Miami Art Museum Collects Brazilian-born Artist Vik Muniz

It is indeed swimmingly delicious to have access to my own content, and to be able to drive my blog in the direction I choose. I very much appreciate this unusual opportunity!

There were so many years when the tyrannical pressure exerted by constant newspaper deadlines, not to mention the fact that I never quite got used to the sometimes quite wack-o things that not exactly artcentrically-sensitive editors would do to my copy drove my already anxiety-driven days...I must say it is a blessed relief to know that part of my life in Miami is over forever, and I NEVER forget how lucky I am to be typing this blog right this minute.

Of course, how and why I have access to my own content leads to a rather painful backstory, but I don't want to go there today or ever again. That part of my life is OVER!!

Today I want to say how thrilled I am to have received an email comment about my previous blog entry on Gordon Parks, pointing out insightful connections between the impassioned activism of Parks and Vik Muniz. So even though I had always thought this blog post today would be about other artists, I have decided to blog about Vik Muniz.

The Miami Art Museum owns a number of exciting works by Vik Muniz. Additionally, very soon the museum will display one of those: "Cloud Cloud, Miami (Pictures of Clouds)," from 2006. When you read the first Miami Herald I have typed on my blog today, you can learn about how that work was created. I think it is very synergistic of MAM that it will soon present a solo show by another Brazilian artist, Rivane Neuenschwander; her show runs from July 17 to Oct. 16. For more info, see www.miamiartmuseum.org

I also want to say CONGRATS to Mark Handforth, who has lived and worked here for a number of years. This just in...The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is presenting the "MCA Chicago Plaza Project," from July 9 to Oct. 10. It will feature four of Mark Handforth's dynamic sculptures inspired by the urban language of the city. For more info, see www.mcachicago.org

In my 6/26/2011 blog post, "Miami Dade College Entrusted with Cintas Cuban Art Collection," I mentioned the returning veteran from the war in Iraq, with whom I had worked at the College Prep Writing Lab of Miami Dade College, Kendall campus. I remain quite impressed by his perseverance and bravery, and think I was remiss by not mentioning how much I admired him when he told me he had taken part in events to help other veterans deal with the frightening consequences of PTSD.

Additionally, I want to give a major shout-out to all my artcentric friends who have taken action to show their support of this amazing project, The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation. For more info about this project, see www.childrensmovementflorida.org

Also, here are two shows in Wynwood I hope to see before they close because they include such terrific artists and suggest such clever ideas:

"Food, Home, Love" at Edge Zones Art Center, 47 NE 25th St., Miami www.edgezones.org In particular, I hope to see work by Harumi Abe, Carlos Alves, Duane Brant, Pip Brant, Charo Oquet, David Rohn, Kristen Thiele, Pedro Vizcaino, Michelle Weinberg, and Barbara Young.

"Home: Dream Home" at Praxis International Art, 2219 NW 2nd Ave., Miami www.praxis-art.com Here are just some of the artists whose work I hope to see: Loriel Beltran, Teresa Diehl, Natasha aka Nat Duwin (you can also see more of her work as part of my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com ), Guerra de la Paz, Michael Loveland, Ernesto Oroza, Gavin Perry, Bert Rodriguez, David Rohn, Kristen Thiele, Mette Tommerup, and Kyle Trowbridge.

Here's my Miami Herald story re Vik Muniz from February of 2006.

IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE! NO, IT'S ART!

This weekend, no matter what the weather forecast says, there will be an extraordinary cloud in the sky over Miami (not like the ones on Saturday, don't worry).

Traced in the air by a professional skywriter in a former military plane, this "cloud"--a perfect, childlike drawing--will appear several times in the skies over Miami between today and Monday. Each time--between 10 a.m. and noon, even possibly in the early afternoon--the mock cloud will last about 10 minutes before it floats away. Best places to catch a glimpse: Near downtown and from Miami Beach.

This drifting drawing--"Cloud Cloud" by Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz--is artwork both public and ephemeral, produced by the Miami Art Museum, on the occasion of the museum's show about Muniz that opens Friday and runs through May 28.

Wispy trails of skywriting are just one of the more unusual materials that this well-known contemporary artist has used in his eccentric, amusing, and thoughtful art that has been admired since the late 1980s in shows in Brazil, Spain, and Ireland, as well as in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Muniz, 43, has also made drawings, which he then photographs, with chocolate syrup, sugar, ketchup, and even Cheese Doodles. His show at MAM will include more than 100 works. Many are his photographs of his easy-to-recognize but fleeting drawings with materials rarely recognized as art materials.

"I like working with things that change over time," explains Muniz in a phone interview from Rio de Janeiro, where he keeps a studio, in addition to one in Brooklyn. "It becomes something you can wonder about. It recovers the magic of drawing."

Not all his experiments with eccentric materials have worked. He says that attempts to draw with M&M candies and snow failed miserably.

But drawing via skywriting has been a grand success. "Clouds are like vessels for meaning. Who has not looked at a cloud and seen a shape in it?" Muniz asks.

"Cloud Cloud" was first produced in New York in 2001 by Creative Time, a nonprofit organization that presents public art in New York. "It was one of our greatest crowd pleasers. The response was nothing less than astounding," says Anne Pasternak, president of Creative Time.

"We got children's drawings, poetry, paintings, and just tons of fan mail because people loved it so much. It was one of those moments that makes living in a city so special. People had never thought about the sky as a place for art. Some people saw a heart, people saw whatever they wanted," says Pasternak.

"In a city where you don't tend to look up, people who chanced to look up were rewarded with this magical sight," says Lorie Mertes, the MAM curator who's overseeing the Miami edition of this skywriting project.

"When you think about the absurdity of it...you can see someone in the act of drawing," Mertes adds. "It's an amazingly public way of seeing something that's normally private. There's a great sense of humor about it. You think, 'That's not so unusual to see the shape of a cloud in the sky,' and then you go, 'Wait a minute!' and then you smile."

Mertes hopes weather will allow professional skywriter Wayne Mansfield to make flights for drawing "Cloud Cloud" over Miami twice a day on each of the four days. "He draws a very specific shape Vik has envisioned. With each flight he draws approximately four times," she says.

To folks scanning Miami skies this week, "Cloud Cloud" will show Muniz making art of the double-take. "He works with very familiar images and somehow makes them strange," says Peter Boswell, who curated "Vik Muniz: Reflex" for MAM. This strangeness is part of what makes the artist's work amusing, but sliced with a thoughtful and critical edge.

"You do a double-take and realize it is not what you thought it was," he says. "It makes people think about what they are looking at. It deals with the manipulation of images."


Here's my review re Vik Muniz, from The Miami Herald from March in 2006. (In this version, I wrote my own sub-heads, because there apparently were none when it was first published. Not sure why--guess it is just one of those many, many things I will never understand, so I may as well just give up trying to figure them out, and continue to count my blessings EVERY DAY.)

A DAB OF MISCHIEF AND TRICKERY

When the tide washed away his favorite book, the one that Vik Muniz found at a garage sale in the early 1980s in Chicago and then left behind at the beach, he found his true calling as an artist.

It was not a calling to create new images, as Claude Monet had done with his famous Impressionist painting of light-dappled and delectably blurry water lilies. It was to copy them--as Muniz did years later when he cut up scores of magazines to evoke a green-blue semblance of Monet's abundantly familiar art historical icon. Then he photographed it, making the photograph his own creative version of his uniquely hand-crafted copy.

That creative version is "Water Lillies, After Monet (Pictures of Magazines)." It's one of more than 100 works now at the Miami Art Museum in "Vik Muniz: Reflex," a truly memorable show of Muniz's unusually familiar art.

These "copies"--call them creative versions--come in series based on the materials that Muniz uses. This quixotic artist delights in experimenting with oddball materials like chocolate syrup, diamonds, dust, and dirt--substances that can exist beyond their shelf life as photographs of themselves.

His self-portrait is part of the same series to which "Water Lillies, After Monet" belongs. It's composed of hundreds of circles punched out from magazine pages and then photographed, making the scale of the materials difficult to judge. The punched-out circles photographed in Muniz's "Self Portrait (Pictures of Magazines)" do look abnormally large, but it's impossible to tell for sure from the image itself.

DOUBLE-TAKE DIAMONDS

Muniz is fascinated with the way our minds make sense of images, both their shape and scale, and he has hit upon a way to make distinctive, deceptive art from that universal and magical process called perception.

In "Elizabeth Taylor (Pictures of Diamonds)," his photograph of his drawing in diamonds of the movie legend only seems to sparkle with diamonds as big as the Ritz. They owe their big sparkle to the big distortions of scale that photography makes possible. Muniz actually executed this drawing with diamonds the size of pinheads.

That special find from the garage sale, that book of photographs that he left behind on the beach in 1987, cracked open the door to his career as an artist. It was only when he had lost the book that the door opened wide.

That book was The Best of 'Life,' a compendium of well-known photographs by Life magazine photographers. If you belong to certain generations, you can probably picture in your mind many of them--like Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous image of the sailor passionately kissing a nurse when news came that World War II was over, or the one of little John-John saluting the funeral procession for his assassinated father, President John F. Kennedy.

MAKING MISCHIEF

As an immigrant far from his native Brazil, Muniz says the photographs in that book became like "family" to him, and he grew inordinately fond of them. When they were gone, he tried to recreate them in drawings. But his drawings were sketchy and incomplete. Like all memories, his memory of The Best of 'Life' was not picture-perfect, and neither were his drawings.

But, in a burst of mischief, he decided to photograph his drawings in soft-focus. To his amusement, when his photographs of these "memory drawings" were exhibited in a gallery, people thought they were poorly reproduced historical photographs. Exhibited as part of the Muniz show at MAM, these blurry black and white photographed drawings do seem to be historical relics. After a fashion, they are.

Muniz recounts this career-altering encounter with The Best of 'Life' in Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (Aperture, $39.95). This book stands as the catalogue for "Vik Muniz: Reflex," a traveling exhibit organized by MAM and curated by Peter Boswell.

Muniz's Life magazine "memory drawing" photographs come early in his show. They resemble one-line jokes--once you understand the trick the artist has played, part of their appeal is diminished.

Far more resonant images come later in the exhibit, particularly as the artist finds a way to make his appetite for oddball materials amplify the meaning of the image he is portraying. His art becomes more than a clever game of mischief-making double-takes--although for this artist, certainly mischief and medium are part of the message. At his best, Muniz loves to deflate pretensions cloaking art history.

He does just that in his amusing photograph of his rendering in gooey, dripping chocolate syrup of Hans Namuth's famous photograph of Jackson Pollock executing his legendary "drip" paintings.

CHILDISH MEMORIES

More resonant work begins with the artist's 1996 "Sugar Children" series, such as Valicia Bathes in "Sunday Clothes (Sugar Children)" at MAM. These are photographs of drawings in sugar that Muniz made on black paper, working from snapshots he took of children he met during a 1995 vacation on St. Kitts. He also met the children's parents. He was haunted by the way the parents, who labored long hours for low pay at grueling jobs on the island's sugar plantations, seemed perennially tired. bereft of the youthful, vivacious charm he found so beguiling in the children of St. Kitts.

"I owe my career to those children," Muniz writes in Reflex. His photographs of his drawings in sugar capture images in typically fleeting materials, but this time the unusual material speaks more directly to the image--to the complex history and story to which these sweet young faces belong.

With his "Sugar Children" series, Muniz begins working more often with children, creating images that don't merely startle the viewer with his puckish penchant for the elaborately devised double-take.

Sometimes he has worked with the photographic memory of a famous child, one who is forever associated with a girl in a story legendary for her own magical, distorting changes in size. The child is Alice Liddell, for whom Lewis Carroll wrote his classic Alice in Wonderland. Muniz has photographed his drawing of Alice in a daunting clutter of colorful plastic toys in "Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll (Rebus)." In his "Toy Soldier (Monads)," the plastic clutter of toys for playing war, including little soldiers, makes the double-take that his work launches both funny and uncomfortable.

His trickster portraits of iconic works in art history, like paintings by Monet and Gaugin, are fabulously clever, but they don't pack the punch that "Angelica (Aftermath)" does. The "Aftermath" series is one he did of homeless children in Sao Paulo. It's a series that makes you think about the deplorable state of these urban orphans, but it is not all preachy and political.

After much coaxing, Muniz photographed the children in poses they chose from an art history book. They are shown in grayish-white negative images, surrounded by the trash and confetti swept up from the streets after the city's Carnival celebration.

How telling that the children seem like eerie mirages, faint memories of masterpieces, and far less substantial than street garbage.

Miami Area Museum Salutes Freedom-Fighter Artist Gordon Parks

And that museum would be the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, currently showing "From A to Z: Great Photographs from the Norton Collection," now through Oct. 16. One of those exceptional photographs is by the late, legendary Gordon Parks (1912-2006). I consider myself especially lucky to get to meet and interview him for The Miami Herald in 1999. (For more info about the very terrific Norton Museum of Art and this particular show, see http://www.norton.org/ )

An eloquent warrior and photojournalist in this country's 20th Century battles for freedom of speech and civil rights, Gordon Parks is the perfect topic for this post during our July 4th holiday.

But first things first...I do want to say that when I finished last week's post, "Miami Dade College Entrusted with Cintas Cuban Art Collection" for 6/26/2011, it was rather late at night. I went to bed tired and a bit sad, feeling like a pale ghost of my former Miami Herald self, also convinced actually that I am totally nuts for still looking back at the past this way. I was so energized to wake up the next morning to find that there was already an appreciative comment on my blog! (Not that I am one of those insecure folks always desperate for approval, but now that this Ishmaelita is cast into the wilderness of free-lance journalism on the Internet, a comment like this is nice now and then.)

And meanwhile, after I made that post, I have been continuing to hear from artists who are concerned about their artworks that have been lost by the Cintas Foundation. I have been encouraging them to post comments on that 6/26/2011 blog post so maybe these troubling issues can at least start to be resolved.

So, for my readers, here are some artcentric events I am looking forward to in the coming days:

I hope to catch "Ernesto Oroza: Videos and Photographs" from 7 to 9 pm July 16 at Art @ Work Gallery, 1245 SW 87th Ave, Miami. (For more information about Ernesto Oroza, check my 4/2/2011 post, "Miami's Historical Vizcaya Museums & Gardens Now Hosts Contemporary Art.") Kudos to that very fab art collector and orthodontist Dr. Arturo Mosquera (as well as his wonderful wife Liza Mosquera) for providing Art @ Work Gallery events for artists and Miami's art community! (For more info about the Magnificent Dr. M, see my 2/26/2011 blog post, "Miami Art Bites in Orthodontist Office.")

Though I am not much for watching television, this does sound cool: On WBPT Channel 2 at 7:30 pm on July 7, there's a 27-minute special show re the Knights Art Challenge and its winners, including Kathleen Hudspeth of Turn-Based Press. For more info, see the 6/23 blog post by Valerie Nahamad Schimel on the Knight Arts Blog. (You'll find a link to that blog on the right-hand side of my blog, underneath my blog archive.) Kathleen's name especially caught my eye since last week I was so delighted to run into her husband and terrific artist Adler Guerrier in the Publix parking lot! I really do missing seeing my artcentric buddies, so it was fab to see him again!

And let's give a shout-out to Dina Mitrani Gallery for extending her fab show of photographs by Colleen Plumb through August 20. Her photographs were part of my June 2011 Critic's Choice for http://www.artcircuits.com/ How terrific that this talented Chicago-based photographer received a rave on 6/21/2011 at TIME.com for her new monograph Animals Are Outside Today from Radius Books, available at Dina Mitrani's gallery, 2620 NW 2nd Ave in Miami's Wynwood Art District. See http://www.dinamitranigallery.com/ and http://www.colleenplumb.com/

Mark your calendar for Second Saturday Gallery Walk at the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, 23 NE 41 Street, Miami. On July 9 from 7 to 10 pm there will be a free performance and radio broadcast by Nicolas Lobo & Terence Hannum, also closing reception for "Kevin Arrow: Amor Infinitus." (For more info about my terrific artcentric friend Kevin, see my 4/22/11 post, "Miami Artist Kevin Arrow Featured at de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space.) See also http://www.delacruzcollection.org/

I must say I was quite pleased to learn that Terence Hannum has exhibited at the Richard Peeler Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Fancy that!! DePauw is my alma mater, also where my sister, my son, and my beloved late nephew attended. Plus my husband and numerous members of his family graduated from from there...I always say that Eric, even though he was born and bred in Miami, is actually one-half Midwestern and one-half Cuban. And guess what--when I went there, the Richard Peeler Center did not exist, but Richard Peeler himself did--he was a ceramacist and a revered art prof. When I was a student there I even bought a charming tea pot that he made and inscribed with his signature at the bottom. I still have it now in my Miami kitchen! What a coincidence!!

Well, as they say, enough about me.

Here's my story about Gordon Parks from The Miami Herald, November 1999. What a remarkable, remarkable man.


HIS WEAPON AGAINST POVERTY, RACISM WAS A $7.50 CAMERA

His manner is more affable than angry now. Call it a generous charm, though one spiked with steely determination.

And he's a natty dresser to boot, telling stories while decked out in a navy blazer. An ivory handkerchief that nearly matches his white mustache is tucked with saucy style into his breastpocket.

But outrage lingers in Gordon Parks' low, raspy voice--a voice that wavers at time in deference to the tolls and triumphs of his 87 years.

It was outrage that inspired and informed a remarkable career as a photographer, writer, composer and filmmaker--a career so important and prolific, thousands of his photos and manuscripts now rest in the Library of Congress. A career so remarkable that it was launched with a second-hand camera purchased in a pawn shop 61 years ago but is now being honored in "Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks," a traveling retrospective of his photographs, films, and music that opened last week at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

But back then, back where it all started, Gordon Parks simply remembers being angry; so angry, he stomped out of a department store when clerks couldn't--or wouldn't--come up with a single coat his size. The time was 1942 and the place was Washington, D.C., recalls Parks. It was his first trip to the capital and he'd just arrived from Chicago, where he'd been photographing South Side slums and high-fashion women, the kinds of desperate and beautiful subjects that would capture his lyrical imagination and laser-sharp social conscience for decades to come.

As a shopper on the mean streets of Washington, he was on a "very strange assignment," he tells his audience, a group of reporters on hand to preview the retrospective. Parks' assignment came from Roy Stryker, director of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), an agency President Roosevelt had set up to help poor farmers. To muster support for these efforts, Stryker hired photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to call attention to the farmers' plight--and the photographers responded with landmark images of Depression-era inequities.

Parks first saw the photos in a magazine left on the North Coast Limited, where he was working as a railroad waiter. It was a job he'd gotten after a gig playing a piano in a brothel.

The stark, tragic images excited him so much that he soon found himself in a Seattle pawn shop looking for a camera. Then he found Richard Wright's Twelve Million Black Voices, an attack on bigotry illustrated with FSA photos. Wright's book became his Bible and the camera unleashed his powerful voice.

It was, he allows, "not much of a camera, but for $7.50, I had purchased a weapon I hoped to use against a warped past and an uncertain future."

His weapon had gotten him work in Chicago, and a fellowship with the FSA he so admired. And now, before Stryker sent Parks out and about in the United States--to destinations that included Daytona Beach--he was sent out to experience Washington.

"Put your camera on the shelf," Parks says Stryker told him that day. "Go to Julius Garfinkel's department store and buy yourself a topcoat, and there across the street is a restaurant. Go in there and get some lunch, and catty-corner across the street is a theater...come back and give me a report on what you thought of that picture."

But the picture to see and report on, he would soon learn, wasn't the movie playing at the theater. It was the one playing in the hearts and minds of men.

At Julius Garfinkel's, for example, nobody even tried to find a coat that would fit a black man, Parks remembers.

"So, in disgust, I stretched my little black body out on this white chaise lounge and said, 'Go get the manager.'" When the manager dithered about how busy the store was during war time, Parks snapped, "Well, there's nobody on this floor but me. I wouldn't take that coat if you gave it to me."

At the restaurant, he says a waiter approached him with this reproach, "Don't you know Negroes can't eat in this place? If you want to eat, you have to go around back..."

Still, that was even better than Parks did at the movie house.

"I didn't even get into the theater," he remembers.

It was the pivotal moment of his career--and a pivotal moment in the long, unsteady history of race relations in the United States--for it inspired the high-powered images of poverty that became Parks' trademark.

"He was always looking at things that needed to be looked at," says University of Miami communications professor Michael Carlebach. "Things that were right there in front of us, but that nobody had paid attention to."

"American Gothic," among his most famous photographs, depicts Washington, D.C. charwoman Ella Watson standing with mop and broom in front of a huge American flag. [This iconic image was part of my Critic's Choice for June 2011 for http://www.artcircuits.com/ ] She gives us an uncompromising gaze, the tools of her dead-end trade lining up with Old Glory's stripes.

"For its time, it was an image that talked about racism in this country in a way no other picture did," says Philip Brookman, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which organized the Parks exhibit. "Here's a woman working for the U.S. government, posed exactly like the American farmer in [Grant] Wood's "American Gothic." The farmer is considered to be an icon of everything good in American culture, and yet the black woman is an ambiguous image, with the feeling of people being exploited."

Coming from Chicago, where Wood's famous 1930 painting of the pitchfork-wielding couple hangs in the city's Art Institute, Park acknowledges that Wood's painting was a "mild influence" on his image.

"But actually," he adds by phone from his Manhattan apartment, "it was an indictment of America. I tried to do something that would show my anger...I had no idea it would turn out to be so popular."

The popularity, however, would come later. At first the photo was considered too provocative to be shown.

"Well, you got the idea all right," Parks remembers an approving Stryker saying when he saw the picture. "But you're going to get us all fired."

So the photo was hidden away. "Years later," recalls Parks, "I was on a plane from New York to Hollywood and there it was, "American Gothic," in The Washington Post. When I got back to New York I jumped straight on the shuttle to Washington and went down to the Library of Congress and got my picture."

In Hollywood, he blazed more new ground. The man whose silky shots of Parisian haute couture for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue made him the first black photographer at Conde Nast, whose 1952 move to Life made him that magazine's first black staff photographer, became the first black director to produce and direct a major feature film with his 1969 movie The Learning Tree--a film that takes its title from Parks' 1963 novel based on his boyhood in Fort Scott, Kansas.

The main character "is like other boys, no matter what the color or place or time...Bruised by [the world], he learns from it nonetheless. The film remains a lyrical and eloquent statement on the black experience in America," writes film historian Donald Bogle.

Two years later, Parks released the critically acclaimed detective movie Shaft, a film that helped launch a decade-long run of successful films by black directors.

As he talks, he looks back on a life so dramatic it, too, could have been scripted in Hollywood. (In fact, HBO will air a documentary on Parks' life next year.)

There was the time in 1961, for example, when he traveled to the mountainside slums of Rio de Janeiro. This was, he wrote later, "dead center in the worst poverty I have ever encountered." There he photographed Flavio da Silva, an asthmatic 12-year-old caring for seven younger siblings who became the subject of one of his most famous Life stories. Readers were so moved they sent in more than $30,000 to bring Flavio to the United States for medical treatment and to buy the da Silva family a new home.

As the civil rights movement gathered steam, Parks spent time with the black Muslims in New York and the Black Panthers in Berkeley. He photographed their leaders for Life, striving to balance journalistic integrity with his sympathy for what he called "the heart of black fury sweeping the country."

Parks himself was moved when an initially skeptical Malcolm X asked him to be his daughter's godfather.

In Park's storied life of peaks and valleys, he fell in love with the art and beauty of Paris, buried his parents in a still-segregated cemetery in Kansas, and met and photographed princes and paupers, as well as Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Richard Wright and Muhammad Ali.

Now divorced--he was married three times--Parks has raised four children, losing his eldest, the filmmaker Gordon Parks Jr., in a plane crash in 1979. He is a grandfather and great-grandfather several times over.

"My family is mixed up with all kinds of races," he says. "I'm part Cherokee, part black. Jewish people have married into my family. One of my wives was Chinese, two great-grandchildren are part Swedish. It's a grand mixture."

Known to friends as an enthusiastic cook and tennis player, Parks continues his literary life. He's at work on his 17th book, a novel based on the rags-to-riches life of English 19th Century landscape painter J.M.W. Turner--whose "absolutely smashingly beautiful" watercolors have influenced Parks' latest dreamy abstractions.

"I deserve a little time to myself to look at the beauty in the world, after those years of looking at poverty and discrimination," says this Renaissance Man, whose days still include time for playing the piano.

"The most important thing is that I find poetry in everything I do."

Miami Dade College Entrusted with Cintas Cuban Art Collection

How appropriate that the Cuban art collection of the Cintas Foundation can now be seen at the Freedom Tower of Miami Dade College! It should be an exceptional marriage of distinctive art and architecture because both are laden with so much history entwined with Miami.

As MDC President Dr. Eduardo J. Padron recently announced, this collection is on extended loan to the college. For more info, check the June 20, 2011 story on website http://www.mdc.edu/ As you will see from my Miami Herald story posted below, the Cintas Foundation collection is a unique resource honoring the cultural patrimony of Cuba. It encompasses nearly 300 artworks by more than 200 artists of Cuban descent.

I am very much looking forward to seeing how this collection, which unfortunately has not always received the care and respect it deserves, evolves in its new home in Miami.

Also, I must say that I am extremely touched that my very dear artcentric friend, Onajide Shabaka, posted my recent blog entry, "Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Wakes Up," on his blog on Mother's Day. Thanks a bunch, Jide!! See May 8, 2011 MAEX Art Blog by Onajide Shabaka at http://www.miamiartexchange.com/

I hope readers will take note of Mark Diamond's comment on Onajide's post. Mark Diamond points out how many returning veterans of the war in Iraq have suffered traumatic brain injuries as a result of being near IED blasts.

As a tutor for the MDC College Prep Writing Lab at the Kendall campus, I recently worked with such a veteran who had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Once I learned that we both were still learning how to cope with the ongoing consequences of this dreadful experience, I think we bonded immediately. We talked about the frustrations of having problems with our short-term memory and the fact that we suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic-stress syndrome), which never really goes completely away, no matter how "recovered" we may look. This means always learning how to deal with the frightening, intensely real dreams and flashbacks that accompany PTSD.

Yes, I realize that combat experiences can be far worse than a car crash, but the lingering mental and emotional scars are surely somewhat similar for survivors, and I felt honored to work with this veteran.

Today, I'd also like to underscore praise for Diaspora Vibe Gallery and Locust Projects, two significant organizations in Miami's cultural community. (I mention them both in my foreword to the book Miami Contemporary Artists by Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow. I remember when Diaspora Vibe Gallery and Locust Projects began, and it's great to see them receive national recognition for their years of exceptionally hard work.) They are among the 61 participants of The Warhol Initiative, an initiative designed to strengthen small and mid-sized artist-centered organizations across the country. These organizations have received cash grants of approximately $125,000 as well as professional opportunities to cultivate their leadership and networking abilities. See www.warholfoundation.org/grant/initiative.html

And this just in...Rosemarie Chiarlone, one of Miami's many talented artists I have known for years, will be showing work in "The Un(Framed) Photograph" at the Center for the Book Arts in New York, from July 6 to September 10, 2o11. Congrats, Rosemarie!!

I hope readers will check my Summer Critic's Choice (for both July and August) soon at http://www.artcircuits.com/ This summer I especially hope to catch "Noise Field" at Dorsch Gallery, 151 NW 24th Street in Wynwood, before it closes July 9--not only because this group show sounds intriguing, but also because it includes work by another talented Miami artist I have known for some time, Odalis Valdivieso.

I have learned that the Frida Kahlo Festival in Miami that I blogged about last week has been postponed till November of this year. Oh, well. It seemed like such a good idea to cheer up our hot, hazy days in the summer.

Here is my Miami Herald story, from July 4, 2004, on the Cintas Collection:

HOPE AND GLORY

As a title, "Hope and Glory" is more than a catchy and self-congratulatory hook for an art exhibit showcasing winners of fellowships awarded in the name of a late Cuban sugar baron and philanthropist.

"Hope and Glory: The Enduring Legacy of Oscar B. Cintas," now at Miami Art Central, is a hope-inducing first for the Cintas Foundation. Until now, the foundation has never created an exhibit like this one, presenting art by the finalists for its annual fellowship grant of $10,000 as well as work by past winners.

This year's finalists were Cuban-American artists Luis Gispert, Magda Fernandez, Gabriel Martinez, Eduardo de Soignie, and Juana Valdes.

This year's winner is Luis Gispert, already a rising young star in the art world. Gispert's striking photographs of cheerleaders adorned in hip-hop glitz and posed like buoyant Baroque angels were a widely reproduced element of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial in 2002. His art was also featured in MAC's inaugural exhibit, which opened last December.

Gispert gets a capacious area to display his work, photography and sculpture that make witty use of pop cuture in general and hip-hop music in particular. Gispert shows how fetish-y, street-wise symbols can modify and enliven mainstream style. His "Untitled (Laundry)," a photograph of cheerleader clothes hanging out to dry and buoyant against a real sky (unlike his previous angelic figures), is a sly metaphor for the artful sampling and cultural masquerade that is the heart of his art.

The current show at MAC also presents art by more than 20 past Cintas fellows, among them Miami-based Mario Bencomo, George Sanchez-Calderon, Mirta Gomez and Eduardo del Valle, Cesar Trasobares, Maria Martinez-Canas, and Maria Brito, who's represented by her recent oil-painted wood construction of a fragmented self, "Blessing."

But the show betrays hasty organization and some disappointing choices. Why not affecting photographs of Cuba that photographers Mario Algaze and Abelardo Morrell, represented here by earlier images, made during recent visits to the island? And the exhibit should be better documented, with at least a small catalog outlining the finalists' work.

Still, "Hope and Glory" bears much hope and a bid for more glory. It suggests that the New York-based foundation, established shortly after the death of Cuban arts patron, ambassador, and businessman Oscar B. Cintas in 1957, wants a more visible profile.

The step has the potential to garner more exposure for the visual artists who become Cintas fellows, and it could also open the quality of the selection process to wider discussion and support. A Cintas brochure published for this occasion notes that the foundation is seeking donors to help set up endowed grants in the visual arts, photography, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature, and for lifetime achievement awards.

Since 1963, the Cintas Foundation has awarded more than 300 fellowships and grants to Cuban artists in various disciplines who live and work in exile. Not open to performing artists, the grants have been given to creative writers, composers, architects, filmmakers, and visual artists. Artists must either have been born in Cuba or be the child or grandchild of a Cuban citizen.

According to Cintas Foundation director Manuel Gonzalez, plans are underway to make the exhibit of fellowship finalists an annual affair. This could involve, he said, shows that alternate between Miami Art Central and El Museo del Barrio in New York.

"Finally what we realized is that, although it did cost a little money, there's no comparison [with past fellowships] to what the artists gained with this show," said Gonzalez. "A lot of them sold a lot of work, and curators can see the work. All the artists felt like winners."

There have been few exhibits linked to the Cintas Foundation. Cintas fellows include established artists like Jose Bedia, Teresita Fernandez, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jorge Pardo, Ernesto Pujol and Andres Serrano, and more artists with much less art world fame, as well as two embarrassing omissions. According to the Cintas brochure, no grants have gone to Ana Mendieta, honored with a traveling show opening this week at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, or to pioneer abstract painter Guido Llinas.

There were shows of work by Cintas fellows in 1977 and 1987 at the Miami-Dade Public Library and a show in 1993 of photography at the Frost Museum at Florida International University (then known as the Art Museum at FIU).

In 1989, the museum acquired on long-term loan the Cintas Fellows Collection, which developed as a result of the foundation asking fellows to give it work produced during their fellowship. Now some of the show's glory is tempered by the fact that the foundation's record-keeping, especially when the collection was housed before 1993 in a New York warehouse, was faulty, and a number of works--including those by Lydia Rubio--has disappeared, said FIU curator Elizabeth Cerejido.

In a show like this, there's a head-spinning variety of art. Trying to make it mesh must have been a nightmare for co-curators Gonzalez and Celso Gonzalez-Fall, both New York-based Cintas directors.

You'll encounter Magda Fernandez's conceptual installations, with a coiled garden hose emitting drops of fake water in blobby forms textured like blue Astro Turf. Her work skewers the forced camraderie and isolationism of genteel gated communities, and though despite its perceptive politics, the work itself is visually tiresome.

Contrast her strident art with the oil paintings by the show's elder statesmen, Cundo Bermudez, Agustin Fernandez, and Jose Mijares. All born before 1930, they developed in pre-Castro Cuba.

Adopting the gem-bright colors of tropical sunshine streaming through stained glass windows, Bermudez and Mijares are known for rhythmically structured compositions of figures in ornate, stylized dress, all ripe with island abundance. "Portrait of a Headless Lady" (1978) by the youngest of these three, Fernandez, is typical of his grimmer work that's both dark and sensual, with body parts imprisoned by a labyrinth of metallic shapes.

Still, this is not a show that's completely exiled coherence, and this painting has been thoughtfully hung near Pablo Cano's sculpture, "Truth," of a saintly, grandly armored female. It's constructed with his deft ability to model delicate facial features and find bodily grace among clunky recycled aluminum cans, nodding to Duchamp's ready-mades and an exile's need to remake new life in new places.

Photography yields one of the most coherent elements of this show. Elegant fragments of the body are spotlighted in Serrano's triptych of ejaculation. There's also fine work by Martinez-Canas, Gomez and del Valle, Algaze and Morrell--fine enough to outshine the pretentious installations of Fernandez and Martinez, whose candlelit homage to talisman-wearing skater Michelle Kwan doesn't live up to its conceptual potential. Also weak are paintings by de Soignie, another finalist, of poorly digested Afro-Cuban symbols.

Most interesting among the finalists who didn't win are the photographs and installations by Juana Valdes, especially her installation of a flowing white dress suspended from the ceiling. It's stitched together with fish hooks and fish nets. Dangerous to touch, it's part airy shroud and bridal gown.

Blurry sounds of voices emanate from a tiny speaker inside this piece, like static on a boater's radio, relaying messages that can't be deciphered. The body as a vital receptacle for mystery, a carrier for essential journeys that are dangerous and hard to understand, is a subtle, hopeful theme here.

It asserts itself in such varied pieces as Trasobares' fraying, skeletal sculptures crafted from dollar bills, in Pardo's radiant sculpture of multiple cellular forms that build upon Charles Eames' body-friendly furniture of the 1950s, and in Valdes' bristling gown, a light twin to Cano's similarly resourceful and metallic maiden.

Also at MAC: "Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image," organized by New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, is a highly selective anthology of video and film from 2003. There's something to be said about the title of this show, too. It's off-putting--the show doesn't have the broad historical perspective you'd expect from the title. But that aside, a contemporary art lover could do a lot worse than spending the hour or so it takes to see all of these works by 11 artists. They show the moving image as a shifting creature celebrating hybrid shapes gleaned from all sorts of visual precedents.

There's the moving image in the guise of a politically correct documentary blended with vertiginous effects from Alfred Hitchcock, in "El Gringo" by Francis Alys, about a stranger in a Mexican village surrounded by threatening dogs. Isaac Julien's distorted views of a Caribbean paradise are wonderful to contemplate, hallucinogenic and kaleidoscopic. Other highlights are the calligraphic cartoons of William Kentridge and the woodsy, mirror-flashing theatrics of Joan Jonas.

Also included here are Gary Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Paul McCarthy, Anri Sala, David Claerbout, Pipilotti Rist, and Douglas Gordon.

[Blogger's note: I REALLY miss the great shows and creative programming offered by Miami Art Central. Maybe at the time it was just too ambitious for us...]

Miami Celebrates Frida Kahlo

Yes, it's that time of year for Fridamania, and I want to be sure my readers know about the Frida Kahlo Festival in Miami on June 24 and July 1.

Mark your calendars for two enticing evenings of cultural and culinary surprises at Cube/Kitchen Loft, 5101 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. On June 24 at 7 pm, hear lecture on Frida Kahlo, "A Tormented Brush," presented by art historian Armando Droulers and then, at 8 pm, savor a dinner created by Chef Diego Texera based on Frida Kahlo's recipes, plus there will be live music. Cost is $69 per person. On July 1 at 8 pm, there will be more Mexican tastings created by Texera, with performances of music from the time of Frida Kahlo. Cost is also $69 per person. RSVP by calling 305-866-6900 or email rsvp@cubemiami.net For more info, see http://www.cubemiami.net/ While you are there, you can also see an exhibit of photographs of Frida Kahlo by Leo Matiz, an artist I highlighted for my June Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com (Surely there are other Frida-centric events happening in Miami. Readers can post more info about them by making comments on this blog entry.)

I'd also like to urge readers to check out this promising exhibit: "Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson: The Twelve Days of Painting" at Flagler Arts Space, 172 West Flagler St. It's up till the beginning of July. See http://www.flaglerartsspace.com/

Here's another: videos by Maria Lino in "All About Water" at 6th Street Container, 1155 (rear) SW 6th Street, Little Havana. See http://www.6thstreetcontainer.com/ For info about the closing reception, probably the best time to see Maria's videos, try contacting Director Maria Amores at maria@6thstreetcontainer.com or Chief Curator Adalberto Delgado at adal@6thstreetcontainer.com Or perhaps if they have a chance they can post that info in a comment on this blog entry.

I've been away from Miami for several weeks, visiting friends and family in the Midwest, especially in my hometown of Shelbyville, Illinois. I just love to go back and visit. It's quite beautiful in the summertime. I have so many wonderful friends there from my high school, and I can check up on my email on computers in the charming 1905 Andrew Carnegie public library, where I checked out tons of books when I was growing up.

Now there's a lake in this small town (pop. around 5,000, when everyone's at home, as my dad always says) built by the Army Corps of Engineers, but that was not completed until after I went to college. But in all those many years since I have left high school, the lake has been a considerable source of tourism and revenue for the area. See http://www.lakeshelbyville.com/

So, now, in honor of Frida, here's my story about her from The Miami Herald, July 25, 2004.

FRIDAMANIA UNLEASHED

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Frida Kahlo's death at age 47 in Mexico, a milestone that has ratcheted the country's highly charged cult of Fridamania--one of Mexico's best-known exports--into overdrive.

"Frida is all over Mexico," says South Florida artist Carlos Betancourt, who in May made his fourth visit to Kahlo's home, the Blue House, in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan. "Frida is Mexico."

Kahlo's face already has launched millions of reproductions on such low-brow items as cigarette holders and mouse pads. In Mexican markets, T-shirts printed with her haughty uni-browed visage share top billing with T-shirts celebrating national heroes like Pancho Villa. Her fame has extended so far around the globe that a website devoted to rock music in Korea reports the existence of a "bluesy" rock band in that country named "Frida Kahlo."

Now a handful of new exhibitions of Kahlo's art in Mexico and several books about her famously interconnected life and art debut this summer and fall. They show that five decades after her death--and more than two decades after Hayden Herrera's biography of the artist appeared, fueling her rapid rise to popularity in the multicultural mind-set of the 1980's--it's clear that Kahlo's art and life still make for a volatile mix, more popular than ever.

Although death did not become her as rapidly as it did for Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Kahlo has a brilliant second life ahead of her as an iconic cult heroine for years to come, it would seem. Yet some art historians versed in the ways of Latin American art don't think all the Frida hype does justice to her singular, and for many years unsung, artistic innovations.

"I think the sensational aspects of her physical suffering and her suffering over Diego Rivera has been exaggerated," says Carol Damian, art history professor at Florida International University.

Damian especially admires the way Kahlo revisited the 19th Century Mexican tradition of retablo paintings so common on household altars. These folk paintings on wood or tin give thanks for misfortunes averted with cursive text and intimate narratives.

Yet Kahlo embellished this convention with her own spectacularly morose and magical brand of surrealism. Think of an ironic painting like her "Self-Portraits with Cropped Hair," painted at a low point in her relationship with Diego Rivera. It is notable for its cursive text and homespun tableau, but also for its acid yellows, cross-dressing identity, and for the funereal, languishing swirls of sliced-off hair. It is not a picture of thanks.

"There's a lot of history in her painting," Damian says. "This idea of suffering was very Mexican. She's coming from a very rich background."

For some, the background remains nearly as vivid as the artist's celebrity.

"When you go to any market in Mexico and you see the folk art," recalls Betancourt, "and when you see the drama in these retablos [folkloric religious artworks] in the churches, you see Frida all over."

FAMILY BOOST

On the 50th anniversary of her death, drama of her celebrity is getting a controversial boost from a family member. Isolda Pinedo Kahlo, the artist's 75-year-old neice, has written one of the new books, Frida Intime (Intimate Frida), which has been jointly published in Colombia and Argentina. In it, Pinedo Kahlo contends that the famed muralist and philanderer Diego Rivera helped his pain-wracked, crippled and suicidal wife die shortly before dawn on July 13, 1954, after she'd lain for hours in a partly comatose state brought on by heavy doses of painkillers.

But Isolda's claim has been challenged by Rivera's grandson, Juan Colonel, the Mexican website http://www.cronica.com.mx/ reported earlier this month. And Isolda Kahlo also has been criticized for using this 50th anniversary to profit from her aunt's name. This July she has also launched "Frida S.A.," a line of sunglasses, necklaces, and pashmina shawls inspired by the artist's signature flair for folkloric fashion, priced at $100 and up.

Memories of Kahlo's death have also brought new liveliness to the Blue House, home to the Frida Kahlo Museum, which attracts some 300,000 visitors a year. The museum, filled with Frida's artworks and her fabulous collection of Mexican artifacts, is located in the legendary lapis lazuli-colored home where she grew up. It's also where she lived and loved, suffered and painted from the late 1930s until her death from pneumonia.

This past May the results of more than $100,000 worth of repairs and restoration work to the Blue House were unveiled, and the Frida Kahlo Museum opened one of the largest exhibits of her work ever, showcasing 46 paintings, many of them her fiercely iconic self-portraits that bristle with not only her powerful charisma but also with monkeys, blood-red ribbons and her treasured symbols of pre-Columbian Mexico.

Still, all the hype surrounding the familiar Frida facts of glamour and gore--she was a lifelong cripple after being impaled on an iron rod in a horrific trolley car accident, she was the miscarrying and bisexual wife of Diego Rivera, and she was a flamboyant stylist who adored native Mexican jewelry, artifacts, and costumes like Tehuana dresses--can make it harder to take into account the elaborate legacy she's left for several generations of younger artists.

STRONG INFLUENCE

One such younger artist who comes to mind is the late Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), subject of a solo show now at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and coming to the Miami Art Museum next year.

"Ana Mendieta was very impressed by Kahlo's work and always went to her home when she was in Mexico," says Latin American art historian and curator Julia P. Herzberg, who's based in New York and has written a catalog essay for the Mendieta exhibit.

"I would say probably that Mendieta was impacted by the way in which Frida Kahlo created narratives through her autobiography, how she used almost exclusively her self-image, which Mendieta did in a very different way. Mendieta didn't use her face, as Kahlo did--she used the silhouette of her body," adds Herzberg. "I'm not saying it was Frida who gave her that idea, but I think this is a legacy Frida left."

In the well-known photographs from her "Silueta Series," Mendieta left imprints of her body in earth and rock, often inspired by the ovoid fertility forms from the indigenous Taino peoples of Cuba.

Another Latin American artist whose work carries links to Kahlo's legacy is contemporary Cuban photographer Marta Maria Perez Bravo. Her black and white self-portraits often show a tableau in which her body is being transformed into a fetishized object evocative of Cuban history and Afro-Cuban rituals.

"All three artists are using the body to find their roots and identity," Damian says of Kahlo, Mendieta, and Perez Bravo. "All of them have an identity that directly connects them to the land."

"The idea of self-portraiture has a very long history," points out Museum of Contemporary Art director Bonnie Clearwater, who published a book in 1993 on Mendieta's photography and rock carvings in Cuba. "Think of Rembrandt and van Gogh, who used themselves as subjects. The distinction is that women are taking charge of their own bodies, rather than being the subject of a painting by a male artist."

But it's not too far-fetched to see traces of Kahlo's precedent-setting self-portraits resurfacing in a considerable spectrum of contemporary artists, both male and female, from photographer Cindy Sherman's cinematic personas in her famous series of self-portraits to Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura's posturing self-portraits inserted into his reproductions of famous paintings by European and North American artists such as Goya and Kahlo herself.

LOCAL ECHOES

Among artists in South Florida, it's also possible to see Kahlo echoes lingering in a variety of work by both men and women. Damian says Kahlo's adaptation of retablos resurfaces in the paintings of Mexican-born artist Alekxey Sabido, a resident of the ArtCenter/South Florida. "He has a genuine sensitivity to the whole history of Mexican art," she says about Sabido's dedicatory altars to both the Virgin of Guadaloupe and to Kahlo.

Maritza Molina, a performance artist and photographer who's exhibited here at both The House and Leonard Tachmes Gallery, has made allusions to Ana Mendieta's "Siueta Series" in one of her own self-portraits.

Both Kahlo and Mendieta have long fascinated Betancourt. His large-scale photographs of himself are layered with hand-written text and lavished with imagery, from flowers to ashes, that convey a flamboyant sense of personal history and his own roots in Caribbean culture.

"There are so many artists that I think work indirectly inspired by Frida Kahlo," Betancourt says. "I love her cursive writing. This is someone telling her art story through herself and, of course, so am I. "

While so much of Frida's art and celebrity is entwined with the history of a life colored deeply by both passion and pain, the pain has led to a heritage that's passionately proactive, Herzberg says.

"It's clear that Frida gave a face to pain, to suffering, and she gave a face to death from her own vantage point, using her own body in portraits. I mean, when did we see miscarriage in art? So through a woman's body, albeit hers, I think she really took on and assumed a new identity.

"She asserted the role of female as agent, the body as agent. The notion that you can take on any identity opened up new ways of thinking about how you could portray your body, and what fictions you could assume," Herzberg says. "And that became a really key element for future artists."

It has been yet another lively time for artcentric folks in Miami.

It has been yet another lively time for artcentric folks in Miami. Even though summer is fast approaching, there is so much to do that it leaves me breathless!

Where to begin? First I want to say that I can’t wait to see “Sight Specific: Explorations in Space, Vision and Sound” at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale. So glad it is up through Sept 14 2011, which means that I have plenty of time to see it. For sure I want to highlight more than one of the super-duper artists in this show for my monthly Critic’s Choice for the fab Art Circuits website. In May for my Critic’s Choice I have highlighted “Cluster F***” by Gavin Perry from this exhibit.

That’s why I have posted “Profiles in Collecting,” my combined profile of Gavin Perry and Beatriz Monteavaro from April 2002 for The Miami Herald, on my blog post for today below.

I happen to like not only Gavin Perry’s art but his title for this work…as some people know, who also know that I am not by nature a foul-mouthed person, my slogan for myself at this point in my newspaper-less artcentric career is “Don’t f*** with me.”

Also I would like to say that we had a fascinating ArtTable meeting at Books & Books in May regarding artists from all over the world, in addition to Miami of course, who have worked with fabric and textiles, moderated by my predecessor at the Knight Ridder-owned Miami Herald, art critic and art historian Helen Kohen. That was our last ArtTable meeting at Books & Books until September 2011.

We need to take the summer off to plan for our upcoming third year of developing panel discussions for Miami’s increasingly lively and sophisticated artcentric community.

As we will announce later via email to the over 300 email recipients regarding our ArtTable meetings for members and guests, we have planned a “retreat” for ArtTable members, and for those whose membership application is pending, on Thursday, July 21. It will be a light potluck supper at my home—sorry, everyone, if you thought we had the $$ to go to a retreat on a Caribbean island!!

We are absolutely thrilled that Susan Galler, president of the Miami-based Galler Group LLC, has offered to guide us through this crucial process of formulating our goals for the future. She has considerable experience in advising an impressive range of nonprofit organizations in a host of ways, as you will see from her website www.gallergroup.com

She is one of the many fascinating people I have gotten to know in my post-Herald life. I see from my notes that I met her during an Arts for Learning breakfast back in February 2009.

Now back to Miami’s immediate artcentric scene. Anyone at Miami International Airport on Saturday May 14 will not want to miss this special event, which I learned about at the May ArtTable meeting. At 2 pm on May 14 at the South Terminal Meeter & Greeter lobby, 3rd floor, you can hear the 90-piece ensemble of the Miami Symphony Orchestra perform, as part of their “Music in Unsuspected Spaces” community concert series. At the Miami airport!! As I live and breathe!!

Also opening on May 14 is “Let’s Play,” yet another site-specific installation. This one is by Argentine-born artist Adrian Sonni, who, as I understand from the press release, transformed an abandoned Wynwood building into a 20 x 40 ft boom-box during Art Basel 2010. How clever…wish I had seen that! Now you can see more of Sonni’s creativity at work during an opening reception 7 to 11 pm on May 14 at Primary Projects, Atrium Building, 4141 NE Second Ave, Suite 104, Miami Design District. For more info see www.primaryflight.com

Mark you calendars for “Dialogues with Duchamp,” a sure-to-be-engaging discussion of the art and life of pivotal 20th Century artist Marcel Duchamp, with art critic Adriana Herrera and art historian Armando Droulers, at 6 pm on May 26 at Miami Biennale, 2751 North Miami Avenue, Miami. It’s free and open to the public, but you do need to RSVP by May 24 to to info@MiamiBiennale.org or call 305-576-2914.

Miami Artist Gavin Perry in Lively Show at Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art

[Blogger's Note: We have been again dealing with tech issues. This post was intended to be part of the earlier post from today, meant to follow the text comprising the post titled "It has been another lively time for artcentric folks in Miami." As we know, sometimes life doesn't go as planned. So readers who want the full impact of this post should read the previous post before they read this one. Clearly, I REALLY am a digital dinosaur! So why ANYONE would think I would have the audacity to blog about the future of journalism is NUTS!!]

Here is my profile of Gavin Perry and Beatriz Monteavaro from The Miami Herald, April 2002.

PROFILES IN COLLECTING

Collecting art and other things is among the most consuming of passions. Even making art doesn't make you immune from such obsessions--from Rembrandt to Matta to Matta to Warhol, artists themselves have frequently been struck with the curse of the collector.

"Possession Obsession: Objects from Andy Warhol's Personal Collection," a new exhibit at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, showcases the artist's wide-ranging taste, from folk art to costume jewelry to cookie jars. It's a particularly daunting example of how an artist's prized possessions can guide us to insights about sources and ideas within his or her work.

In South Florida, artists who have gathered distinctive collections include Cuban-born Jose Bedia, whose home resembles a museum gallery showcasing a rich assortment of African and Native American masks, carvings, and dozens of other artifacts. On one wall is an African mask once owned by Latin American master Wifredo Lam; the mask's stark profile often appears in Bedia's figurative drawings which spring from Afro-Cuban religious rituals.

Other area collctions are more quirky, blurring the line between artful artifacts and emblems of popular culture. Bruce Helander's surreal collages, for example, owe much to his stash of vintage sheet music and Bakelite radios. And a barely thirty-something artist couple, Beatriz Monteavaro and Gavin Perry, are amassing a vivid collection of toys--chiefly action figures and miniature low-rider cars--that has shaped their adventurous art.

Collecting "builds your repertoire, the visual language that you are using to build your work. You pull a part from there, you pull a part from here," says Perry, standing in his ArtCenter/South Florida studio next to a table of some 70 gem-bright toy cars awash in lurid pinks, purples, and shades of green the color of Astro Turf.

"I'm really trying to find cars that fit that California mode rather than a Detroit mentality," Perry says. "It's not about how a car goes, but how it looks."

Picking up a bronze and gold model of a 1969 Impala, he says he's intrigued by the aesthetics of what's "predominantly a ghetto culture, or more an urban subversive culture now being marketed to suburban kids."

Many of Perry's models sport the down-to-earth profiles of Chicano low-rider cars and feature "chop tops"--roofs lowered for a more streamlined effect. A gaudy model Chevelle boasts a hot pink interior and a black body that dazzles with pink, silver, and aqua glitter.

"This is insane. You'd think this is only found on a Matchbox car, but no, they actually make paint like that," Perry says, producing one of several books on customized auto bodies he culls for techniques on how to produce the "fetish finish" gleam of his abstract paintings, which are layered with the sheen of auto-body paint and the meticulously lean trails of color pinstriping.

In a stroke of off-hand poetry, the book identifies the paint as a "rainbow metallic flake base."

Perry's canvases have become shinier this year, thanks to an industrial-strength paint gun. And those paintings' garish glow has caught the eye of Montreal dealer Fabrice Marcolini, who saw them at Art Miami in January.

"What hit us most about his work is that it walks this dangerous path," says the Artcore gallery's Marcolini, who will show Perry's art next fall or spring. "It translates something that is kitsch into something that is fresh. That takes talent."

HERO WORSHIP

Monteavaro's burgeoning collection of plastic super-hero and -heroine action figures has also influenced her art. Her interest in the figures began during her childhood in Hialeah, where she was the youngest of four children. She devised solitary games about battling good and bad guys, preferring even the scant ranks of female superheroes such as Wonder Woman to "eternally boring" pink tea sets and Barbies.

"The only fun thing I remember girls ever played was Charlie's Angels," she says. "Even today in toy stores the boys' section is full of color, with intricate robots. The girls' section is all pink and purple, and the most exciting thing you'll find is a Barbie that tans. There's no action."

Teased for playing with boys' toys in the second grade, she admits that "I stopped playing with them too early, which is why I think I collect them now--it's like taking back part of my childhood."

Even early on, there was an urge to manipulate these pop culture artifacts, though the 7-year-old Betty, as friends call her, wouldn't have put it that way. These days she freely modifies her collection by customizing figures for her deliberately cheesy videos about bested muscle-bound villains and her surprisingly elegant drawings, examples of which are on view at North Miami's Ambrosino Gallery through Tuesday.

While the video has a funny, grainy crudeness that makes us look twice at cheap designs that are less familiar than we'd expect, her drawings are the real stars of the show. Her adapted characters bristle with crisply composed details.

Collecting is "a way to make your work your work, and not a generic overview of everybody else's," says Monteavaro, wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt and standing in her ArtCenter/South Florida studio, where squads of action figures cluster in neat rows on industrial shelving, like crowds of stars and extras come to life from old comic books and corny cartoons.

There's a clutch of lizards shaped like bloated, mutant pickles that she identifies as "Godzilla and his family of villains and friends." There's a pack of Disney witches gleaned from fast-food lunches, a tiny doll of Gene Hackman in Lex Luther's purple tights, and Flash Gordon with sidekicks.

TIARA AND BOOTS

Nearby, a vintage Wonder Woman picked up from e-Bay is clad in a golden tiara and red boots. Sandals would have been the historically correct gear, Monteavaro explains, though she approves of the error as it jibes with the kind of license she takes with plots and protagonists.

"I don't really think sandals are for superheroes," she says. "It seems to me like her feet would hurt."

Museum of Contemporary Art director Bonnie Clearwater, who included Monteavaro's work in "Making Art in Miami: Travels in Hyperreality" in late 2000, believes the artist's alterations give her work a maturing edge.

"She alters the figures so that they take on new characters, not just what some toy company has determined, and she animates them the way a child would so that they can act out stories of good and evil," Clearwater says. "But she makes us question our own beliefs."

In her solo show at Ambrosino, Clearwater says, "the story lines have interesting parables for today, and I think her draftsmanship is quite astonishing. There's a considerable strength and maturity."

With recent shows at galleries in Geneva, Chicago, and Madrid, Monteavaro's career is moving forward. Still, she and Perry must find work here doing installation jobs for museums, and she also teaches classes at the ArtCenter to make ends meet.

In a way, Monteavaro's collection has become more than simply a source of ideas for art, but also for the artist's personal experience. As a result, this assortment of action figures offers both artistic and personal subsenance.

"I think a lot of things are parallel to superhero and Star Wars stories," Monteavaro says. "There's the hero that goes through the struggle, and nine times out of ten they come out winning. This isn't just myth, it's life--we are our own heroes, we go through struggles, and we either wither away or keep going."

Miami Art Critic Elisa Turner Wakes Up

No journalist EVER wants to become part of the story she is covering.

But as readers will see with the story I am posting on my blog today, there is really no way that I could not become part of this one. And I never, ever forget how lucky I am to be typing my blog right this minute.

To write the story that you see below, I had to face many challenges--and some I am still living with today, including the post-traumatic-stress-syndrome that accompanies a brain injury. PTSD never really goes away--as I have painfully discovered, you just learn various strategies for compensating for its presence in your life.

After all that, it was quite traumatic to be called "too artcentric" for the Herald after the very terrific publisher, whose support helped me accomplish so much at The Miami Herald, left the newspaper to lead the charge for setting in motion quite impressive initiatives for the rapidly evolving future of journalism, now that so many newspapers are in such tragic disarray.

But first things first. Artcentrically, I want to say it is very fab that the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, 1650 Harrison Street in Hollywood, has an opening reception tonight, April 29, from 6 to 9 pm for its "Fifth All-Media Juried Biennial." For more info see www.ArtandCultureCenter.org or call 954-921-3273.

This show will be up through June 5, and there are many quite talented artists in it, including Maria Font, highlighted in my May Critic's Choice for Art Circuits. See www.artcircuits.com But here are just a FEW others: Loriel Beltran, Julie Davidow, Felice Grodin, Susan Lee-Chun, Kerry Phillips, David Rohn. I am hoping I will be able to highlight at least one for my June Critic's Choice.

Another impressive event on Miami's artcentric horizon: "New Methods," a three-day symposium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which will be "examining the practices of contemporary arts organizations providing essential educational and professional development to local artistic communities in Latin America," as the postcard I received at my home from MOCA says...still addressed to Elisa Turner, Miami Herald-Art Critic. It is May 4 - May 6. For info see wwww.mocanomi.org or call 305-893-6211.

I am so sorry that I will miss this, esp since the symposium concludes with a lecture by Dr. George Yudice, Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Miami. George offered me a very generous honorarium when I spoke to his UM class in 2010, and he has been to at least one of our ArtTable meetings. It was really a terrific class. They asked lively questions and applauded when I finished speaking.

I will miss it because I am taking a Memoir Writing Workshop May 4 - May 6, with the Writer's Institute of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College. As a journalist, I have to say I miss writing A LOT. I still have lots to say, and I am the kind of person who needs a BIG project to keep my mind stimulated, esp now that my newspaper days are over for good. Of course, I realize I am starting on a long and uncertain journey. I hope my readers will wish me LOTS of luck!!!

As every journalist knows, there is always a backstory. So today I am posting the backstory to the poem I posted on my blog last week. Via email, I have received very touching remarks about that poem.

Because I have made so many artcentric friends in Miami after this story was published on the front page of The Miami Herald, I thought it might be especially enlightening for them--for instance, Karla F and Jerome S, and, I believe, the fab mother-daughter duo of Emma G and Susan G. I also know that my terrific senior pastor Laurie H came to Miami after this was published, so she also might also find it interesting.

I really cannot say enough about how wonderful Coral Gables Congregational Church is for all of this community. Their music program is outstanding. See www.coralgablescongregational.org

And, because I always believe in giving credit where credit is due, I want to give a major shout-out to Associate Pastor Guillermo Marquez-Sterling. I will never, ever forget how he singled Eric and me out for a welcome from the pulpit when we came together to church for the first time after our dreadful accident.


This is my award-winning front page story for The Miami Herald, published April 18, 2005.

RECOVERING LIFE, SELF AFTER COMA

It was the water's spray that nudged me back, its warmth on my skin tugging me from the stupor that has robbed me of sensation, of my self, of everything. Though still only half awake, I realized I was sitting on a chair in a shower and that my close friend Iliana Garcia was washing my hair.

But the bathroom tile, a drab beige I never would have chosen, did not make any sense. Where was I? Why was Iliana washing my hair? I will never forget the weirdness of waking up this way. Then my dim awareness melted away, and I got very sleepy again.

Back on the morning of Aug. 20, my family and I were driving through heavy rain to take my son, Grant Smith, to begin his freshman year at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. We were on Interstate 70 near Terre Haute when a Corvette whirling across the slick median slammed into our rented minivan. The impact sent us spinning twice into a tractor trailer before we slid to a crumpled stop on the roadside.

My daughter, Margaret, hair full of broken glass, was cut on her right eyelid. My husband Eric Smith would be deaf in one ear for a few days. Grant suffered a lacerated spleen and ended up slumped in Margaret's lap, blood dripping from his bitten tongue. Riding in the front passenger seat, I was knocked into a deep state of unconsciousness that left me struggling to breathe.

NO BROKEN BONES

I had no broken bones and no obvious wounds except a few leg bruises, but my brain had been so badly jolted that the right frontal lobe had hemorrhaged, and there was bleeding in a few other places. A doctor likened the trauma to "shaken baby syndrome."

In her anxious phone calls to relatives, my mother-in-law Gerry Smith refused to utter the dreadful, hopeless word "coma," but there is no synonym for the state of utter blankness that engulfed me for those first three days. I could not respond to the simplest commands: "Squeeze my hand." Nothing. "Wiggle your toes." Nothing.

I had grown up in Shelbyville, Ill., about 90 miles from the accident scene, and as friends and relatives gathered at Terre Haute Regional Hospital, I became the surprising centerpiece of a strange family reunion. Only one person was missing: me.

NO RECOLLECTION

Sometimes, I'm told, I lay with one unfocused eye open. I remember nothing of this period. If I were to walk into that intensive-care unit today, I would not recognize it. Nor would I recognize the doctors and nurses who treated me there.

Still, because I didn't have a lot of bleeding or swelling, my prognosis was said to be relatively good.

On Aug. 28, my husband, a family-medicine physician, arranged to have me airlifted back home, to Baptist Hospital. I don't remember much about the grimness that followed. Ten days after the crash, my hospital chart characterized me, with what now seems gloomy frankness, as "significantly stuporous to comatose."

At Baptist, instinctively struggling back into the world, I was often agitated, a good sign. I constantly jerked myself upright, and friends stayed with me in shifts to keep me from yanking out my feeding tube. One night Eric even climbed into bed with me to try to calm me enough so that I could rest. I lay quietly for about five minutes and then began to stir. None of this I remember.

I woke up in the shower about 15 days after the accident. I had been moved from Baptist's intensive-care to a regular hospital room. By this time I was able to hold brief conversations, but my voice was faint, flat.

A friend told me that after he heard a National Public Radio segment about an idiot savant who could recite the alphabet backward, he visited me and asked me to say my ABCs. I did it but looked puzzled when he asked me to say the alphabet backward. The next time he visited, with a doctor in the room, he asked me to recite it again. "Forwards or backwards?" I asked.

I don't remember making this little joke, a spark of cleverness I treasure now, and there were other glimmers of improvement I don't remember.

"You had small victories all the time," Eric says. Margaret and Gerry were encouraged when I asked for something on which to write, only to watch me scribble across the page and then across the bedsheet.

When Eric showed me newspaper headlines and asked if I could read them, I always said no. Then one day, pushing my wheelchair, he pointed to a sign over the door: "Neuropsychology," mumbled my small, flat voice. What a funny first word.

As my grogginess started to clear, I actually had to remember who I was.

"Oh, I'm this person," I actually remember thinking in a flicker of consciousness.

About the time I could swallow pureed meals, I started speech, physical and occupational therapy, but I was too sleepy at first to make much progress. My handwriting resembled a jumble of gray threads. My disobedient hand could not guide the pencil. It was shockingly hard to write my name.

FEELING PUZZLED

This did not make me particularly angry or frustrated. Just puzzled. When I finally understood what had happened to us in the wreck, I absorbed the news as casually as someone listening to a radio traffic report: Oh? I was hurt in a wreck? I could accept the fact, but I could not quite connect it to me.

At first, I didn't even know I was in a hospital. I was just in a strange place. Even the concept "What am I doing here?" was too advanced for me. Within the peculiar logic of what was now my world, I don't remember being particularly frustrated by how slow and hard everything was.

I just found everything puzzling. Why can't I tie my sneakers, I thought as the blue laces sifted like straw through my fingers. When a social worker asked me if my house had stairs, I couldn't remember my home. Instead, the image that floated into my mind was of a white living room with hardwood floors, my childhood house years before my parents installed carpeting.

By the time I was discharged from the hospital on Sept. 23, I could read, tie my shoes and write my name. But my speech was slow, my stiff voice unfamiliar, and I couldn't laugh or scream. A glass of water felt heavy. When I tried to apply lipstick, I drew a clownish line of Healthy Lips pink across my cheek. The wooden pegs that seemed to be my fingers could barely type the most simple email message. Driving was forbidden.

LOTS OF PATIENCE, REST

I needed--I still need--a lot of patience and sleep. [This is still the case, even now. I know I am blessed to look as if all this had never happened, but as most of us have learned by now, there is a vast gap between appearance and reality. I HAVE to take a daily nap. Sometime just about every afternoon, I can actually feel my brain slowing down and shutting off, as if it is saying, "OK, Elisa, that is all the work you are going to get out of me now. Go to bed. Do NOT even THINK of driving." Of course, I have made huge strides, and I never lose hope that more improvement is possible. On days that begin with tons of rest, my stamina is greater than usual. But perhaps there are some things that just won't come back, just as my job as art critic at the Knight-Ridder-owned Miami Herald won't come back either, because KR-owned newspapers don't exist anymore.]

I had to relearn how to walk up steps, even how to walk in low-heeled sandals. [I even had to teach myself how to type again.] I was shocked to find that reading and walking at the same time made me lose my balance and lurch like a drunk. And I was so tired. Even now I have daily bouts of bone-crushing fatigue. I can sense when the gray, mushy weariness is coming, as if watching thunderstorms sweeping in from the Everglades.

After I came home from the hospital, I continued with out-patient therapy. I walked around the lake at Baptist and did exercises to improve my balance. I learned how to swallow coffee again, and therapists plied me with puzzles to perk up my sluggish fine-motor skills.

On Dec. 15, I took a driver's test offered a Baptist for patients recovering from brain trauma and was cleared to drive again.

Today, finally, my life is edging back toward the familiar. My doctor tells me most likely I will have a full recovery although it may take two years. I still haven't regained some 20 pounds I lost, and most food still tastes kind of blah. [Actually that's still pretty much true, except for desserts!] But I type. I'm writing about art for The Herald again. My signature seems a bit wobbly, but it looks almost as if it did before.

I still have some double vision when I look down--to climb stairs, for example. Because one of my optic nerves was damaged, my maverick left eye does not always follow up-down movements in sync with the right. Its pupil is a little smaller than normal, and for a long time the eyelid drooped, especially when I was tired. [This is still the case to although only people who know me really well, including Eric, can spot this outward sign of my increasing exhaustion. They understand then that it is time for me to sleep VERY soon.]

SPEECH THERAPY

I've recently gone back to speech therapy to strengthen my voice. I haven't completely regained my sense of balance, so I am leery of riding a bike. [Still true today, but what is that to complain about? I NEVER ONCE forget that I could be dead or drooling in a wheelchair, and that my totally terrific family could be dead too. Yes, I know it often seems as if the McClatchy-owned Miami Herald is on life-support, but there is nothing I can do about that. It is a sad state of affairs, no question. But back to my award-winning story from 2005.]

These days, I shiver when I hear a siren and cringe when I see news reports of a bad accident. But today, my family and I all feel blessed to be well and walking. Two months ago Eric and I flew to Indianapolis. We rented a car and visited Grant at DePauw. His lacerated spleen has healed. I didn't want to commit a mom's cardinal sin of embarrassing her grown son by crying over him, but it was touching to see him happy and settled.

Almost eight months after I had begun the trip to see my son start college, I was so lucky to finish the journey.