Yes, I know that it is not really kosher for a journalist to become part of the story she is covering. . . but, well, as you will see below from the beginnings of my memoir, I never went to "j-school," as those in the know like to call journalism school, so I trust readers will cut me some slack. . .
I think it was just great that I could attend The Miami Writers Institute, the creative writing conference in early May at The Center @ Miami Dade College. See www.flcenterlitarts.com for more info or google The Center @ Miami Dade College at www.google.com . For the second year in a row, I have attended a workshop in memoir writing. It has been really helpful and encouraging. This year, the workshop was taught by Da Chen, author of the memoir Sounds of the River. He really helped me plot a "roadmap" for finding a way to tell my story.
What I have posted below is most--but not all--of the writing sample I submitted for discussion at the workshop. Since then, I have slightly revised it, but I know I am a long, long way from writing a book-length memoir. Maybe as a book it will never see the light of day. . . but I would just like to do it anyway.
This memoir is probably one of the last big ideas I have had since my post-Miami Herald life began several years ago. And believe me, some of those big ideas have been doozies, lemme tell ya. Some of you reading this may remember at least one of them. . . But they all came to naught. So now, I am going to start on this one.
Before I begin more of this blog post, I want to say THANK YOU THANK YOU!! to my way-beyond-fab daughter Margaret Smith. She designed this blog for me because, as many of you know, I am indeed a self-confessed "digital dinosaur." There is just NO WAY NO HOW I could have set this up myself. She learned so much at the private Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida, where she graduated with honors and now has a job in her field of interior design. Ringling has terrific computer resources for designers. I am very grateful and proud that I was able to contribute over the years to her college fund thanks to all those years of working so hard for the Knight Ridder-owned Miami Herald.
Monday on CNN I just heard about this horrific story re an American citizen. See www.freejacobnow.com
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
LegalArt, at 1035 North Miami Ave, is offering this ONE NIGHT ONLY chance to see video-based works by national and international artists. It is 8 to 11 pm, Friday, May 25, 2012 on the second and fourth floors of LegalArt building, also at Corner Bar, on northwest corner of LegalArt building. This exhibition is organized by curatorial collective Southernmost Situations and will include video-based sculptures and installations, also looped reel of short videos. Among the artists: Clifton Childree, Alice Raymond, Magnus Sigurdson, TM Sisters, Antonia Wright. For more info, contact Dominique Breard, email info@legalartmiami.org or ph. 786-347-2360. www.legalartmiami.org
Norton Museum of Art announces the establishment of an award for emerging photographers. It is called the Rudin Prize and will be awarded annually. It will be coordinated by curator Tim B. Wride. Winner receives $20,000 and a solo exhibition. Panelists selecting the award nominees: John Baldessari, Graciela Iturbide, Susan Meiselas, Michal Rovner, Yinka Shonibare. Prize named for late New York City real estate developer Lewis Rudin. Inaugural prize awarded December 2012. Norton Museum of Art is located at 1451 S. Olive Avenue, West Palm Beach FL. More info: see www.norton.org
An Annual Winner for Art and Education: The Education Fund's Charity Auction of Art made by 5-to-18 year old public school students is set for May 24, with 100 percent of proceeds from art sales donated back to their classrooms to help teachers purchase supplies for next year's lessons. Auction will be held in the historic Moore Building in Miami's Design District. Purchase tkts in advance through May 18 online at www.educationfund.org/programs/silentartauction or purchase tkts at the door. For more info call 305-892-5099. Tkts start at $100. This is really an exceptional event--I remember both covering and attending this during my time with The Miami Herald. On view this year will be over 150 artworks created by Miami-Dade County Public School students and teachers representing nearly 50 schools. This event has raised more than $722,000 since it began. It allows students and teachers to have access to donated and recycled materials for art making, courtesy of Ocean Bank Center for Educational Materials. Visionary event sponsors of this visionary event: Ocean Bank, The Children's Trust, Whole Foods, DACRA, and Bacardi.
Bridge Red Studios / Project Space located at 12425 NE 13th Ave #5, North Miami FL is now showing the work of Zaydee Martinez, Joe Nicastri, Laura Tan. Really try not to miss this. Closing brunch is Sunday, July 8, 2012, from noon to 4 pm. Also you can see this by appt; call 786-390-8915. www.bridgeredstudios.com This is an exhibition of 3 painters who, as the press release says, "explore representation with all the complexity that the word re-presentaion connotes." Also in the same building, in the downstairs space of Lou Anne Colodny known as Under the Bridge is another not-to-be-missed be show: "smoke signals: portals y paisajes." This show aims to focus on the "concept of a lens as a portal, frame, window, an entry point that one can further look through to unlock narratives beyond the limits of a two-dimensional frame . . ." It is curated by William Cordova. Among the artists: Leslie Hewitt, Robert Thiele, Glexis Novoa, Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Onajide Shabaka [for more info on Onajide, see my first post on this blog], Luis Gispert. Closing brunch is also July 8, 2012, from noon to 4 pm. Very cool Miami artcentric synergy in this space!
New World School of the Arts continues to celebrate its 25th anniversary year with further examples of how it makes many pioneering marks on Miami's cultural development. This year it is ranked among America's Top High Schools by U.S. News and World Report, earning the prestigious Gold Medal Award. NWSA is ranked 17th place in the state of Florida and 186th among all high schools in the nation this year. NWSA is home this year to two Presidential Scholars in the Arts, out of 20 scholars recognized nationally. Scholars are Kelley Kessell, in music-theater, and Jessica Suhr, in visual arts.
Here's another don't-miss opportunity for those of us lucky enough to both "summer" and "winter" in Miami: The fabulous Community Arts Program Summer Concert Series is now starting its 27th season! Concerts are 8 pm every other Thursday evening June 7 to August 16. Concerts held at my totally terrific church: Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ at 3010 DeSoto Blvd, Coral Gables (directly opposite the Biltmore Hotel.) First concert is June 7: Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Tkts are $30 each in advance, $35 at the door if available. Order by calling 305-448-7421, ext 153. See www.CommunityArtsProgram.org
WHERE IS THE GIRL I USED TO KNOW? A MEMOIR by Elisa Turner....or....FROM THE MIDWEST TO MIAMI: MY STAR-CROSSED AFFAIR WITH THE JOURNALISM (working titles) by Elisa Turner
I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place.
When I used to visit the city in the 1970s and early 1980s, I thought Miami was flat and flashy, a shallow substitute for the street-smart glamour of Boston, New York or London. These were the cities that had truly captivated someone like me, longing for far-flung adventures while she grew up in the small town of Shelbyville, Illinois.
When people in Miami raved about the brazenly orange blooms of Poinciana trees, I groaned inside. I saw visions of tulips and daffodils, missing the way their charming hues announced the long-awaited arrival of spring "up North." Yet, like the girlish and dreamy-eyed waitress in the popular 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers" who dramatically proclaimed that she was leaving her job at the bar to find herself and perhaps become a writer, I had simply run out of things that I was not good at when I moved to Miami with my husband in the scorching hot summer of 1984.
All the summers thereafter I discovered would be insufferably sticky scorchers in Miami, especially when I was pregnant. When I would gripe about how weird I thought Christmas lights looked on palm trees, family and friends would roll their eyes. "There are no seasons here," I complained. "Yes, there are. They are just more subtle," people would say. "Well, yes, there are two," I would snap. "Hot and REALLY hot."
But, after all this time, I have made my peace with Miami. My terrific husband of over 30 years and I have raised two wonderful adult children. They grew up with the opportunity to spend every day of their young lives outside. They never experienced chilly "snow days" that kept them stuck in their home, away from friends from school. They learned Spanish in public elementary school in Miami. When learning how to drive, they never had to confront icy roads.
And professionally, I grew into a life I would never have thought possible back when I grumpily relocated here from New York. Miami opened up countless adventures in a new world for me then. It is still doing that.
The city has always been a place where people come to re-invent themselves, to start anew. Somehow, without ever taking a course in journalism or art criticism, I became the last Miami Herald art critic when the Herald was the flagship newspaper of Knight Ridder, which sadly no longer exists.
Because I was never a full-time employee at the paper, I worked in my book-lined study at home, so that I could handle the busy demands of raising children and running a household. I started working especially hard for the paper in 1995 when Helen L. Kohen, the previous art critic, left. I recall reading her good-bye column and going to a farewell dinner for her with newspaper colleagues. My children were in grade school then. But even after Helen left, I never had my own computer in the newsroom. It made sense for me to drive to museums, galleries and art events from my home without going to the newspaper office. I would often rush back to pick up my kids and cook dinner and then work late or early in the morning.
Through the wonders of telecommuting (and a reliable modem), I usually filed my stories on time. It was a hectic, harried and enthralling life. I had always loved words and images, had studied so much literature and art history, so what could be a better career for a working mom? And then there were the fabulous international assignments for the Herald: the paper sent me once to the Havana Bienal in Cuba, twice to the Venice Biennale in Italy, once to Art Basel in Switzerland, and once to Haiti.
That trip to Cuba was my first overseas gig. When I came back to write my story in Miami, I was astonished to see it printed with the dateline Havana under my byline. It looked as if I had written it in Havana and filed it from there--how remarkable that newspapers could do something like this, I thought, which just shows was a journalistic neophyte I really was. Nevertheless, the experience was so thrilling that I wanted to do it again, and I dreamed up more angles to persuade the paper to let me travel again.
When my half-Cuban husband Eric Smith traveled with me to Havana while I covered the art scene for the paper, we found time to visit some of his relatives who still live in Havana. We brought them medicine from Miami in a carry-on suitcase. It was a warm, friendly encounter even though we wrongly assumed we had never met. We spoke for about an hour in an apartment with modest decor recalling the 1950s. Actually, they did most of the talking, with Eric occasionally translating for me since I don't speak Spanish. Elenita, who was the first cousin of Eric's late mom, remembered that she had first met Eric in Miami when she came to help her cousin take care of him soon after he was born.
At my urging, Eric asked Elenita why she still lived in Cuba though so much of her family has moved to Miami. She sighed. Then she said, "Some of us have to stay in Cuba."
This is perhaps the brightest memory I have of those fabulous trips, and one I often recall as I see how the city today is frequently defined by its evolving relationship with Cuba.
In spite of those opportunities to travel, my professional relationship with the Herald ended with a thundering bang.
My family and I were nearly killed in a horrific car accident in 2004. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, I was plunged into the black nothingness of a coma. Afterwards I struggled through hours and days of therapy to learn once again how to eat and drink, to talk and walk. My fingers stumbled on the keyboard until I taught myself how to type again.
Cards, telegrams and orchids from family, friends, co-workers, also from so many people in the art world, kept arriving at my various hospital rooms (there were about four) and home. It was an astonishing deluge of concern for a free-lance art critic who never thought she was good enough because she did not have a degree in journalism or art history and was not full-time at the Herald.
Still more shocking surprises: journalism was changing dramatically, especially in Miami. In 2006 The Miami Herald was sold to The McClatchy Company and the venerable Knight Ridder newspaper chain dissolved. As a free-lancer I lost access to 21 years' worth of work in the Herald archives. While I was still learning how to live with the post-traumatic stress disorder that accompanies a brain injury, the doors slammed shut on my life as art critic for The Miami Herald.
The nasty truth piercing the heart of an exceptionally productive newspaper career is that no one from The Miami Herald has ever told me that I am no longer an art critic for that paper. I still have my photo I.D. to gain entry to the Herald building at One Herald Plaza in Miami. This building may soon be demolished as its valuable bayfront location has been sold, and the Herald will eventually have to move to another location. To me, all this is, as Aunt Velva from Fayette County, Illinois, might have said, as ugly as home-made sin.
TO BE CONTINUED . . . (not sure when)
[Blogger's Note: I may not post another blog entry until Thursday, June 21, 2012. In the meantime, readers can read my previous blog posts here, also see my blog at www.artcircuits.com or to see my original ArtCentric blog, google Elisa Turner at www.google.com . Be sure to sign up to receive email notices when I post another entry on this blog. Also you can become a follower of this blog by clicking on my bio info; then see info about doing that on lower left-hand side of screen.]
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Miami Artist Jose Bedia Presented by Miami Art Museum
Miami Art Museum offers a major career retrospective of the art of Jose Bedia, in "Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by Jose Bedia," running May 24 to Sept. 2, 2012. For more info see www.miamiartmuseum.org I have admired his work for ages, and so glad I have a reason now to post my Herald review about his work today. I really think it is my signature piece of writing that distills all that I have learned about the arts in a place like Miami. (Ok, Ok, I realize it may sound crazy to call what is probably the longest story I ever wrote for the Herald a "distillation." But I do think that I was able to distill something of what it means to be an artistic immigrant soul who has landed in Miami.)
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
From Tami Katz-Freiman, exceptionally talented Israeli curator and my very fab artcentric friend now based in Miami, I have learned that she has guest co-curated with Rotem Ruff this exhibit, "Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India," running May 31 to December 8, 2012 at the Tel Aviv Museum. See www.tamuseum.com With 17 artists, it is the first major show to introduce, as she tells me via email, the Israeli public to the thriving contemporary art scene in India. The press release explains: "The works included in this exhibition are anchored in a tumultuous social and political reality and their multiple layers of meaning reflect different responses to the deep transformations that have been taking place in Indian society for the past two decades." Wouldn't it be cool if somehow this show could travel to Miami??
LegalArt in Miami offers a series of roundtable discussions looking at how contemporary art curators do their work. This is presented by Amanda Sanfilippo, Curator-in-Residence at LegalArt. First discussion is May 15; topic is "Failure/Ruin." Discussions are free and begin at 7 p.m. Amanda's bio info says she is Development Associate at Locust Projects, Miami. She has previously worked with Creative Time and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other institutions. For more info, see www.legalartmiami.org
Renowned curator Dan Cameron is the next speaker in the Hot Topics discussion series at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. He speaks May 12. Reception with Cameron begins at 5 pm at the Center, 1650 Harrison Street, Hollywood. Lecture is at 6 pm. Tkts are $10 for non-members and $5 for members, students, teachers, and seniors. See www.ArtAndCultureCenter.org
Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya has been chosen by The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia to install monumental sculpture in its Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. "Enrique Martinez Celaya: The Tower of Snow," runs July 2012 to November 2012. His sculpture is 15 feet high and cast in bronze--I have seen a smaller version of this in his Miami studio, and I think it is quite evocative. Very poetic and inspiring, actually. I think it is one of my very favorite works by him. It depicts a boy on crutches bearing a house--really a home--on his back. As the press release explains, "Burdened but resilient and resourceful, the boy raises the idea of displacement and loss as well as possibility and redemption." Isn't that an idea inspiring to all of us, for WHATEVER reason??
ShoeboxLA presents "Joshua Levine: Monumental," opens Saturday, May 12, 2012 from 4 to 7 pm at The Studio for Southern California History-Chinatown, 818 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Josh is so talented. . .wish I could fly out there to see this. We had such a blast when we hung out together during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. With my VIP card, I could get him into the VIP lounge where we had such a fab lunch together. . .His show in Los Angeles is a series of 12 sculptures that continue his investigation of genetic animal hybrids. Now here's a really cool concept: ShoeboxLA gives Los Angeles artists an opportunity to do one-day site-specific exhibitions outside traditional gallery settings. See more at www.shoeboxla.blogspot.com
Don't miss this Miami show: "lynne golob gelfman: scapes" at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum of Florida International University, running May 16 through September 2, 2012. Opening is May 16, from 6-9 pm. For more on museum, see http://thefrost.fiu.edu As the release tells us, "Lynne Golob Gelfman makes abstract paintings that are rooted in the visible world. . .In recent years, inspired by morning walks along the Miami shore, she has been making works that evoke the reflection of light on water. But as a result of their repetitive markings, her works become as much about the process of their own making as about any outside source." Lynne is yet another artist I have known for years--more years than I want to count--and I have been fascinated to watch her exquisite work evolve--plus she is one of my neighbors! See her website at www.lynnegolobgelfman.com
You never know where you will find art that moves you. . .Recently at the Wirtz Gallery of First National Bank of South Miami on 5750 Sunset Drive in South Miami, FL 33143, I happened across a quietly stunning solo show by painter Reisha Leize Perlmutter. I understand she received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Check out her website www.ReishaArt.com
This just in. . . SUPER CONGRATS TO MY BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace!! She has been recognized as a Distinguished Achiever at the ICABA Salutes South Florida's 100 Most Accomplished Caribbean Americans Recognition Event. This is a black-tie reception and recognition program at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on June 29, 2012. For more info about ICABA, see www.icabaworld.com
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Jose Bedia loves to tell a story--or is it several stories at once? His plots and protagonists melt and nestle together as he talks about his sinuous imagery of mermaids and deer, oceans and earth. People and animals cross-dress, the way they do in American Indian myths and African masks. Stories overlap, like one blue Caribbean wave cresting into another, or like a serpent coiling back on itself. The remarkable connections can span continents in a single brushstroke or breath. Like the one about the mythical prince at the peak of his manhood who must trade in his royal crown for a leper's crutch after making an arrogant mistake. Now revered for his healing powers, this fallen figure is known as San Lazarus in Spanish Roman Catholicism, Babaluaye in the Afro-Cuban lore of Santeria, and Obaluaiye in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, homeland of many slaves brought to Cuba in the 19th Century.
Leaning on a ladder splattered with the black paint that's a constraint in his vivid visual narratives, the Cuban-born South Florida artist tilts his head back reflectively. His thick, brown, wavy hair seems to curl even closer to his waist. He is getting ready to tell the tale of San Lazarus, subject of a still-wet silhouette he's painted on the gallery walls of the Art Museum at Florida International University, site of "Jose Bedia," the fierce and fascinating solo show of his never-exhibited personal collection of paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks. [Note that this museum now has its own stunning building on campus, the Frost Museum at FIU.]
His eyes widen. The story begins.
"San Lazarus was a prince--a rich, wealthy, handsome man. He had a lot of lovers, a lot of women. So he was asking a favor from Olofi [the Yoruba god], if he can have all the lovers he wants."
Bedia goes on. The favor was granted, so long as San Lazarus reserved Thursday as a day of rest from his lovemaking, and prayed to God instead. But San Lazarus forgot his promise, and soon became sick with leprosy. Forgiveness was granted again, but his rich grandeur did not return. "He loses his crown," Bedia says. "He was homeless, a lone traveler, lying down in the street."
In Cuba, Bedia says, "they have two San Lazaruses," referring to the Saint Lazarus in traditional holy robes. "But the San Lazarus of the people is the guy with crutches, Babaluaye. He looks so weak, but he is powerful. If you promise something to him, you have to pay for it. Otherwise you'll be in trouble."
LEGENDARY INSTALLATION
The Lazarus legend comes to new life in "Mi Coballende (Protector of Patron Saint)," an installation Bedia created at FIU, dominated by an engulfing, electrifying silhouette. A man's black torso rises from the floor, tattoed with curvy chalk lines pointing to earth and sky, emblazoned with Afro-Cuban symbols standing for the crossroads between life and death. Vast arms extend around corners, one morphing into a giant dog's head, another draped with a tattered roll of burlap, emblems of the humbled but now beneficient Lazarus. Outlines of thorny trees sprout from his body; a tiny leggy man seems to race desperately along one gangly arm. As the work tells its story, boundaries between myth and man and forest blur.
It's a vivid example of the sort of work that's brought Bedia international acclaim--particularly since he left Cuba for Mexico in 1991, eventually settling in Miami with his wife and son. His art stands out for its elegant and assertive draftsmanship, and the way it's often laced with deft homages to American Indian drawings on animal hide and to action-figure comic books. Even more striking, though, is the way Bedia transforms eloquent scenarios expressing Afro-Cuban imagery and spiritual values into his own brand of contemporary art. This comes through in his direct graphic style, which he compares to "a primitive comic." It also surfaces in his love of symbolically loaded materials--whether it's the beaded Afro-Cuban ritual staff or even the weighted diving shoes (metaphors for mining personal myths) that are part of his installation here.
"For me, the object is very important," Bedia says. "It's a fetish--to have this thing that connects you with people even though they lived hundreds or thousands of years ago."
NON-WESTERN VIEW
His is an alchemical process that is gaining more notice amid the art world's current interest in work removed from the dominant American culture.
"I think Bedia's art is actually about providing an alternative, even a warning against Western culture," says South Florida art historian Roni Feinstein, who wrote the catalog essay for the FIU show.
In Bedia's primal universe, no one is truly disconnected from the natural world. In the handsomely rhythmic and bilingual "Nkunia Brava (Fierce Forest)," a wilderness of angular branches is rendered as an elaborate network of limbs and heads, so that plant, animal and person become one vital hybrid.
"In a world where everyone is sending each other e-mail and going shopping on the Internet, his work is a reminder that there's another world out there with real, physical experience, with spiritual values," Feinstein says.
Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, author of essential books on African and African-American culture and the opening-night lecturer for the Bedia show, gives lavish praise to Bedia's fluid adaptation of image and idea from non-Western sources--and especially from the rich Kongo culture of West Africa, carried across the Atlantic to merge in the Afro-Cuban religion of Palo Monte. (Palo Monte, meaning "trees of the sacred forest," venerates spirits living outside crowded cities.)
This is not a matter of amateur anthropology--even though the artist himself jokes that if he hadn't been so seduced by filling up sketchbook after sketchbook with restless drawings, he might have entered that field. A friend even once called him a frustrated anthropologist, Bedia says. And certainly, he's fed his muse with what some might call field studies. These include an apprenticeship in 1985 to a Lakota shaman on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and, more recently, a visit to the Southwestern Yaqui tribe during Easter week, when the Yaqui mount their own "Days of the Deer" festival.
"I learn things from my eyes and ears. This is different from when you learn only from books," he says of his travels. Archaeology, another way to recover the past, has also fascinated him, ever since he began finding carved shards of Cuba's native Taino and Siboney history buried in the island's soil and sand. An endlessly inventive artist, Bedia has dedicated his career to alternative ways of digging, and his creative excavations have struck not only past but present truths. Deeply influenced by his direct involvement with American Indian and Palo Monte rituals, his art is in synch with the changing uban landscape.
"Bedia's right at the forefront of contemporary art and culture. America has become the first universal nation on this planet," says Thompson, noting the evermore visible presence of people with Asian, American Indian, African and Hispanic roots. "Particularly in Miami. Miami is teaching the world what it will be like in the 21st century, and Jose is teaching us how to move into this multiethnic situation. He is at the very least trilingual."
Bedia's paintings and drawings are nearly always inscribed with sayings in Spanish or the Kongo language, so that their observations and admonitions mingle with scenes of people and animals negotiating crossings of earth, sea and sky. Their migrations tell not only the story of exiles and immigrants, but of moral choices that define life's journeys through a universe fraught with intricate connections.
"Who knows more, Isabel or Isabelita, who knows more?" is a typical, translated inscription. "It's a sermon about paying attention to our elders," says Thompson, "instead of just shoving them into a condo for old people."
THE OTHER 'MAMBO'
This query is called a mambo, a Kongo expression meaning "most important matters." These mambos are not the foot-tapping dances of 1930s Cuba but moral guides for living. Often, they remind us that time is running out for everyone. Even for the rich and handsome.
The cautionary tale of the once-handsome Lazarus, steeped as it is in Afro-Cuban lore carried so long ago to the Caribbean, is really not so different--as Bedia will tell you with a burst of wry laughter--from the catastrophe that beset a famous fallen charmer of Irish extraction, the terribly two-faced Dorian Gray. The "Cuban Dorian Gray," which Bedia's syncretic mind has suddenly dubbed Babaluaye, is just one example of his love of layered narratives.
Another is the story about a 10-year-old Cuban kid who recklessly clambered up a fence, only to fall and chip his two front teeth so that, forever after, they formed an odd little space, shaped like a triangle. "He was so spoiled," Bedia confesses. When the kid grew up and found himself doing a six-month compulsory military stint in Angola for Cuba in 1985, imagine his surprise to see tribesmen in southern Angola pointing at him. "They made a joke about my teeth," he said. "Mostly the men speak Portuguese, but my Portuguese was so bad, we were just talking to each other by gestures and laughing."
It turned out that the soldier's smile bore an uncanny likeness to those of various tribesmen in Angola. In the southern part of the country, men customarily cut their teeth to form a similar triangular pattern, as a way of paying homage to the cattle that are the focus of their nomadic life. In the north, men of another tribe cut their teen so that they form a triangular opening, making it easier to chew a sugar cane-like fruit during ritual ceremonies.
The 10-year old kid was Bedia, of course. His tale of the chipped teeth resonates as an especially striking coincidence, for Bedia's work is marked by his passionate fascination with the art and culture of West Africa, and by his profound awareness of how that intricate system of imagery and values has wound its way into the Afro-Cuban religions of Santeria and Palo Monte. Frustrated with the academic approach offered by his art training in Havana, Bedia was grateful when one teacher introduced him to the links between Cuban and African art. His later initiation into Palo Monte, he recalls, "was a conscious idea to recover my culture. When you are connected with [this tradition], many things develop for you. You can read reality in nontraditional ways. They teach you many things about the forces of nature in the river, the mountain, the sea, the ocean, the wind."
Not only does Bedia collect cross-cultural stories, he collects objects, too. His Miami home is filled with dozens of African as well as American Indian artifacts, from painted drums used by the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico to carved shell objects of Taino and Siboney origin, which the artist found as a teenager along beaches and hills in Cuba.
"When you live inside this environment, you must learn something," Bedia has said. "For at some moment, the symbol must open up to you. That is my technique. I try to find knowledge from many different places."
Perhaps the place that's given him the most knowledge is the sacred shrines of Palo Monte, which he began visiting in Havana at age 16 with his mother. Less than 10 years later, in 1983, Bedia was initiated into the priesthood of Palo Monte. A night of song and dance unfolded in a room painted brilliant blue with blazing stars, evoking the world's wheeling cycles between night and day, life and death.
Thompson, who was initiated with Bedia at his side a few years later, recalls the circular and cross-shaped Kongo designs, drawn in white chalk on the floor. Called "cosmograms," they represent the intersecting forces of life and death, God and man. "That's where you stand and swear to be a better person," Thompson says.
The cosmograms, also sliced with a knife into an initiate's skin as signs of spiritual strength, appear on figures in countless paintings and drawings by Bedia. At FIU, they score the shoulders of a lone, lean silhouetted figure in the painting "De Vuelta al Barrio" (Return to the Neighborhood). Carrying a suitcase in each hand, he seems nearly trapped in a chasm of bleak apartment buildings, their windows resembling ominous eyes--yet this figure's restless, taut posture suggests a defiant and mobile vitality very much at odds with the barren cityscape.
More Kongo circles, spun into a concentric maze, appear in another painting at FIU, "Isla Sola" (Lone Island). The circles revolve inside the silhouette of a large, disembodied head, which appears to be watching a swimmer fleeing a moonlit shipwreck. It's a dream-like scene, with the man's head seemingly laced together by a network of tree branches, so that he also resembles a forested island.
Both paintings pull us into a vortex of unsettling migration and cyclical motion, themes that South Florida poet Adrian Castro--a Bedia admirer--considers both consumately Caribbean and truly universal. Born and raised in Miami by parents from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Castro shares Bedia's deep sensitivity to the rich themes of Afro-Caribbean culture. Not only has Castro translated into English the Spanish works, laced with African expressions, by 1930s Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Mato, but the Miami poet is a Babalawo Ifa priest of Santeria.
IMMIGRANT LIFE
Asked to read from his new book of poems at this exhibit on March 17, Castro also wrote the poem "Para la installation de Jose Bedia" for a 1996 Miami Light Project performance at the Rubell Family Collection soon after Bedia created a room-sized installation, "Naufragios" (Shipwrecks), for the collection. Inspired by the deathly "rafter season" of 1994, "Naufragios" also comments on the pervasive presence of immigrants in world history, a fertile topic for the poet as well.
"Migration is really the story of humanity, of moving from one place to another," Castro says. "No one is from a single place."
That sense of movement is sounded like a steady drumbeat through so much of Bedia's art because, he says, "I am involved in the same thing. This is the drama of my people, and not only of the Cuban people but of so many around the whole world.
"From the moment I left Cuba, I started to study this feeling. I feel like this tiny little guy who's carrying his luggage with him wherever he goes. You always have to carry a little part of your country with you."
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Born in Havana in 1959, Jose Bedia studied art at Escuela de Arte de San Alejandro and at the Instituto Superior de Arte. He is the best known among the group of "80's generation" Cuban artists, whose work represented a significant break with tradition.
In the late 1980s, Bedia began to chart a place on the art world map when his work appeared in biennials in Havana and Sao Paulo and in the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre, a prominent show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1993, he was the youngest of five Cuban-born artists tapped for the landmark "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. His art is in the permanent collections of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and in museums in Mexico, Germany and Finland.
For the past two years, Bedia has been developing designs for the Opera and Symphony Hall lobbies of Miami's new Performing Arts Center, projects commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places.
This June, his work will go on exhibit at P.S. 1 in Queens, N.Y., a mammoth venue for contemporary art that recently announced a merger with New York's Museum of Modern Art. His piece will be part of the traveling group show, "Animal. Anima. Animus," which also includes installations by Maria Abramovic and Dennis Oppenheim and was organized by the Pori Art Museum in Finland.
"Jose Bedia will measure up as very important," says Amy Cappellazzo, director of the Rubell Family Collection, though she admits that, despite Bedia's growing reputation, vistors to the collection aren't always familiar with his distinctive style and materials. "A lot of Europeans see the work by Jeff Koons here and they nod approvingly, but when they see Jose they fall off the map. It has a whole different set of African and Caribbean references that don't even register on their scale."
Bedia's accomplishments register for Matta, the legendary Latin American master and 1940s Surrealist. After a meeting was arranged between the two artists at Matta's request, the elder Latin American attended a brunch at Bedia's home in January 1998. The dozen guests included Bedia's dealer, Fred Snitzer. "Matta was very charming, holding court," says Snitzer, "and he loved Jose's collection [of African and Native American art]. He kept saying, 'Ooh, can you get me one of those?' But it was clear that he recognized something in Bedia as very special."
[Blogger's Note: My goal is to post a new blog entry every other Thursday. That's my plan, anyway--we all know that things do not always turn out the way they have been planned. If I've made any mistakes, you can post a comment on my blog post informing readers and me what is correct. You can also post comments about other artcentric events or issues you would like to let readers know about. This is YOUR opportunity to inform the art community, since my newspaper deadline-filled days are over for good.]
First Things First: More Visual Arts News Connected to Miami
From Tami Katz-Freiman, exceptionally talented Israeli curator and my very fab artcentric friend now based in Miami, I have learned that she has guest co-curated with Rotem Ruff this exhibit, "Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India," running May 31 to December 8, 2012 at the Tel Aviv Museum. See www.tamuseum.com With 17 artists, it is the first major show to introduce, as she tells me via email, the Israeli public to the thriving contemporary art scene in India. The press release explains: "The works included in this exhibition are anchored in a tumultuous social and political reality and their multiple layers of meaning reflect different responses to the deep transformations that have been taking place in Indian society for the past two decades." Wouldn't it be cool if somehow this show could travel to Miami??
LegalArt in Miami offers a series of roundtable discussions looking at how contemporary art curators do their work. This is presented by Amanda Sanfilippo, Curator-in-Residence at LegalArt. First discussion is May 15; topic is "Failure/Ruin." Discussions are free and begin at 7 p.m. Amanda's bio info says she is Development Associate at Locust Projects, Miami. She has previously worked with Creative Time and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other institutions. For more info, see www.legalartmiami.org
Renowned curator Dan Cameron is the next speaker in the Hot Topics discussion series at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. He speaks May 12. Reception with Cameron begins at 5 pm at the Center, 1650 Harrison Street, Hollywood. Lecture is at 6 pm. Tkts are $10 for non-members and $5 for members, students, teachers, and seniors. See www.ArtAndCultureCenter.org
Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya has been chosen by The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia to install monumental sculpture in its Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. "Enrique Martinez Celaya: The Tower of Snow," runs July 2012 to November 2012. His sculpture is 15 feet high and cast in bronze--I have seen a smaller version of this in his Miami studio, and I think it is quite evocative. Very poetic and inspiring, actually. I think it is one of my very favorite works by him. It depicts a boy on crutches bearing a house--really a home--on his back. As the press release explains, "Burdened but resilient and resourceful, the boy raises the idea of displacement and loss as well as possibility and redemption." Isn't that an idea inspiring to all of us, for WHATEVER reason??
ShoeboxLA presents "Joshua Levine: Monumental," opens Saturday, May 12, 2012 from 4 to 7 pm at The Studio for Southern California History-Chinatown, 818 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Josh is so talented. . .wish I could fly out there to see this. We had such a blast when we hung out together during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. With my VIP card, I could get him into the VIP lounge where we had such a fab lunch together. . .His show in Los Angeles is a series of 12 sculptures that continue his investigation of genetic animal hybrids. Now here's a really cool concept: ShoeboxLA gives Los Angeles artists an opportunity to do one-day site-specific exhibitions outside traditional gallery settings. See more at www.shoeboxla.blogspot.com
Don't miss this Miami show: "lynne golob gelfman: scapes" at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum of Florida International University, running May 16 through September 2, 2012. Opening is May 16, from 6-9 pm. For more on museum, see http://thefrost.fiu.edu As the release tells us, "Lynne Golob Gelfman makes abstract paintings that are rooted in the visible world. . .In recent years, inspired by morning walks along the Miami shore, she has been making works that evoke the reflection of light on water. But as a result of their repetitive markings, her works become as much about the process of their own making as about any outside source." Lynne is yet another artist I have known for years--more years than I want to count--and I have been fascinated to watch her exquisite work evolve--plus she is one of my neighbors! See her website at www.lynnegolobgelfman.com
You never know where you will find art that moves you. . .Recently at the Wirtz Gallery of First National Bank of South Miami on 5750 Sunset Drive in South Miami, FL 33143, I happened across a quietly stunning solo show by painter Reisha Leize Perlmutter. I understand she received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Check out her website www.ReishaArt.com
This just in. . . SUPER CONGRATS TO MY BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace!! She has been recognized as a Distinguished Achiever at the ICABA Salutes South Florida's 100 Most Accomplished Caribbean Americans Recognition Event. This is a black-tie reception and recognition program at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on June 29, 2012. For more info about ICABA, see www.icabaworld.com
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Jose Bedia loves to tell a story--or is it several stories at once? His plots and protagonists melt and nestle together as he talks about his sinuous imagery of mermaids and deer, oceans and earth. People and animals cross-dress, the way they do in American Indian myths and African masks. Stories overlap, like one blue Caribbean wave cresting into another, or like a serpent coiling back on itself. The remarkable connections can span continents in a single brushstroke or breath. Like the one about the mythical prince at the peak of his manhood who must trade in his royal crown for a leper's crutch after making an arrogant mistake. Now revered for his healing powers, this fallen figure is known as San Lazarus in Spanish Roman Catholicism, Babaluaye in the Afro-Cuban lore of Santeria, and Obaluaiye in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, homeland of many slaves brought to Cuba in the 19th Century.
Leaning on a ladder splattered with the black paint that's a constraint in his vivid visual narratives, the Cuban-born South Florida artist tilts his head back reflectively. His thick, brown, wavy hair seems to curl even closer to his waist. He is getting ready to tell the tale of San Lazarus, subject of a still-wet silhouette he's painted on the gallery walls of the Art Museum at Florida International University, site of "Jose Bedia," the fierce and fascinating solo show of his never-exhibited personal collection of paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks. [Note that this museum now has its own stunning building on campus, the Frost Museum at FIU.]
His eyes widen. The story begins.
"San Lazarus was a prince--a rich, wealthy, handsome man. He had a lot of lovers, a lot of women. So he was asking a favor from Olofi [the Yoruba god], if he can have all the lovers he wants."
Bedia goes on. The favor was granted, so long as San Lazarus reserved Thursday as a day of rest from his lovemaking, and prayed to God instead. But San Lazarus forgot his promise, and soon became sick with leprosy. Forgiveness was granted again, but his rich grandeur did not return. "He loses his crown," Bedia says. "He was homeless, a lone traveler, lying down in the street."
In Cuba, Bedia says, "they have two San Lazaruses," referring to the Saint Lazarus in traditional holy robes. "But the San Lazarus of the people is the guy with crutches, Babaluaye. He looks so weak, but he is powerful. If you promise something to him, you have to pay for it. Otherwise you'll be in trouble."
LEGENDARY INSTALLATION
The Lazarus legend comes to new life in "Mi Coballende (Protector of Patron Saint)," an installation Bedia created at FIU, dominated by an engulfing, electrifying silhouette. A man's black torso rises from the floor, tattoed with curvy chalk lines pointing to earth and sky, emblazoned with Afro-Cuban symbols standing for the crossroads between life and death. Vast arms extend around corners, one morphing into a giant dog's head, another draped with a tattered roll of burlap, emblems of the humbled but now beneficient Lazarus. Outlines of thorny trees sprout from his body; a tiny leggy man seems to race desperately along one gangly arm. As the work tells its story, boundaries between myth and man and forest blur.
It's a vivid example of the sort of work that's brought Bedia international acclaim--particularly since he left Cuba for Mexico in 1991, eventually settling in Miami with his wife and son. His art stands out for its elegant and assertive draftsmanship, and the way it's often laced with deft homages to American Indian drawings on animal hide and to action-figure comic books. Even more striking, though, is the way Bedia transforms eloquent scenarios expressing Afro-Cuban imagery and spiritual values into his own brand of contemporary art. This comes through in his direct graphic style, which he compares to "a primitive comic." It also surfaces in his love of symbolically loaded materials--whether it's the beaded Afro-Cuban ritual staff or even the weighted diving shoes (metaphors for mining personal myths) that are part of his installation here.
"For me, the object is very important," Bedia says. "It's a fetish--to have this thing that connects you with people even though they lived hundreds or thousands of years ago."
NON-WESTERN VIEW
His is an alchemical process that is gaining more notice amid the art world's current interest in work removed from the dominant American culture.
"I think Bedia's art is actually about providing an alternative, even a warning against Western culture," says South Florida art historian Roni Feinstein, who wrote the catalog essay for the FIU show.
In Bedia's primal universe, no one is truly disconnected from the natural world. In the handsomely rhythmic and bilingual "Nkunia Brava (Fierce Forest)," a wilderness of angular branches is rendered as an elaborate network of limbs and heads, so that plant, animal and person become one vital hybrid.
"In a world where everyone is sending each other e-mail and going shopping on the Internet, his work is a reminder that there's another world out there with real, physical experience, with spiritual values," Feinstein says.
Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, author of essential books on African and African-American culture and the opening-night lecturer for the Bedia show, gives lavish praise to Bedia's fluid adaptation of image and idea from non-Western sources--and especially from the rich Kongo culture of West Africa, carried across the Atlantic to merge in the Afro-Cuban religion of Palo Monte. (Palo Monte, meaning "trees of the sacred forest," venerates spirits living outside crowded cities.)
This is not a matter of amateur anthropology--even though the artist himself jokes that if he hadn't been so seduced by filling up sketchbook after sketchbook with restless drawings, he might have entered that field. A friend even once called him a frustrated anthropologist, Bedia says. And certainly, he's fed his muse with what some might call field studies. These include an apprenticeship in 1985 to a Lakota shaman on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and, more recently, a visit to the Southwestern Yaqui tribe during Easter week, when the Yaqui mount their own "Days of the Deer" festival.
"I learn things from my eyes and ears. This is different from when you learn only from books," he says of his travels. Archaeology, another way to recover the past, has also fascinated him, ever since he began finding carved shards of Cuba's native Taino and Siboney history buried in the island's soil and sand. An endlessly inventive artist, Bedia has dedicated his career to alternative ways of digging, and his creative excavations have struck not only past but present truths. Deeply influenced by his direct involvement with American Indian and Palo Monte rituals, his art is in synch with the changing uban landscape.
"Bedia's right at the forefront of contemporary art and culture. America has become the first universal nation on this planet," says Thompson, noting the evermore visible presence of people with Asian, American Indian, African and Hispanic roots. "Particularly in Miami. Miami is teaching the world what it will be like in the 21st century, and Jose is teaching us how to move into this multiethnic situation. He is at the very least trilingual."
Bedia's paintings and drawings are nearly always inscribed with sayings in Spanish or the Kongo language, so that their observations and admonitions mingle with scenes of people and animals negotiating crossings of earth, sea and sky. Their migrations tell not only the story of exiles and immigrants, but of moral choices that define life's journeys through a universe fraught with intricate connections.
"Who knows more, Isabel or Isabelita, who knows more?" is a typical, translated inscription. "It's a sermon about paying attention to our elders," says Thompson, "instead of just shoving them into a condo for old people."
THE OTHER 'MAMBO'
This query is called a mambo, a Kongo expression meaning "most important matters." These mambos are not the foot-tapping dances of 1930s Cuba but moral guides for living. Often, they remind us that time is running out for everyone. Even for the rich and handsome.
The cautionary tale of the once-handsome Lazarus, steeped as it is in Afro-Cuban lore carried so long ago to the Caribbean, is really not so different--as Bedia will tell you with a burst of wry laughter--from the catastrophe that beset a famous fallen charmer of Irish extraction, the terribly two-faced Dorian Gray. The "Cuban Dorian Gray," which Bedia's syncretic mind has suddenly dubbed Babaluaye, is just one example of his love of layered narratives.
Another is the story about a 10-year-old Cuban kid who recklessly clambered up a fence, only to fall and chip his two front teeth so that, forever after, they formed an odd little space, shaped like a triangle. "He was so spoiled," Bedia confesses. When the kid grew up and found himself doing a six-month compulsory military stint in Angola for Cuba in 1985, imagine his surprise to see tribesmen in southern Angola pointing at him. "They made a joke about my teeth," he said. "Mostly the men speak Portuguese, but my Portuguese was so bad, we were just talking to each other by gestures and laughing."
It turned out that the soldier's smile bore an uncanny likeness to those of various tribesmen in Angola. In the southern part of the country, men customarily cut their teeth to form a similar triangular pattern, as a way of paying homage to the cattle that are the focus of their nomadic life. In the north, men of another tribe cut their teen so that they form a triangular opening, making it easier to chew a sugar cane-like fruit during ritual ceremonies.
The 10-year old kid was Bedia, of course. His tale of the chipped teeth resonates as an especially striking coincidence, for Bedia's work is marked by his passionate fascination with the art and culture of West Africa, and by his profound awareness of how that intricate system of imagery and values has wound its way into the Afro-Cuban religions of Santeria and Palo Monte. Frustrated with the academic approach offered by his art training in Havana, Bedia was grateful when one teacher introduced him to the links between Cuban and African art. His later initiation into Palo Monte, he recalls, "was a conscious idea to recover my culture. When you are connected with [this tradition], many things develop for you. You can read reality in nontraditional ways. They teach you many things about the forces of nature in the river, the mountain, the sea, the ocean, the wind."
Not only does Bedia collect cross-cultural stories, he collects objects, too. His Miami home is filled with dozens of African as well as American Indian artifacts, from painted drums used by the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico to carved shell objects of Taino and Siboney origin, which the artist found as a teenager along beaches and hills in Cuba.
"When you live inside this environment, you must learn something," Bedia has said. "For at some moment, the symbol must open up to you. That is my technique. I try to find knowledge from many different places."
Perhaps the place that's given him the most knowledge is the sacred shrines of Palo Monte, which he began visiting in Havana at age 16 with his mother. Less than 10 years later, in 1983, Bedia was initiated into the priesthood of Palo Monte. A night of song and dance unfolded in a room painted brilliant blue with blazing stars, evoking the world's wheeling cycles between night and day, life and death.
Thompson, who was initiated with Bedia at his side a few years later, recalls the circular and cross-shaped Kongo designs, drawn in white chalk on the floor. Called "cosmograms," they represent the intersecting forces of life and death, God and man. "That's where you stand and swear to be a better person," Thompson says.
The cosmograms, also sliced with a knife into an initiate's skin as signs of spiritual strength, appear on figures in countless paintings and drawings by Bedia. At FIU, they score the shoulders of a lone, lean silhouetted figure in the painting "De Vuelta al Barrio" (Return to the Neighborhood). Carrying a suitcase in each hand, he seems nearly trapped in a chasm of bleak apartment buildings, their windows resembling ominous eyes--yet this figure's restless, taut posture suggests a defiant and mobile vitality very much at odds with the barren cityscape.
More Kongo circles, spun into a concentric maze, appear in another painting at FIU, "Isla Sola" (Lone Island). The circles revolve inside the silhouette of a large, disembodied head, which appears to be watching a swimmer fleeing a moonlit shipwreck. It's a dream-like scene, with the man's head seemingly laced together by a network of tree branches, so that he also resembles a forested island.
Both paintings pull us into a vortex of unsettling migration and cyclical motion, themes that South Florida poet Adrian Castro--a Bedia admirer--considers both consumately Caribbean and truly universal. Born and raised in Miami by parents from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Castro shares Bedia's deep sensitivity to the rich themes of Afro-Caribbean culture. Not only has Castro translated into English the Spanish works, laced with African expressions, by 1930s Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Mato, but the Miami poet is a Babalawo Ifa priest of Santeria.
IMMIGRANT LIFE
Asked to read from his new book of poems at this exhibit on March 17, Castro also wrote the poem "Para la installation de Jose Bedia" for a 1996 Miami Light Project performance at the Rubell Family Collection soon after Bedia created a room-sized installation, "Naufragios" (Shipwrecks), for the collection. Inspired by the deathly "rafter season" of 1994, "Naufragios" also comments on the pervasive presence of immigrants in world history, a fertile topic for the poet as well.
"Migration is really the story of humanity, of moving from one place to another," Castro says. "No one is from a single place."
That sense of movement is sounded like a steady drumbeat through so much of Bedia's art because, he says, "I am involved in the same thing. This is the drama of my people, and not only of the Cuban people but of so many around the whole world.
"From the moment I left Cuba, I started to study this feeling. I feel like this tiny little guy who's carrying his luggage with him wherever he goes. You always have to carry a little part of your country with you."
JOSE BEDIA: A GROWING REPUTATION by Elisa Turner from The Miami Herald, February 1999
Born in Havana in 1959, Jose Bedia studied art at Escuela de Arte de San Alejandro and at the Instituto Superior de Arte. He is the best known among the group of "80's generation" Cuban artists, whose work represented a significant break with tradition.
In the late 1980s, Bedia began to chart a place on the art world map when his work appeared in biennials in Havana and Sao Paulo and in the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre, a prominent show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1993, he was the youngest of five Cuban-born artists tapped for the landmark "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. His art is in the permanent collections of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and in museums in Mexico, Germany and Finland.
For the past two years, Bedia has been developing designs for the Opera and Symphony Hall lobbies of Miami's new Performing Arts Center, projects commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places.
This June, his work will go on exhibit at P.S. 1 in Queens, N.Y., a mammoth venue for contemporary art that recently announced a merger with New York's Museum of Modern Art. His piece will be part of the traveling group show, "Animal. Anima. Animus," which also includes installations by Maria Abramovic and Dennis Oppenheim and was organized by the Pori Art Museum in Finland.
"Jose Bedia will measure up as very important," says Amy Cappellazzo, director of the Rubell Family Collection, though she admits that, despite Bedia's growing reputation, vistors to the collection aren't always familiar with his distinctive style and materials. "A lot of Europeans see the work by Jeff Koons here and they nod approvingly, but when they see Jose they fall off the map. It has a whole different set of African and Caribbean references that don't even register on their scale."
Bedia's accomplishments register for Matta, the legendary Latin American master and 1940s Surrealist. After a meeting was arranged between the two artists at Matta's request, the elder Latin American attended a brunch at Bedia's home in January 1998. The dozen guests included Bedia's dealer, Fred Snitzer. "Matta was very charming, holding court," says Snitzer, "and he loved Jose's collection [of African and Native American art]. He kept saying, 'Ooh, can you get me one of those?' But it was clear that he recognized something in Bedia as very special."
[Blogger's Note: My goal is to post a new blog entry every other Thursday. That's my plan, anyway--we all know that things do not always turn out the way they have been planned. If I've made any mistakes, you can post a comment on my blog post informing readers and me what is correct. You can also post comments about other artcentric events or issues you would like to let readers know about. This is YOUR opportunity to inform the art community, since my newspaper deadline-filled days are over for good.]
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Miami Artist Enrique Martinez Celaya Announces Art Lecture
Today I am blogging about Miami artist Enrique Martinez Celaya because he has been making quite impressive contributions to Miami's art community. Mark your calendar for lecture #10 in Enrique Martinez Celaya's outstanding Whale & Star Studio Lecture Series. At 7 pm on Wednesday May 16, 2012, his studio will present art historian and critic Matthew Biro discussing "La Ribaute," Anselm Kiefer's studio-estate in Barjac, France, which has been called Kiefer's total work of art. Lecture open to the public for $5 admission fee. RSVP's required; to RSVP call the studio at 305-576-6160. Whale and Star Studio is located at 2215 NW 1st Place, Miami, FL. Note that Biro is Chair and Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Michigan. Some of his bio info from press release: "Originally trained as a continental philosopher, he came to art history through an interest in aesthetics and visual thinking." For more info, see www.whaleandstar.com and www.thelectureproject.com
First things first: More visual arts news in Miami
When I was recently on assignment in Wynwood for ARTnews, so glad that my BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace and I could visit this most intriguing solo show for Onajide Shabaka, also in Wynwood. He is showing his numerous black synthetic rubber cutouts and monochromatic acrylic drawings on paper, loosely depicting Florida flora such as banana trees and mangrove leaves. It is on view through May 12, 2012 at GalerieSchusterMiami, 2051 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. See also www.galleryschuster.com To get in touch with this excellent artist, who certainly deserves more recognition in Miami than he has received, email him at onajide@gmail.com or see his website at www.art3st.com
Antonia Wright must be completing her one-month stint living a new life as a homeless woman while she is an artist-in-residence, a residency she began April 2, at Lotus House Women's Shelter, again in Wynwood. I understand that she is the first artist to do this--what an remarkable project. For more info about her experiences at Lotus House, see www.antoniawright.com (click on Projects). For more info about this wonderful example of philanthropy in Miami, see www.lotushouseshelter.org.
Here's an event with a lecture and panel discussion I wish I could attend, but with my wack-o driving issues, most likely will not. But maybe readers who can easily get to Boca Raton will. Event is "Feeling the Squeeze: The Future of the Beaches in Florida" at 8 pm on May 3, at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Catch this event in Building #51, Rm 101, next to the Schmidt Center Gallery of FAU. For 1/2 hr before and after the panel discussion, you can see the related and surely thought-provoking exhibit, "Surfing Florida: A Photographic History," which will be on view through May 12. Lecture is by Tom Anderson, a legal skills professor and director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He is one of several humanities scholars who have contributed to the exhibit "Surfing Florida" by putting together this May 3 panel discussion. This lecture and panel will address environmental issues, including environmental law and the legal concerns of Florida's surfers. For more info on the panelists, this event, and the exhibit, see www.fau.edu/galleries/
So sad to reflect on the recent passing of art collector Richard Shack, 1926-2012. I simply find it so hard to believe that we will never again have one of our conversations about the Miami art scene. I always learned so much from his astute observations, and whenever I needed to speak to him about some issue on my visual arts beat, he was unfailingly generous with his time. Go to the home page of The Miami Foundation at www.miamifoundation.org to learn more about this courageous man and how you can honor his legacy to Miami with a contribution to The Miami Foundation. There you will also find a link to The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor J. Brecher.
This just in. . .Michelle Weinberg tells me via email that her show at Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24th St in Miami's Wynwood) opens May 11. For more info see www.michelleweinberg.com and www.dorschgallery.com Also: At Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, 158 NW 91st St in Miami, there's an opening Friday, April 27 from 7-10 pm. See drawings and mixed media collages by Shoshanna Weinberger, also in the Project Space see group show curated by Alice Raymond, with work by artists Antonia Wright, Kerry Phillips, Loriel Beltran, Dogan Arslanoglu. More info at www.cjazzart.com
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald March 2004
His paintings come from places where most of the lights have flickered and died.
Looking at them, you feel as if you've stumbled in from a leafy outdoors noisy with sunlight bouncing off cars and kids, having just pushed the door open onto a house boarded up for years. Other paintings can make you feel as you've left a familiar kitchen, bright and busy with pots simmering and knives chopping, and then stepped into a living room just as the power fails, when armchairs and family photos vanish into a chilly black hole.
The heavy darkness in the paintings of Enrique Martinez Celaya can make you blink and squint. You want to peer into their light-devouring voids, trying to make out the telltale surroundings for his chalky white outlines of men, women, and children, trying to figure out where these hollowed-out families, who are really more phantom than flesh, belong.
The tantalizing pleasures and secrets gingerly offered by this dark art, part of the artist's "October Cycle" now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, are dense with layers of oil paint and emulsified tar. They usually outweigh the annoying way their murky, mucky surfaces can trigger eye-strain. As your eyes become accustomed to Martinez Celaya's moody nighttime palette, the artist lures you into the delicate task of refocusing, of starting to see absence as well as presence, to recognize how even a contrasting, glowering abyss of loss, of black near-nothingness, can pump rare strength into the faint glow of what has survived.
In a talk last week at the Museum of Art, the artist tried to illuminate his aesthetic of absence and loss in a body of work that includes photography and sculpture as well as painting. Based in Los Angeles, Martinez Celaya has seen his career take off in the past decade, with his art entering museum collections in Germany and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. One of his paintings also hangs in the striking corporate collection at Miami's Four Seasons Hotel.
"I was fascinated by the way he changes from one exhibition to another," said Jorge Santis, a curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, who invited the artist to create a large-scale mural near the entrance to the exhibit. "There are so many facets to his work. It's realistic, it is minimalist, but it is also romantic, passionate. I think there's an inner suffering in many of his pieces that comes from his Cuban roots."
During his time in Fort Lauderdale, Martinez Celaya wanted to eat only Cuban food, explaining that it was hard to come by where he lives now, Santis said. In talking about his own varied work, Martinez Celaya doesn't express such visceral desires. He can wax into a passionate but windy philosopher, even a killjoy when it comes to understanding why some visual artists get their kicks from tweaking the excesses of pop culture, a subject his severe, almost monastic paintings avoid.
MISERY IN MADRID
The absence of another subject dramatically shadowed his talk. He barely grazed over his memories of leaving his boyhood home in Palos, Cuba, a small town surrounded by sugar-cane fields and located on a road leading to Varadero Beach. In 1972, when Martinez Celaya was 8, he and his family moved from Cuba to Madrid. It was a miserable life of severe poverty, played out against seasons of cold and early dusk, beginning with the month of October. That's the telling namesake for his series of 22 paintings now at the museum, in a show organized by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska.
"I have fought so hard to make the painings not just be about exile," he explained, with an expression that combined frown, sigh, and a quick, rueful smile. "Exile implies loss but there are other ways of loss. In each talk I add something and I take something out of the story."
But his is a story, like the "October Cycle," about etching thin rays of light in dark times and places. Sometimes those rays of light are as weak as the winter sun, like those outlining a father and son in his painting "The Distance."
"Spain was such a shock. We were beyond poor. My father couldn't find a job. We lived in a storage place without a place to take a bath. It was not just exile, it was the sense of being completely dispossessed," he recalled, as he walked around his show at the museum. "Creditors were coming to the house banging on the door."
Their digs in Madrid had no windows. Tensions flared. It was such a contrast to life at his grandfather's home in Palos, where Martinez Celaya spent much of his time, while his father worked on a cane plantation and his mother taught school. Comfortable despite its layers of peeling paint, the house opened onto a sunny courtyard shaded lightly by a fir tree.
In Madrid, Martinez Celaya looked to art as an escape, though he didn't care to paint the courtyards of his past. Somehow he laid his hands on a book about Leonardo da Vinci and spent hours trying to mimic the secret of Mona Lisa's smile in his own drawings. In a talk he shows a skillful drawing he made after arriving in Spain. It was the face of someone sleeping, but the slumber seemed so airless and final. Its disembodied clarity resembled a death mask. "Definitely our life there [in Spain] was a death," he said. "There was a hopeless kind of life. Every day was the same as the day before. I was just waiting for something to change."
SCIENTIFIC TRAINING
Change came in 1975, when the family moved to Puerto Rico. Martinez Celaya studied art but develped another passion: science. Bright and creative, he built a laser for a 10th grade science project and won an award from the National Congress of Science. He graduated from high school as valedictorian and headed off to Cornell to study applied physics. Next came graduate school in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a job at a laser company, where he patented four inventions. But much of this time he was still painting, selling art in San Francisco parks.
In the late 1980s, he left scientific academe and returned full-time to art, and later earned an MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I did it because I simply couldn't afford to leave my life outside once I entered the door of the lab, which is something you have to do as a physicist," he said. "I did it because I wanted to bring my life into my work."
In the "October Cycle," Martinez Celaya paints the mysteries, sorrows, and longings of life as both parent and child. At 37, he is a stocky man with short dark hair and a penchant for soft-spoken but intense conversation, voicing surprise at how much life as a father has seeped into his life as an artist. He and his wife of five years, Alexandra Williams, have two small children, Sebastian and Gabriela. "Gabriela (First)" is one of the most memorable paintings here. It shows a mother tossing a baby in the air, or perhaps catching her as she falls. It is not sentimental. The figures gleam as the barest suggestions of life, their reaching-but-not-touching-hands more vivid than their faces. Six small dashes of light float across the black void cloaking these figures.
As an aside, the artist explains that the points of light represent his daughter's six birthmarks, the possible symptom of a congenital disease. When he painted this work, he and his wife were in the midst of determining whether she had the disease--learning eventually that she did not.
But whether you know this or not, the painting is a hauntingly spare scene of life's fragile bonds, of gifts that come and go, and of the capacity of art to say much with a few threads of light that are deceptively simple. Like the pinpoint beams of a laser, Martinez Celaya's pale brushstrokes pierce their target, life, at its core.
First things first: More visual arts news in Miami
When I was recently on assignment in Wynwood for ARTnews, so glad that my BFF Rosie Gordon Wallace and I could visit this most intriguing solo show for Onajide Shabaka, also in Wynwood. He is showing his numerous black synthetic rubber cutouts and monochromatic acrylic drawings on paper, loosely depicting Florida flora such as banana trees and mangrove leaves. It is on view through May 12, 2012 at GalerieSchusterMiami, 2051 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. See also www.galleryschuster.com To get in touch with this excellent artist, who certainly deserves more recognition in Miami than he has received, email him at onajide@gmail.com or see his website at www.art3st.com
Antonia Wright must be completing her one-month stint living a new life as a homeless woman while she is an artist-in-residence, a residency she began April 2, at Lotus House Women's Shelter, again in Wynwood. I understand that she is the first artist to do this--what an remarkable project. For more info about her experiences at Lotus House, see www.antoniawright.com (click on Projects). For more info about this wonderful example of philanthropy in Miami, see www.lotushouseshelter.org.
Here's an event with a lecture and panel discussion I wish I could attend, but with my wack-o driving issues, most likely will not. But maybe readers who can easily get to Boca Raton will. Event is "Feeling the Squeeze: The Future of the Beaches in Florida" at 8 pm on May 3, at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Catch this event in Building #51, Rm 101, next to the Schmidt Center Gallery of FAU. For 1/2 hr before and after the panel discussion, you can see the related and surely thought-provoking exhibit, "Surfing Florida: A Photographic History," which will be on view through May 12. Lecture is by Tom Anderson, a legal skills professor and director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He is one of several humanities scholars who have contributed to the exhibit "Surfing Florida" by putting together this May 3 panel discussion. This lecture and panel will address environmental issues, including environmental law and the legal concerns of Florida's surfers. For more info on the panelists, this event, and the exhibit, see www.fau.edu/galleries/
So sad to reflect on the recent passing of art collector Richard Shack, 1926-2012. I simply find it so hard to believe that we will never again have one of our conversations about the Miami art scene. I always learned so much from his astute observations, and whenever I needed to speak to him about some issue on my visual arts beat, he was unfailingly generous with his time. Go to the home page of The Miami Foundation at www.miamifoundation.org to learn more about this courageous man and how you can honor his legacy to Miami with a contribution to The Miami Foundation. There you will also find a link to The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor J. Brecher.
This just in. . .Michelle Weinberg tells me via email that her show at Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24th St in Miami's Wynwood) opens May 11. For more info see www.michelleweinberg.com and www.dorschgallery.com Also: At Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, 158 NW 91st St in Miami, there's an opening Friday, April 27 from 7-10 pm. See drawings and mixed media collages by Shoshanna Weinberger, also in the Project Space see group show curated by Alice Raymond, with work by artists Antonia Wright, Kerry Phillips, Loriel Beltran, Dogan Arslanoglu. More info at www.cjazzart.com
THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald March 2004
His paintings come from places where most of the lights have flickered and died.
Looking at them, you feel as if you've stumbled in from a leafy outdoors noisy with sunlight bouncing off cars and kids, having just pushed the door open onto a house boarded up for years. Other paintings can make you feel as you've left a familiar kitchen, bright and busy with pots simmering and knives chopping, and then stepped into a living room just as the power fails, when armchairs and family photos vanish into a chilly black hole.
The heavy darkness in the paintings of Enrique Martinez Celaya can make you blink and squint. You want to peer into their light-devouring voids, trying to make out the telltale surroundings for his chalky white outlines of men, women, and children, trying to figure out where these hollowed-out families, who are really more phantom than flesh, belong.
The tantalizing pleasures and secrets gingerly offered by this dark art, part of the artist's "October Cycle" now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, are dense with layers of oil paint and emulsified tar. They usually outweigh the annoying way their murky, mucky surfaces can trigger eye-strain. As your eyes become accustomed to Martinez Celaya's moody nighttime palette, the artist lures you into the delicate task of refocusing, of starting to see absence as well as presence, to recognize how even a contrasting, glowering abyss of loss, of black near-nothingness, can pump rare strength into the faint glow of what has survived.
In a talk last week at the Museum of Art, the artist tried to illuminate his aesthetic of absence and loss in a body of work that includes photography and sculpture as well as painting. Based in Los Angeles, Martinez Celaya has seen his career take off in the past decade, with his art entering museum collections in Germany and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. One of his paintings also hangs in the striking corporate collection at Miami's Four Seasons Hotel.
"I was fascinated by the way he changes from one exhibition to another," said Jorge Santis, a curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, who invited the artist to create a large-scale mural near the entrance to the exhibit. "There are so many facets to his work. It's realistic, it is minimalist, but it is also romantic, passionate. I think there's an inner suffering in many of his pieces that comes from his Cuban roots."
During his time in Fort Lauderdale, Martinez Celaya wanted to eat only Cuban food, explaining that it was hard to come by where he lives now, Santis said. In talking about his own varied work, Martinez Celaya doesn't express such visceral desires. He can wax into a passionate but windy philosopher, even a killjoy when it comes to understanding why some visual artists get their kicks from tweaking the excesses of pop culture, a subject his severe, almost monastic paintings avoid.
MISERY IN MADRID
The absence of another subject dramatically shadowed his talk. He barely grazed over his memories of leaving his boyhood home in Palos, Cuba, a small town surrounded by sugar-cane fields and located on a road leading to Varadero Beach. In 1972, when Martinez Celaya was 8, he and his family moved from Cuba to Madrid. It was a miserable life of severe poverty, played out against seasons of cold and early dusk, beginning with the month of October. That's the telling namesake for his series of 22 paintings now at the museum, in a show organized by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska.
"I have fought so hard to make the painings not just be about exile," he explained, with an expression that combined frown, sigh, and a quick, rueful smile. "Exile implies loss but there are other ways of loss. In each talk I add something and I take something out of the story."
But his is a story, like the "October Cycle," about etching thin rays of light in dark times and places. Sometimes those rays of light are as weak as the winter sun, like those outlining a father and son in his painting "The Distance."
"Spain was such a shock. We were beyond poor. My father couldn't find a job. We lived in a storage place without a place to take a bath. It was not just exile, it was the sense of being completely dispossessed," he recalled, as he walked around his show at the museum. "Creditors were coming to the house banging on the door."
Their digs in Madrid had no windows. Tensions flared. It was such a contrast to life at his grandfather's home in Palos, where Martinez Celaya spent much of his time, while his father worked on a cane plantation and his mother taught school. Comfortable despite its layers of peeling paint, the house opened onto a sunny courtyard shaded lightly by a fir tree.
In Madrid, Martinez Celaya looked to art as an escape, though he didn't care to paint the courtyards of his past. Somehow he laid his hands on a book about Leonardo da Vinci and spent hours trying to mimic the secret of Mona Lisa's smile in his own drawings. In a talk he shows a skillful drawing he made after arriving in Spain. It was the face of someone sleeping, but the slumber seemed so airless and final. Its disembodied clarity resembled a death mask. "Definitely our life there [in Spain] was a death," he said. "There was a hopeless kind of life. Every day was the same as the day before. I was just waiting for something to change."
SCIENTIFIC TRAINING
Change came in 1975, when the family moved to Puerto Rico. Martinez Celaya studied art but develped another passion: science. Bright and creative, he built a laser for a 10th grade science project and won an award from the National Congress of Science. He graduated from high school as valedictorian and headed off to Cornell to study applied physics. Next came graduate school in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a job at a laser company, where he patented four inventions. But much of this time he was still painting, selling art in San Francisco parks.
In the late 1980s, he left scientific academe and returned full-time to art, and later earned an MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I did it because I simply couldn't afford to leave my life outside once I entered the door of the lab, which is something you have to do as a physicist," he said. "I did it because I wanted to bring my life into my work."
In the "October Cycle," Martinez Celaya paints the mysteries, sorrows, and longings of life as both parent and child. At 37, he is a stocky man with short dark hair and a penchant for soft-spoken but intense conversation, voicing surprise at how much life as a father has seeped into his life as an artist. He and his wife of five years, Alexandra Williams, have two small children, Sebastian and Gabriela. "Gabriela (First)" is one of the most memorable paintings here. It shows a mother tossing a baby in the air, or perhaps catching her as she falls. It is not sentimental. The figures gleam as the barest suggestions of life, their reaching-but-not-touching-hands more vivid than their faces. Six small dashes of light float across the black void cloaking these figures.
As an aside, the artist explains that the points of light represent his daughter's six birthmarks, the possible symptom of a congenital disease. When he painted this work, he and his wife were in the midst of determining whether she had the disease--learning eventually that she did not.
But whether you know this or not, the painting is a hauntingly spare scene of life's fragile bonds, of gifts that come and go, and of the capacity of art to say much with a few threads of light that are deceptively simple. Like the pinpoint beams of a laser, Martinez Celaya's pale brushstrokes pierce their target, life, at its core.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Miami Artist Edouard Duval Carrie Featured at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery
Today I am thrilled to be blogging chiefly about Edouard Duval Carrie, a Miami artist I have known for years and always admired. Even though I was always picky about my stories when they were finally published in The Miami Herald, and tended to mope about things that were cut or that I had left out, this profile is one that even I could not find a lot to complain about. (Find it after current news items in this blog post.)
It's great that everyone in Miami has a chance to see more of what Edouard is doing lately with his exhibit "The Three Dimensional Gods and Goddesses Meet Their Cousins The Trees." (What an incredible title! Who would not like to read a novel or see a movie with a title like that??!!) As the press release says, the show depicts "his unique universe" peopled by "anthropomorphic flamboyant characters." This show runs April 14 to May 31, 2012 at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, 3550 North Miami Avenue, Miami Fl 33127. Opening is Saturday, April 4, 2012 from 2 to 9 pm. Valet parking available. In addition to that, be sure not to miss new work by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Nova, in his exhibit at the gallery, "Novo Aniversario." More info: see www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com
First thing first: More visual arts news in Miami
This news item is actually more appropriate for South Florida. Recently heard via email from Irvin Lippman, Executive Director of Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University about this impressive development. So very fab to see how this museum is maturing under his dynamic leadership. Try not to miss this: upcoming Pearl and Stanley Goodman Lecture on Latin American Art, "Between Two Dimensions: The Paintings and Sculpture of Isabel De Obaldia" by Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. Lecture is 6-7 pm Thursday, April 19, at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University, One East Las Olas, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301. Lecture is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To RSVP for lecture, contact Holly Giuliano at 954-262-0241 or education1@moafl.org Dress code: Business attire. Following the lecture is a toast to Pearl and Stanley Goodman. Lecture is funded in part by Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Contemporary Studio Glass Movement.
And there's more exciting artcentric news: On April 2, 2012, this museum announced that the Pearl and Stanley Goodman Latin American Collection is a promised gift. As the press release states, "This impressive collection of over 75 works includes masters such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Wifredo Lam. The Goodmans, long-time residents of Fort Lauderdale, began to collect in the 1980s, attracted to Latin American art because it tells 'a story usually with a clear political and social message.' They are keen that their collection be of benefit to the people of South Florida and serve as a focus for educational programs at the museum and NSU." For more info, check the "Events" section of the museum website at www.moafl.org
WALL OF VODOU by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald, November 2000
With his quick wit and deep, infectious laugh, Edouard Duval Carrie would be a perfect fit as a social director on a Caribbean cruise.
You can imagine him introducing guests to one another, cajoling people to share a drink or tell a story and chatting up an audience in English or French--or even in the Spanish he learned as a teenager living in Puerto Rico.
He became an artist instead although he aims to make plenty of introductions these days. He indicated as much to a standing-room-only crowd at the opening of his latest exhibition, "New Work: Edouard Duval Carrie, Migrations," an exploration of Haitian culture, Vodou spirits, and the current desperation on the island, now on view at the Miami Art Museum. But these introductions concern desperate travelers in rickety flotillas and vivid migratory Haitian Vodou spirits of love and death, not tanned passengers sipping rum on multi-million dollar ships.
"Here is this whole culture that you might not be aware of," said Duval Carrie, a wordly and jocular figure dressed in a natty black suit. "But it may be heading your way, so let's get accustomed to each other."
Presented as a tour de force combination of painting and sculpture, "Migrations" is a spirited encounter made for South Florida, a community of immigrants suffused with much of the Caribbean. (Another collection of Duval Carrie's work, "Edouard Duval Carrie: Landscapes, Real & Imagined," is also showing at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Wynwood.)
And fittingly, the MAM show is scheduled for its own significant encounter. In the spring of 2002, "Migrations" will meet up with three of the artist's previous installations that probe complex African, American, and European strands interlacing Haitian culture and its history, born from Middle Passage horrors. The quartet is uniting for a show organized by the Davenport Museum, a venue known for its large collection of Haitian art, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, which owns the artist's caustic portrait of deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his family, a seminal riff on European court painters.
MILESTONE EXHIBITION
Duval Carrie's first traveling museum exhibit will mark a milestone in a prolific career, and both "Migrations" and the traveling show should solidify Duval Carrie's reputation as a major voice sifting the New World-Old World melange of the Caribbean with the inventive materials and international outlook of contemporary art.
The just-published Oxford History of Western Art, in fact, is already linking Duval Carrie's art to the blend of European Modernism and Afro-Cuban rites forged by Cuban master Wifredo Lam.
"It's very second millenium," MAM senior curator Peter Boswell says of the artist's work. "He's a great synthesizer. He's bringing in those influences from other countries. "This is really a dominant trend in art right now, with artists who are global but also regional at the same time."
And the polyglot, Caribbean-colored lanscape of Miami, Boswell adds, "is very good at fostering that type of sensibility."
"It's so refreshing to have a voice like Edouard's, that openly talks about Vodou and treats it with the respect it deserves," says Leonie Hermantin, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation, which today is co-sponsoring a round-table discussion on issues raised by Duval Carrie's exhibition. "His art shows us that when we move to another land we used our memories of religion to help us adapt."
As Duval Carrie spoke at MAM, subdued laughter rippled through the crowd. The artist may be a clever charmer, but the urgent reasons behind his get-accustomed offer are close to the surface.
"In time, God knows, the island will get its act straight," but for now, he continued, "the crisis in Haiti seems unending."
The artist puts it more emphatically in an interview in his Design District studio, a work space lined with art books, antique maps of Port-au-Prince and an orange I-Mac computer.
"The Vodou spirits are splitting! I am having the whole pantheon pick up and leave," he says of the premise driving "Migrations," in which the Vodou spirits flee the island. "It's funny, but at the same time it's very tragic. I decided to address the problem of Haiti losing itself, of dying. Peope are in total dire straits."
BITTERSWEET STORIES
During Duval Carrie's visit to Port-au-Prince five months ago, a gunman fatally shot his cousin, a prominent radio newscaster critical of the Duvalier regime. That violent scene--and many others--are rendered in the MAM show in painted panels that include a faux marble wall relief reminiscent of a Roman Catholic altarpiece.
In one panel, a lush tropical forest smolders while in others a tatooed goddess dances in a South Beach strip joint and a warrior spirit in gold epaulets mans a tank in the Gulf war.
They deliver bittersweet stories of a besieged country, represented by rural spirits migrating into new urban contexts. The spirits are testament to the fluid energies of Vodou that Duval Carrie has always admired. He calls Vodou--with its syncretic assortment of Yoruba, Kongo and Roman Catholic deities--"a guerilla religion."
"It refuses to have strict cannons," he says. "You have new gods coming in, other gods forgotten. It recovers anything that might be of use to survival of the people."
Loosely reminiscent of a Vodou temple, "Migrations" is perfumed with lilies strewn on the floor like offerings and fraught with the rococo curves of crumbling colonial French architecture, replicated in ornate urns laden with more offerings of glazed fruit.
Throughout is the festive sparkle of Vodou altars to "Mistress" Ezili Freda, the vampish light-skinned Goddess of love and luxury. A devotee of pink cake, lace hankies, and Anais-Anais perfume, she is a poor country's fantasy of ravishing wealth--and emblematic of colonial Haiti's vanished natural resources.
At MAM, she's the dominant voyager in a peculiar flotilla of boats suspended from the ceiling, their hulls glistening in melting pink shades of mock marble and inscribed with lacy ritual drawings that invoke Vodou spirits. And like the glowering, scar-faced Bawon Samedi, a Vodou spirit at home in cemeteries but tucked here in a listing skiff, Ezili is heading for the exit and away from Haiti.
Their uprootedness is familiar to Duval Carrie, 45. He is, writes Latin American art historian Edward J. Sullivan, "acutely familiar of the disorientations caused by migration [which is] the defining issue in the history of the islands."
STUDIED ABROAD
After spending his boyhood in Haiti and his adolescence in Puerto Rico, the artist shipped out to college in Montreal to study urban planning though he was more engaged in painting than in planning. In the 1980s, he returned to Haiti to help manage his father's construction business, where he witnessed the downfall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the chaos that followed.
Two years later the French government invited him to a formative residency at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris. In 1992, he traveled to Benin, home to Haiti's African ancestors, for an international reunion of Vodou cultures, and a year after that he settled in Miami with his second wife Nina, an English film producer, and their sons, now 8 and 10.
Along the way, he has exhibited at the contemporary art museum in Monterrey, Mexico, biennials in Sao Paulo and Havana, and the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta.
Raised Roman Catholic in an upper-middle-class family that typically finds his interest in Vodou "off the wall," Duval Carrie recalls constant drumming coming from the mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince.
"You got to know it, if you liked it or not. There's no way you can be shielded," he says. "When I was a kid the maids took me to somethiing that was supposedly church-related, but it was really a pilgrimage to Ezili . . . . It was just like a party, and they would serve you a Coke.
"You could even visit the tmples and go into the back rooms where the sacred objects are. There would be tables full of cakes for Ezili, and you'd have rows of perfume bottles, some appropriated from my mother. Visually, it's very stunning."
SCARRED BY BRUTALITY
Affected by the flashy panoply of altars and fantastic colors of traditional Haitian painting, the artist was also scarred by brutalities of the Duvaliers, who jailed his brother Robert for more than a year. And while his is not unique among Haitian artists of his generation in reinventing his country's intensely visual heritage, Duval Carrie is a leader in this trend, says Veerle Poupeye in the 1998 book Caribbean Art.
"His work evokes," she writes, "the magic and mystery of the Vodou universe and comments on Haiti's history and sociopolitical realities with sharp, surreal wit."
In his first show in 1980 at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, his evocations went too far. Centre director Francine Muerat advised him against adding his portrait of Baby Doc in lacy drag with a pistol pointed to his head, a nod to rumors that the iron-fisted dictator was gay and to Ezili's patronage of homosexuals.
"Do you want to have us all disappeared?" Duval Carrie remembers Muerat asking. "That would be signing our death warrant."
Six years later, the portraits finally surfaced publicly as a poster celebrating Duvalier's flight from power. Vodou scholar Donald J. Cosentino says it shrewdly indicated how Duvalier's lavish kleptocracy kept itself afloat by playing into Ezili-inspired fantasies of Haiti's poor.
Given his view of Haiti's current fortunes, Duval Carrie says migration is a more pressing issue that ever. But by devising a scenario in which even the country's spiritual essence is departing, the artist has delayed his own dream of painting murals in a Vodou temple in Haiti. The stay is only temporary, he promises. As icons of Haitian culture, the spirits are, he insists, international and can return to the island just as easily as they left.
"They can travel back and forth," he says. "That's the state of things these days. Nobody's stuck in one place."
It's great that everyone in Miami has a chance to see more of what Edouard is doing lately with his exhibit "The Three Dimensional Gods and Goddesses Meet Their Cousins The Trees." (What an incredible title! Who would not like to read a novel or see a movie with a title like that??!!) As the press release says, the show depicts "his unique universe" peopled by "anthropomorphic flamboyant characters." This show runs April 14 to May 31, 2012 at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, 3550 North Miami Avenue, Miami Fl 33127. Opening is Saturday, April 4, 2012 from 2 to 9 pm. Valet parking available. In addition to that, be sure not to miss new work by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Nova, in his exhibit at the gallery, "Novo Aniversario." More info: see www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com
First thing first: More visual arts news in Miami
This news item is actually more appropriate for South Florida. Recently heard via email from Irvin Lippman, Executive Director of Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University about this impressive development. So very fab to see how this museum is maturing under his dynamic leadership. Try not to miss this: upcoming Pearl and Stanley Goodman Lecture on Latin American Art, "Between Two Dimensions: The Paintings and Sculpture of Isabel De Obaldia" by Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. Lecture is 6-7 pm Thursday, April 19, at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University, One East Las Olas, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301. Lecture is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To RSVP for lecture, contact Holly Giuliano at 954-262-0241 or education1@moafl.org Dress code: Business attire. Following the lecture is a toast to Pearl and Stanley Goodman. Lecture is funded in part by Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Contemporary Studio Glass Movement.
And there's more exciting artcentric news: On April 2, 2012, this museum announced that the Pearl and Stanley Goodman Latin American Collection is a promised gift. As the press release states, "This impressive collection of over 75 works includes masters such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Wifredo Lam. The Goodmans, long-time residents of Fort Lauderdale, began to collect in the 1980s, attracted to Latin American art because it tells 'a story usually with a clear political and social message.' They are keen that their collection be of benefit to the people of South Florida and serve as a focus for educational programs at the museum and NSU." For more info, check the "Events" section of the museum website at www.moafl.org
WALL OF VODOU by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald, November 2000
With his quick wit and deep, infectious laugh, Edouard Duval Carrie would be a perfect fit as a social director on a Caribbean cruise.
You can imagine him introducing guests to one another, cajoling people to share a drink or tell a story and chatting up an audience in English or French--or even in the Spanish he learned as a teenager living in Puerto Rico.
He became an artist instead although he aims to make plenty of introductions these days. He indicated as much to a standing-room-only crowd at the opening of his latest exhibition, "New Work: Edouard Duval Carrie, Migrations," an exploration of Haitian culture, Vodou spirits, and the current desperation on the island, now on view at the Miami Art Museum. But these introductions concern desperate travelers in rickety flotillas and vivid migratory Haitian Vodou spirits of love and death, not tanned passengers sipping rum on multi-million dollar ships.
"Here is this whole culture that you might not be aware of," said Duval Carrie, a wordly and jocular figure dressed in a natty black suit. "But it may be heading your way, so let's get accustomed to each other."
Presented as a tour de force combination of painting and sculpture, "Migrations" is a spirited encounter made for South Florida, a community of immigrants suffused with much of the Caribbean. (Another collection of Duval Carrie's work, "Edouard Duval Carrie: Landscapes, Real & Imagined," is also showing at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Wynwood.)
And fittingly, the MAM show is scheduled for its own significant encounter. In the spring of 2002, "Migrations" will meet up with three of the artist's previous installations that probe complex African, American, and European strands interlacing Haitian culture and its history, born from Middle Passage horrors. The quartet is uniting for a show organized by the Davenport Museum, a venue known for its large collection of Haitian art, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, which owns the artist's caustic portrait of deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his family, a seminal riff on European court painters.
MILESTONE EXHIBITION
Duval Carrie's first traveling museum exhibit will mark a milestone in a prolific career, and both "Migrations" and the traveling show should solidify Duval Carrie's reputation as a major voice sifting the New World-Old World melange of the Caribbean with the inventive materials and international outlook of contemporary art.
The just-published Oxford History of Western Art, in fact, is already linking Duval Carrie's art to the blend of European Modernism and Afro-Cuban rites forged by Cuban master Wifredo Lam.
"It's very second millenium," MAM senior curator Peter Boswell says of the artist's work. "He's a great synthesizer. He's bringing in those influences from other countries. "This is really a dominant trend in art right now, with artists who are global but also regional at the same time."
And the polyglot, Caribbean-colored lanscape of Miami, Boswell adds, "is very good at fostering that type of sensibility."
"It's so refreshing to have a voice like Edouard's, that openly talks about Vodou and treats it with the respect it deserves," says Leonie Hermantin, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation, which today is co-sponsoring a round-table discussion on issues raised by Duval Carrie's exhibition. "His art shows us that when we move to another land we used our memories of religion to help us adapt."
As Duval Carrie spoke at MAM, subdued laughter rippled through the crowd. The artist may be a clever charmer, but the urgent reasons behind his get-accustomed offer are close to the surface.
"In time, God knows, the island will get its act straight," but for now, he continued, "the crisis in Haiti seems unending."
The artist puts it more emphatically in an interview in his Design District studio, a work space lined with art books, antique maps of Port-au-Prince and an orange I-Mac computer.
"The Vodou spirits are splitting! I am having the whole pantheon pick up and leave," he says of the premise driving "Migrations," in which the Vodou spirits flee the island. "It's funny, but at the same time it's very tragic. I decided to address the problem of Haiti losing itself, of dying. Peope are in total dire straits."
BITTERSWEET STORIES
During Duval Carrie's visit to Port-au-Prince five months ago, a gunman fatally shot his cousin, a prominent radio newscaster critical of the Duvalier regime. That violent scene--and many others--are rendered in the MAM show in painted panels that include a faux marble wall relief reminiscent of a Roman Catholic altarpiece.
In one panel, a lush tropical forest smolders while in others a tatooed goddess dances in a South Beach strip joint and a warrior spirit in gold epaulets mans a tank in the Gulf war.
They deliver bittersweet stories of a besieged country, represented by rural spirits migrating into new urban contexts. The spirits are testament to the fluid energies of Vodou that Duval Carrie has always admired. He calls Vodou--with its syncretic assortment of Yoruba, Kongo and Roman Catholic deities--"a guerilla religion."
"It refuses to have strict cannons," he says. "You have new gods coming in, other gods forgotten. It recovers anything that might be of use to survival of the people."
Loosely reminiscent of a Vodou temple, "Migrations" is perfumed with lilies strewn on the floor like offerings and fraught with the rococo curves of crumbling colonial French architecture, replicated in ornate urns laden with more offerings of glazed fruit.
Throughout is the festive sparkle of Vodou altars to "Mistress" Ezili Freda, the vampish light-skinned Goddess of love and luxury. A devotee of pink cake, lace hankies, and Anais-Anais perfume, she is a poor country's fantasy of ravishing wealth--and emblematic of colonial Haiti's vanished natural resources.
At MAM, she's the dominant voyager in a peculiar flotilla of boats suspended from the ceiling, their hulls glistening in melting pink shades of mock marble and inscribed with lacy ritual drawings that invoke Vodou spirits. And like the glowering, scar-faced Bawon Samedi, a Vodou spirit at home in cemeteries but tucked here in a listing skiff, Ezili is heading for the exit and away from Haiti.
Their uprootedness is familiar to Duval Carrie, 45. He is, writes Latin American art historian Edward J. Sullivan, "acutely familiar of the disorientations caused by migration [which is] the defining issue in the history of the islands."
STUDIED ABROAD
After spending his boyhood in Haiti and his adolescence in Puerto Rico, the artist shipped out to college in Montreal to study urban planning though he was more engaged in painting than in planning. In the 1980s, he returned to Haiti to help manage his father's construction business, where he witnessed the downfall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the chaos that followed.
Two years later the French government invited him to a formative residency at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris. In 1992, he traveled to Benin, home to Haiti's African ancestors, for an international reunion of Vodou cultures, and a year after that he settled in Miami with his second wife Nina, an English film producer, and their sons, now 8 and 10.
Along the way, he has exhibited at the contemporary art museum in Monterrey, Mexico, biennials in Sao Paulo and Havana, and the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta.
Raised Roman Catholic in an upper-middle-class family that typically finds his interest in Vodou "off the wall," Duval Carrie recalls constant drumming coming from the mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince.
"You got to know it, if you liked it or not. There's no way you can be shielded," he says. "When I was a kid the maids took me to somethiing that was supposedly church-related, but it was really a pilgrimage to Ezili . . . . It was just like a party, and they would serve you a Coke.
"You could even visit the tmples and go into the back rooms where the sacred objects are. There would be tables full of cakes for Ezili, and you'd have rows of perfume bottles, some appropriated from my mother. Visually, it's very stunning."
SCARRED BY BRUTALITY
Affected by the flashy panoply of altars and fantastic colors of traditional Haitian painting, the artist was also scarred by brutalities of the Duvaliers, who jailed his brother Robert for more than a year. And while his is not unique among Haitian artists of his generation in reinventing his country's intensely visual heritage, Duval Carrie is a leader in this trend, says Veerle Poupeye in the 1998 book Caribbean Art.
"His work evokes," she writes, "the magic and mystery of the Vodou universe and comments on Haiti's history and sociopolitical realities with sharp, surreal wit."
In his first show in 1980 at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, his evocations went too far. Centre director Francine Muerat advised him against adding his portrait of Baby Doc in lacy drag with a pistol pointed to his head, a nod to rumors that the iron-fisted dictator was gay and to Ezili's patronage of homosexuals.
"Do you want to have us all disappeared?" Duval Carrie remembers Muerat asking. "That would be signing our death warrant."
Six years later, the portraits finally surfaced publicly as a poster celebrating Duvalier's flight from power. Vodou scholar Donald J. Cosentino says it shrewdly indicated how Duvalier's lavish kleptocracy kept itself afloat by playing into Ezili-inspired fantasies of Haiti's poor.
Given his view of Haiti's current fortunes, Duval Carrie says migration is a more pressing issue that ever. But by devising a scenario in which even the country's spiritual essence is departing, the artist has delayed his own dream of painting murals in a Vodou temple in Haiti. The stay is only temporary, he promises. As icons of Haitian culture, the spirits are, he insists, international and can return to the island just as easily as they left.
"They can travel back and forth," he says. "That's the state of things these days. Nobody's stuck in one place."
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