." Another critical influence was Robert Frank's often surreal 1958 book of photographs, "The Americans," showing bleak highways dotted with cafes and filling stations.
Throughout his career, Ruscha has melded photography and painting, building upon these sources by adding his droll trove of "found words," as he describes them in his book of word drawings "They Called Her Styrene" (Phaidon), published last year. The book reprises the down-to-earth poetry of brand names, billboards, comic-book exclamatory phrases and movie lingo that weaves throughout his MAM show, forming a witty narrative that occasionally turns sublime and poignant.
Ruscha also exploits the myth-making devices of Hollywood's dream factory, and plants that wide-angle cinematic style where we would least expect it. You find the reminder of a film director's eye in his unfolding photographic strip of gas stations or in his monumental 1963 painting of a Standard Oil station in Texas.
The dramatic, looming perpsective in this signature painting recalls the image of a speeding train seen in countless movies particularly, as Brougher points out, in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
In the '80s and '90s, Ruscha produced some of his most pared-down but evocative work, stripping his palette to foggy shades of light gray and inky black. The work reminds us of the romantic gloom of his old black-and-white movies, a feeling that remains pervasive whether his subject is a fading mythic shot of Native American tents or a 1950s car struggling toward a mountain pass.
"Like everyone else, I'm a frustrated film director," Ruscha once said.
He is clearly not a frustrated storyteller, inviting us to read his cinematic landscapes left to right, just as we would the lines of a script, poem or novel. That mix of language and landscape finds eloquent expression in his murals, which are on permanent view in the rotunda and elsewhere at Miami-Dade's Main Library.
In the rotunda, Shakespeare's line "words without thoughts never to heaven go" graces a lush stream of sunset paintings. And individual segments of his word paintings make sly homage to their surroundings, like the awkward layers of the word "sure" in the science section.
"We have people coming from all over the world not because they want to check out books, but because they want to see his paintings," says Barbara Young, the library's art services director. "It's really like turning pages as you move through the library."
Ruscha's mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go" and 56 painted lunettes are on permanent display at the Main Library, 101 W. Flagler St.
SIGN LANGUAGE PAINTER ED RUSCHA, WHOSE WORK IS NOW ON VIEW AT THE MIAMI ART MUSEUM, CAPTURES THE DRIVE-BY POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Elisa Turner, from The Miami Herald April 2001
Ed Ruscha sounds sure he made the right move when he gave up that day job as a professional sign painter.
"Computers," he explains with a slight smile, "would have put me out of business."
There's no such danger of that happening now. A well-connected Los Angeles artist, he counts actor Dennis Hopper and Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley as friends. He has even posed in a Gap ad and played a bit part in a film about radio talk shows.
But best of all, he transformed his commercial training into a brilliant international art career years ago.
Today his paintings can fetch as much as $400,000.
Still, you sense that he must have painted a bundle of bang-up signs. Right now he's standing in front of one of his sleek paintings at the Miami Art Museum. It's a snowy scene that tries too hard to sparkle, like a billboard selling some mountain valley's bottled water.
As a witty riff on commercial art and photography, it's labeled with meticulous signage.
"I call that typeface Boy Scout Utility Modern," he says with affectionate pride, his cornflower blue eyes flashing beneath barely spiked silver hair. "If a lineman from the telephone company got the job of a designing a poster for the annual picnic, well, that's the typeface he would use."
Signs are still on the artist's mind, as you can see in the remarkable survey "Ed Ruscha," which runs through June 3 at Miami Art Museum. The exhibition includes more than 50 paintings, drawings and books spanning nearly four decades. And looking at his vision of everything from parking lots and film credits to sublime sunbursts, it's clear that Ruscha remains a professional sign painter--though on the big scale of a California thoroughfare.
With a laconic sense of humor and a love for journeys westward, Ruscha's art points us toward a truly American cinematic flow of roads and words whisking past our dusty windshields. The paintings include a behind-the-scenes view of the famous letters spelling out "Hollywood" next to a freeway. Then there's his empty, apocalyptic map of Sunset Boulevard and his grand painting of the signage for a Standard Oil gas station in Amarillo, Texas.
Works like this have made him the art world's terse but telling road writer.
"There's glory," he insists in an interview at MAM, "in word combinations for somebody selling tires."
In the 1960s, Ruscha's affection for drive-by ordinariness earned him acclaim as an L.A.-styled Pop artist. That's not a title he likes, nor one suitable to the plot twists of his career.
Life in L.A. has not been the only thing that has shaped his life, he says.
"The whole Western United States--I see it as a great, expansive land with the Grand Canyon and all these beautiful places that are really inspiring, and somehow that gets into my work," he says.
In fact, Ruscha, 63, is itching for another road trip, this time to Wyoming. Nudging him on is "Annals of the Former World," a book by John McPhee about geology in the Western states.
"It rekindled my interest to get in a car and go driving, just see the landscape and take a camera," he says. "I was seeing the parallel between his [McPhee's] interest in geology and my life as an artist. He was talking about flowing volcanic mud, full of rock fragments.
"Art history moves in the same way. It makes its own garbage and people learn from it. It's a rolling-never-stopping kind of thing."
On the road, he turns the radio dial to R&B or jazz.
"It's like a soundtrack for what I'm seeing," he says. "Looking out the window is almost like seeing a movie. You're constantly surprising yourself. I love driving just for that alone."
CROSSING COUNTRY
His love for long drives started early. After finishing high school in 1956, Ruscha climbed into his 6-year-old Ford and rolled across Route 66 from his home in Oklahoma City to art school in Los Angeles. It was a trip he repeated many times, finding some of his most famously deadpan images and making monuments out of mundane gas stations.
"I had a desperate need for gasoline and moving at the same time," he remembers. "I thought there was pictorial juice to these gas stations."
Late 1950s L.A. was a good place to be an artist. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was about to open and the new Ferus Gallery was a magnet for young local talent, also staging pioneer shows of collage art by Kurt Schwitters and the work of a new kid from New York named Andy Warhol.
And in 1963, Marcel Duchamp came to town. This pivotal figure in 20th Century art struck Ruscha as a brainy but down-to-earth alternative to the "chain-smoking, macho [Jackson] Pollock."
It was a fortuitous encounter, coming at a time when Ruscha was growing disenchanted with the heroic, painterly flourishes of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Not only was Ruscha leaning toward the attention to ordinary items of daily life celebrated by Pop art, but he found that Duchamp suggested more deliberate ways to conceive ideas for art. Ruscha learned to plan art in his mind, as he did with commercial illustration or typesetting, and then execute it. Early works were a roiling mix of brand names and paint, but the brush strokes quickly turned thin and flat.
In the '60s and early '70s, he went through a startling range of approaches, painting with blueberry extract and photographing a typewriter tossed from the window of a speeding car.
During these turbulent years he married, and with wife Danna has a son Eddie, now a musician. The couple divorced in 1975, only to remarry 13 years later in the same county courthouse.
"I lived with other women and she lived with other men and we got back together," he says simply.
At about the same time, Ruscha did a series of "silhouette" paintings that evoked the look of film noir.
Riley, the Miami Heat coach who got to know Ruscha when Riley coached the L.A. Lakers, owns a work from this series showing a simple house as lonely refuge.
"People take a look at it, and it brings tears to their eyes," Riley says. "Here's a man who paints every day, who works very hard in his studio, but when he goes out he's a fun man to be around."
PUBLIC ART
In 1985, Ruscha tackled his first public artwork, the splendid mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go," that lines the rotunda of the Main Library of the Miami-Dade Public Library System. Four years later his 56 lunette paintings were installed over arched windows around the library.
"I think it's one of the great pieces of public art in the last part of the 20th Century," MAM director Suzanne Delehanty says. "It's totally appropriate for the library, and I love the beautiful skies that are painted by the words."
"I was really nervous about accepting the job," says Ruscha, who admits he was daunted by the 128-foot circumference of the rotunda.
He felt too old to paint on the site, a la Michelangelo. But once the logistics were solved, he threw himself into the task, camping out all night inside the library to study Miami history.
Ruscha saw the project as "not just an architectural setting but a human setting," says Cesar Trasobares, then director of Miami-Dade Arts in Public Places, which commissioned the work. "As he got to know people here, he had a better sense for issues like language and local color."
That rare sense of language and local color has become Ruscha's signature.
"I can read the Yellow Pages like a novel," he insists. "I can just flip anywhere, and there seems to be a new frontier. It opens up to expose its innards, and the city is right there."
As a follow-up to my previous blog post, I'm refining the book pitch for my memoir. I know it's not in good-to-go shape yet, but it is much better than the previous one I made at the Pitch-o-Rama at the Writers Institute in early May at MDC. I really fell flat on my ass with that one (figuratively, I mean).
So here's my current book pitch (a very short summary of the essence of the book someone wants to write, designed to interest a book publisher, or not):
I wake up every morning and praise God that I'm not dead or drooling in a wheelchair, and that the rest of my family is alive and well. One rainy day our lives changed instantly in a car crash as we drove our son to start college. Yet I'll never remember this life-changing event. In a flash I was knocked into the black nothingness of a coma and hospitalized for a month while I tried to remember who I was and re-learn basic skills I'd always taken for granted, like talking, walking, sipping coffee, even the typing I did as a journalist. Today I'm blessed to look as if my life has returned to normal, but now I live with my "new normal": dealing with the post-traumantic stress disorder dreadfully familiar to those who've suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, football game, or war zone. I've said good-bye to my former life and income: I lost my newspaper job. Driving on expressways gives me the creeps. Painful reminders of my past trigger flashbacks, also bad dreams that seem real until I wake up to realize I'm not being strangled, or that someone I know isn't amputating my feet.
First things first: More visual arts news connected to Miami
So very sad to report the death of feminist art historian and retired University of Miami professor Paula Hays Harper on June 3, 2012. When I read The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor Brecher in the paper on June 13, 2012, I cried and cried, even though I had known she had been quite sick for such a long time. Mark your calendar, if you will be in Miami then, for the memorial service her friends are planning at noon on July 20 at The Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach 33139.
Had to share this touching email comment I received re Paula from Billie G. Lynn, Associate Professor of Sculpture at University of Miami:
"She was a great teacher and I loved her sense of humor. . .sooooo wicked and yet right on! The students of the future will miss her and not know quite what is missing, but I'll be sure to tell them about her. As you well know, no one knows the hour of their death, as the bumper sticker says: 'Live like it's your last day on Earth because one day you'll be right.'
"She as a great woman, let's honor her by living outrageously."
For particularly noteworthy exhibits in Miami this summer, check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com In the June ARTnews, you might like to catch my review of Rita Ackermann solo show at MOCA in North Miami, page 98. Also note in that issue on page 42 story about how ARTnews has won a prize for its excellence in journalism.
Sebastian Spreng tells me about an exhibit of 150 artworks by Julio Larraz, who lives in Miami, opening July 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm and up through the last week in Sept. 2012 at Galleria D'Arte Contini, Via S. Marco 2765 / 30124 in Venice, Italy. To rsvp call this Miami ph number: 305-665-3334. For more info about this exhibit, see www.continiarte.com
Tina Spiro tells me she has been invited for the second time in a row to exhibit at Beijing Biennale, this time for 2012, at the National Museum of China. Her tryptych oil painting "Rembrandt 2012: Back to the Future" will be featured to represent Jamaica. Other news: Tina (who used to live and work here and has since moved to Jamaica but we keep in touch via email) has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Gallery of Jamaica and asked to serve as the chair of the Exhibitions Committee of that institution.
Joel Hoffman, director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, has created a blog to document the process of replacing Vizcaya's Courtyard skylight. It's really been an eyesore for years in that quite beautiful place. Plans are to finish this project in September. Find the link to his blog at the homepage at www.vizcaya.org
My BFF Rosie Gordon-Wallace tells me about this exhibit, which sounds quite exciting and impressive. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator presents this in partnership with the Miami Dade College Art Gallery System and MDC Live!:
"Milagros: Portal Culture" by Felici Asteinza
National Performance Network / Visual Artists Network Residency
Opening night reception is Thurs. June 28, from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd. Artist Talk is Friday, June 29 at 1 pm. This exhibit continues through July 27, 2012 as a DVCAI Caribbean Crossroads exhibition series. All programs are free and open to the public.
Milagros: Portal Culture
Felici Asteinza, Caribbean artist whose one week NPN/VAN community residency is June 24-30, 2012 will create Milagros: Portal Culture, presenting a series of community partnership projects and programs, including a collaborative community-making / collecting project where artists and musicians guide participants through creation and collection of art and sound. Working with her artist group Alvin Fillastre, Evan Galbick and Elestial Sound, visitors to MDC Art Gallery System at the Freedom Tower will experience first hand the process and creation of building the installation performance space, culminating in an on-site, one-night artist musician performance.
Felici's artwork explores the ritualistic nature of creating. These multi-layered collages are embedded with re-discovered residue from the artist's studio as well as images reflecting anxieties and greed. Elaborate, precise lines become the glue between elements, creating a rhythmic, activated field.
Elestial Sound Records is a sustainable record label run by solar panels in the northern California mountains, also supporting an abundane of cutting-edge musicians from Florida. Their music plays while the installation is created, making a truly collaborative venture between the visual and music arts. The Freedom Tower's architecture has guided this site-specific installation.
WOULD LOVE TO GET COMMENTS FOR MY BLOG ABOUT WHAT READERS THOUGHT ABOUT THIS EVENT: The live performance will take place ONLY during the opening reception, Thursday, June 28 from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne, 3rd Floor.
For more info about Felici, see www.milagrosartcollective.blogspot.com For more info about Diaspora Cultural Arts Incubator, see www.diasporavibevirtualgallery.com For more info about Miami Dade College Art Gallery system, see http://www.mdc.edu/ags For more info about MDC Live! Performing Arts Series, see http://www.mdc.edu/main/mdclive
This program is sponsored by the National Performance Network (NPN) Visual Arts Network (VAN) funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, partnered with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. For more info about NPN and VAN, please see http://www.npnweb.org
Rustin Levenson, that art conservator extraordinaire, tells me how she is cleaning up Salvador Dali, his artwork, that is! See "Four Salvador Dali masterworks cleaned, repaired in public" by Lennie Bennett, Tampa Bay Times Art Critc (thank goodness Tampa residents have one for THEIR paper!) See http://www.tampabay.com
Cernuda Arte and Cernuda Family Collection have loaned 13 artworks to "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," a remarkable collaborative group of exhibitions in New York now on view at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Queens Museum of Art. Congrats to this gallery and collection! The loaned artworks are by Esteban Chartrand, Victor Patricio Landaluze, Domingo Ramos, Jose Cuchi Arnau, Oscar Garcia Rivera, Carlos Enriquez, Rene Portocarrero, Fedelio Ponce, Roberto Diago, Jose Bedia.
And now here's the "vintage" part of my blog. . .
CINEMATIC IN STYLE AND SIZE, RUSCHA'S ART ADMIRED WORLDWIDE by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald April 2001
"Ed Ruscha" at the Miami Art Museum is a traveling survey that charts one American artist's journeys along open roads and crowded urban intersections.
Often characterized as a Los Angeles practitioner of Pop art, Ruscha (pronounced ROO-shay) resists that label, as does the lyrical and deadpan variety of the 50-plus paintings, books, drawings and photography that make up this survey covering nearly 40 years of an inventive and internationally admired career.
Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, this not-to-be-missed show is accompanied by a 196-page hard-bound catalog. Unusual among museum tomes, this catalog contains essays of exceptional insight and clarity by Kerry Brougher, chief curator at the Hirshhorn, and Neal Benezra, the Art Institute of Chicago's deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art.
They discuss important precedents for Ruscha's work, including Jasper Johns's famous 1955 Pop painting, "Target with Four Faces." Another critical influence was Robert Frank's often surreal 1958 book of photographs, "The Americans," showing bleak highways dotted with cafes and filling stations.
Throughout his career, Ruscha has melded photography and painting, building upon these sources by adding his droll trove of "found words," as he describes them in his book of word drawings "They Called Her Styrene" (Phaidon), published last year. The book reprises the down-to-earth poetry of brand names, billboards, comic-book exclamatory phrases and movie lingo that weaves throughout his MAM show, forming a witty narrative that occasionally turns sublime and poignant.
Ruscha also exploits the myth-making devices of Hollywood's dream factory, and plants that wide-angle cinematic style where we would least expect it. You find the reminder of a film director's eye in his unfolding photographic strip of gas stations or in his monumental 1963 painting of a Standard Oil station in Texas.
The dramatic, looming perpsective in this signature painting recalls the image of a speeding train seen in countless movies particularly, as Brougher points out, in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
In the '80s and '90s, Ruscha produced some of his most pared-down but evocative work, stripping his palette to foggy shades of light gray and inky black. The work reminds us of the romantic gloom of his old black-and-white movies, a feeling that remains pervasive whether his subject is a fading mythic shot of Native American tents or a 1950s car struggling toward a mountain pass.
"Like everyone else, I'm a frustrated film director," Ruscha once said.
He is clearly not a frustrated storyteller, inviting us to read his cinematic landscapes left to right, just as we would the lines of a script, poem or novel. That mix of language and landscape finds eloquent expression in his murals, which are on permanent view in the rotunda and elsewhere at Miami-Dade's Main Library.
In the rotunda, Shakespeare's line "words without thoughts never to heaven go" graces a lush stream of sunset paintings. And individual segments of his word paintings make sly homage to their surroundings, like the awkward layers of the word "sure" in the science section.
"We have people coming from all over the world not because they want to check out books, but because they want to see his paintings," says Barbara Young, the library's art services director. "It's really like turning pages as you move through the library."
Ruscha's mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go" and 56 painted lunettes are on permanent display at the Main Library, 101 W. Flagler St.
SIGN LANGUAGE PAINTER ED RUSCHA, WHOSE WORK IS NOW ON VIEW AT THE MIAMI ART MUSEUM, CAPTURES THE DRIVE-BY POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Elisa Turner, from The Miami Herald April 2001
Ed Ruscha sounds sure he made the right move when he gave up that day job as a professional sign painter.
"Computers," he explains with a slight smile, "would have put me out of business."
There's no such danger of that happening now. A well-connected Los Angeles artist, he counts actor Dennis Hopper and Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley as friends. He has even posed in a Gap ad and played a bit part in a film about radio talk shows.
But best of all, he transformed his commercial training into a brilliant international art career years ago.
Today his paintings can fetch as much as $400,000.
Still, you sense that he must have painted a bundle of bang-up signs. Right now he's standing in front of one of his sleek paintings at the Miami Art Museum. It's a snowy scene that tries too hard to sparkle, like a billboard selling some mountain valley's bottled water.
As a witty riff on commercial art and photography, it's labeled with meticulous signage.
"I call that typeface Boy Scout Utility Modern," he says with affectionate pride, his cornflower blue eyes flashing beneath barely spiked silver hair. "If a lineman from the telephone company got the job of a designing a poster for the annual picnic, well, that's the typeface he would use."
Signs are still on the artist's mind, as you can see in the remarkable survey "Ed Ruscha," which runs through June 3 at Miami Art Museum. The exhibition includes more than 50 paintings, drawings and books spanning nearly four decades. And looking at his vision of everything from parking lots and film credits to sublime sunbursts, it's clear that Ruscha remains a professional sign painter--though on the big scale of a California thoroughfare.
With a laconic sense of humor and a love for journeys westward, Ruscha's art points us toward a truly American cinematic flow of roads and words whisking past our dusty windshields. The paintings include a behind-the-scenes view of the famous letters spelling out "Hollywood" next to a freeway. Then there's his empty, apocalyptic map of Sunset Boulevard and his grand painting of the signage for a Standard Oil gas station in Amarillo, Texas.
Works like this have made him the art world's terse but telling road writer.
"There's glory," he insists in an interview at MAM, "in word combinations for somebody selling tires."
In the 1960s, Ruscha's affection for drive-by ordinariness earned him acclaim as an L.A.-styled Pop artist. That's not a title he likes, nor one suitable to the plot twists of his career.
Life in L.A. has not been the only thing that has shaped his life, he says.
"The whole Western United States--I see it as a great, expansive land with the Grand Canyon and all these beautiful places that are really inspiring, and somehow that gets into my work," he says.
In fact, Ruscha, 63, is itching for another road trip, this time to Wyoming. Nudging him on is "Annals of the Former World," a book by John McPhee about geology in the Western states.
"It rekindled my interest to get in a car and go driving, just see the landscape and take a camera," he says. "I was seeing the parallel between his [McPhee's] interest in geology and my life as an artist. He was talking about flowing volcanic mud, full of rock fragments.
"Art history moves in the same way. It makes its own garbage and people learn from it. It's a rolling-never-stopping kind of thing."
On the road, he turns the radio dial to R&B or jazz.
"It's like a soundtrack for what I'm seeing," he says. "Looking out the window is almost like seeing a movie. You're constantly surprising yourself. I love driving just for that alone."
CROSSING COUNTRY
His love for long drives started early. After finishing high school in 1956, Ruscha climbed into his 6-year-old Ford and rolled across Route 66 from his home in Oklahoma City to art school in Los Angeles. It was a trip he repeated many times, finding some of his most famously deadpan images and making monuments out of mundane gas stations.
"I had a desperate need for gasoline and moving at the same time," he remembers. "I thought there was pictorial juice to these gas stations."
Late 1950s L.A. was a good place to be an artist. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was about to open and the new Ferus Gallery was a magnet for young local talent, also staging pioneer shows of collage art by Kurt Schwitters and the work of a new kid from New York named Andy Warhol.
And in 1963, Marcel Duchamp came to town. This pivotal figure in 20th Century art struck Ruscha as a brainy but down-to-earth alternative to the "chain-smoking, macho [Jackson] Pollock."
It was a fortuitous encounter, coming at a time when Ruscha was growing disenchanted with the heroic, painterly flourishes of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Not only was Ruscha leaning toward the attention to ordinary items of daily life celebrated by Pop art, but he found that Duchamp suggested more deliberate ways to conceive ideas for art. Ruscha learned to plan art in his mind, as he did with commercial illustration or typesetting, and then execute it. Early works were a roiling mix of brand names and paint, but the brush strokes quickly turned thin and flat.
In the '60s and early '70s, he went through a startling range of approaches, painting with blueberry extract and photographing a typewriter tossed from the window of a speeding car.
During these turbulent years he married, and with wife Danna has a son Eddie, now a musician. The couple divorced in 1975, only to remarry 13 years later in the same county courthouse.
"I lived with other women and she lived with other men and we got back together," he says simply.
At about the same time, Ruscha did a series of "silhouette" paintings that evoked the look of film noir.
Riley, the Miami Heat coach who got to know Ruscha when Riley coached the L.A. Lakers, owns a work from this series showing a simple house as lonely refuge.
"People take a look at it, and it brings tears to their eyes," Riley says. "Here's a man who paints every day, who works very hard in his studio, but when he goes out he's a fun man to be around."
PUBLIC ART
In 1985, Ruscha tackled his first public artwork, the splendid mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go," that lines the rotunda of the Main Library of the Miami-Dade Public Library System. Four years later his 56 lunette paintings were installed over arched windows around the library.
"I think it's one of the great pieces of public art in the last part of the 20th Century," MAM director Suzanne Delehanty says. "It's totally appropriate for the library, and I love the beautiful skies that are painted by the words."
"I was really nervous about accepting the job," says Ruscha, who admits he was daunted by the 128-foot circumference of the rotunda.
He felt too old to paint on the site, a la Michelangelo. But once the logistics were solved, he threw himself into the task, camping out all night inside the library to study Miami history.
Ruscha saw the project as "not just an architectural setting but a human setting," says Cesar Trasobares, then director of Miami-Dade Arts in Public Places, which commissioned the work. "As he got to know people here, he had a better sense for issues like language and local color."
That rare sense of language and local color has become Ruscha's signature.
"I can read the Yellow Pages like a novel," he insists. "I can just flip anywhere, and there seems to be a new frontier. It opens up to expose its innards, and the city is right there."
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