https://miamigeneration.com The Miami Generation Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:01:21 +0000 https://miamigeneration.com en https://miamigeneration.com/Main-page Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:38:09 +0000 The Miami Generation https://miamigeneration.com/Main-page <img width="2081" height="330" width_o="2081" height_o="330" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e7a2c6a240228895cabba031926927c8a0b195c1f9f87e5ff8fdbb190b8cab86/THEMGLong4x.png" data-mid="161722771" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e7a2c6a240228895cabba031926927c8a0b195c1f9f87e5ff8fdbb190b8cab86/THEMGLong4x.png" /> Essays on Cuban America artists who emerged in 1980s Miami. Juan A. Martinez &nbsp;→ The Miami Generation: 1983-2013 &nbsp;→ An Art Opening and a Generation of Artists &nbsp;Arturo Rodríguez → The Human Figure in th Art of Arturo Rodríguez → &nbsp;Jake Fernández&nbsp;→&nbsp;From Artifice to Semblance, A Few Observation on Jake Fernández's Landscapes.&nbsp;→ &nbsp;Demi →&nbsp;Demi’s Sun and Moon Children&nbsp;→ &nbsp;Maria Brito&nbsp;→ Chapter&nbsp; 2 Boxes, Interiors, and Objects: Assemblages 1980-2000&nbsp;→ &nbsp;→Fernando García&nbsp;→ To Fernando García &nbsp;Pablo Cano&nbsp;→ Pablo Cano’s Royal Ladies&nbsp;→ The Little Known Collection of Cuban American and Cuban Art in the Lowe Art Museum Professor Emeritus of Art History, Dr. Juan A. Martínez <img width="435" height="591" width_o="435" height_o="591" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/40149792b28af799224f21a02adb1c53e9b284790e70d790bbf4efb0c59bc8fb/MG-black4x.png" data-mid="165418828" border="0" data-scale="11" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/435/i/40149792b28af799224f21a02adb1c53e9b284790e70d790bbf4efb0c59bc8fb/MG-black4x.png" /> https://miamigeneration.com/Miami-Generation Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:38:08 +0000 The Miami Generation https://miamigeneration.com/Miami-Generation The Miami Generation:1983-2013 X︎ Juan A Martinez, 2012 A Cuban teenager from Santiago de Cuba arrived in NYC, where he would study art and become a prominent portrait painter in that city.&nbsp; His well-to-do family sent their youngest son to the United States to keep him out of harm’s way due to turbulent political times in the island.&nbsp; The year was 1868, the young man was Guillermo Collazo (1850-1896), and it was the beginning of Cuba’s First War of Independence.&nbsp; He was the first Cuban to study and practice art, successfully, in the United States.&nbsp; Others had come before him and many afterwards, but they were mostly formed artists by the time they arrived in the United States.Fast-forward one hundred years and history repeats itself on a much larger scale. In the 1960s, an entire generation of Cubans came to the United States as teenagers, fleeing political turmoil.&nbsp; They studied art in this country, and in the last thirty years have become a part of the narrative, if seldom told, of contemporary American art.&nbsp; This is particularly the case with the so-called Miami Generation.The term Miami Generation was coined in 1983 by the late Giulio V. Blanc (1955-1995), an art historian, critic, and curator, to title an exhibition of nine Cuban American artists he organized for the former Cuban Museum of Art and Culture, Miami. The term, which in my estimation applies to more artists than included in the exhibition, refers to Cuban-Americans who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, studied art partially or entirely in Miami colleges and universities, and emerged as artists in the late 1970s.In the Preface for The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban-American Artists exhibition catalogue, Cynthia Jaffee McCabe (1943-1986), then a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum wrote: “It will be extremely interesting to watch these Cuban-American artists during the next decade. As more and more of them become known individually beyond the Miami-Dade region, one hopes and expects that, as their works develop, aesthetically, they will retain the special bicultural qualities which permeate this exhibition.”&nbsp; This essay looks at these artists’ careers thirty years later and offers a glimpse into McCabe’s prediction and hopes.More specifically, the essay reviews the artists’ development, careers, and contributions to contemporary American art. They are: Mario Bencomo (1953-), Maria Brito (1947-), Humberto Calzada (1944-), Pablo Cano (1961-), Emilio Falero (1947), Fernando García (1945-1989), Juan González (1942-1993), Carlos Maciá (1951-1994) and César Trasobares (1949-). <img width="1400" height="1386" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1400/q/67/i/838f1e0c23e2fa05568e9901f50b7ce14992c3e7711cbbe407544ae11fd57ca6/ftld_4.jpg" style="width: 387.631px; height: 383.755px;" data-scale="80"> Today’s Miami--a metropolis, banking center, gateway to Latin America, and exceedingly multicultural society--began to take shape in the 1980s and so did its contemporary art scene.&nbsp; By mid-decade the Dade County government founded the Center for the Fine Arts (a non-collecting exhibition museum) and a robust Art in Public Places program. The former is now a collecting institution with a new name, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and a new building.The Cuban community acquired a permanent locale in Little Havana for its Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture. Florida International University opened its Art Gallery, today the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, and developed its B.F.A. program.&nbsp; Towards the end of the decade, the Miami-Dade Public School system, along with Miami-Dade College, founded the renowned New World School of the Arts.&nbsp; Older institutions such as the Lowe Art Museum, the Bass Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA) also contributed to the budding art infrastructure of the city. Art galleries multiplied, mostly concentrated in Bal Harbor and Coral Gables.&nbsp; Media coverage of art exhibitions and events was provided by The Miami News, The Miami Herald, and El Nuevo Herald, which published regular art reviews and news.The artists under consideration began to exhibit in Miami in the late 1970s and came to prominence in the 1980s, benefitting from the aforementioned developments and contributing to the nascent art scene. The growing political and economic power of Miami Cubans in the 1980s and the expansion of Cuban culture brought about by the Mariel Boatlift exodus of 1980 also played a role in the emergence of this generation of artists.Specifically, three alternative spaces, all in downtown Miami, proved essential: the Bacardi Art Gallery directed by Juan Espinosa (born 1940) and located in their former headquarters on Biscayne Blvd.; the Main Miami-Dade Public Library art division led by Margarita Cano (1932-) and formerly housed in Bay Front Park, and the Frances Wolfson Art Gallery of Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus, headed by Sheldon M. Lurie.On the commercial side, Gallery at 24, Forma, and Meeting Point galleries represented a number of these artists and contributed to their initial exposure. A major event in that process was the Cuban Museum’s 1983 The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban-American Artists exhibition.&nbsp; The museum’s leadership was mostly interested in exhibitions of pre-1959 Cuban art, however it sponsored a few significant exhibitions on the art of Cuban-Americans in the late 1980s and early 1990s. &nbsp;The works of art included in the exhibition are mature pieces that provide a good representation of what these artists were doing in the 1980s. To begin with the painters, Bencomo’s Insular Night: Invisible Gardens, 1983 (Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida) is his first series of paintings inspired by poetry, in this case José Lezama Lima’s (1910-1976) expansive poem of the same title, and are abstract representations of the artist’s journey from Cuba to the United States via Spain.&nbsp; Tracing the trajectory out of Cuba, that leap into the void, is a recurrent theme in the work of Cuban-Americans.Another major series of that decade is the Wind paintings, created in reaction to Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, on April 1986, and inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s (1863-1890) Starry Night, 1888 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). An outstanding painting from that series is Cobalt Wind, 1986 (Collection of Maria Justo, Coconut Grove, Florida), whose sparse image possesses a strange foreboding beauty. Bencomo’s abstract expressionist style contrasts with the taut illusionism practiced by the rest of the painters participating in the exhibition.Early on Calzada developed his favorite motif, the nineteenth century homestead of a white and wealthy Cuban criollo class, which he painted in a Precisionist-like realism, and turned into a rich and flexible symbol of nostalgia, ruins, and reconstruction over the years.&nbsp; A fine early example is La reja, 1979 (Private collection, Miami, Florida), of the nostalgia period and Planning the Eclipse, 1990 (Nova Southeastern University Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Florida) when the Cuban colonial homestead turns into ruin.Falero’s illusionistic paintings with collage like composition, where two or more incongruous realities meet were already well developed in the 1970s, as seen in major works like The Visit, 1973 (Private collection, Miami, Florida) and Meninas and Industrial Landscape, 1974 (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Mestre, Miami, Florida). In the former, Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) meets Pablo Picasso (1181-1973) and in the latter, Velazquez crashes the Industrial Age. The contrast between the different views of man and the world signal not only rupture, but more importantly continuities.To Falero, times change, but not humanity.In the 1980s, his compositions become more complex, as seen in Findings, 1983 (Collection of Dr. Nunzio Mainieri, Coral Gables, Florida), shown at The Miami Generation exhibition. In this case, the image is unusually foreboding, showing a bulldozer about to dump red earth on an unsuspecting Velazquez’s child, who holds one of a pair of metal feet, borrowed from René Magritte (1989-1967).&nbsp; By mid-1980s, he developed a series of expressionistic paintings where Velazquez meets Jasper Johns (1930-), like Mariana and Flag, 1985 (Collection of the artist).&nbsp; In these paintings, his Spanish heritage meets his American upbringing.Gonzalez, like his friend Falero, was an early post modernist who often appropriated historical art, particularly from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, to visualize his own experience. Nativity, 1979 (Collection of Hal and Susan Einstein, New York) shown at The Miami Generation exhibition, quotes the nativity scene from Hugo Van der Goes (1440-1482), The Portinari Altarpiece, 1475 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy), to symbolize his birth.&nbsp; On the other end, Sea of Tears, 1987 (Collection of Maria and Daniel Schleifman, New York), is Gonzalez’s somber meditation on death and the AIDS epidemic. His head lies, in the manner of Constantin Brancusi’s (1876-1957) Sleeping Muse, 1910 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), over a moonlit ocean at night. In the top part of the trompe l' oeil frame a drawn skull reigns.Macía was a multimedia artist involved with collages, paintings, drawings, prints, and books. He is known for highly illusionistic “Façade” paintings, such as Mascher Street Façade, 1982 (location unknown), informed by Pop and Graffiti art. He was also represented in The Miami Generation show by etchings, like Basic Colors, 1983 (location unknown), inspired by Renaissance and Baroque art and his interest in theology.In the early 1980s, Cano was involved with painting, collage, and book making. Cano’s La Sebastiana, 1983 (Collection of John and Lauren Oramas, Miami, Florida), a major early work, included in The Miami Generation exhibition, is a large collage presenting an allegorical and suffering view of Cuba as St. Sebastian(a). As with others in this group, Cano referred at times to his Cuban heritage through Catholic imagery.As the decade progressed, his work turned to assemblages of found objects, and then to marionettes, as seen in Florabel Marionette Theater, 1985 (Collection of the artist). Since then, his work has doubled as performance pieces and sculpture.A master of mixed media sculpture, Maria Brito’s inclusion in the exhibition, Woman Before a Mirror, 1983 (Collection of the artist), reclaims a theme going back to Titian (1485-1576), but from a woman’s point of view. She represents woman as subject, rather than object. More tableaux followed in the 1980s with the theme of self-exploration as Cuban-American woman, mother, wife, and human being, as in The Room of the Two Marias, 1984 (Collection of the artist), and Self-Portrait, 1989 (Collection of Arturo and Liza Mosquera, Miami, Florida). The latter is a curious assemblage of a wooden wheelchair, a dry branch, a armor on fire, and a small cage as head. Brito’s symbolic approach to self-portraiture invites questions and projections, but no definite interpretation.Lastly, García and Trasobares share an interest in conceptual art and engaging with the community.&nbsp; García was represented in the show by one of his most poetic pieces, A Martí 1983 (Private collection, Miami, Florida), which consisted of a mirror with the outline of the Cuban flag etched in it and reflecting a quote from an essay José Martí (1853-1895) wrote on Michelangelo (1475-1564) ,written backwards on the opposite wall.Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence, has been extensively quoted in Cuba and the Exile community for his political writings, yet García chose to focus on his least known line of writing, art criticism, which fitted perfectly with the site.&nbsp; In his brief, but productive career, García’s work showed a range of concerns from post-minimalism to works engaging Miami’s civic life.Among his most recognized pieces are Holiday Spheres, 1985 (location unknown), consisting of weather balloons covered in brightly colored symbols and floated over the Miami-Dade Cultural Center during its opening; 10,865, 1980 (Miami-Dade County Public Library, Miami, Florida) a collage using the local media to document the Mariel Boatlift in real time; Anti-Bilingual Bigot, 1987 an ephemeral installation done in collaboration with Carlos Alfonzo (1950-1991), offering biting commentary on Miami’s “language wars” of that decade; and Making Purple, 1988, a neon piece at the Okeechobee Metrorail Station, which is part of the Miami-Dade’s Art in Public Places program.Trasobares’s exhaustive exploration of the Cuban and Cuban-American popular rite of passage, the Quinceñera, was well represented in The Miami Generation show with pieces such as Les Demoiselles de la Petite Havanne, 1983 (Collection of the artist) and Quinceñera Club Kick Back Officer, 1978 (Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida, Gift of Richard and Ruth Shack). Using collages, boxes, and performances, Trasobares parodied these lavish coming out parties while keeping an anthropologist’s eye on issues of class, aesthetics, and the weight of traditions in the Miami Cuban exile community.By the late 1980s, these artists had kept a constant presence in South Florida through participation in collective and personal exhibitions from West Palm Beach to Miami, including the Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, the Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, MOCA, and the Center for the Fine Arts (now the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida).&nbsp; A look at the art reviews of Ellen Edwards and Helen Kohen in The Miami Herald, Rafael Casalins in El Nuevo Herald, Lillian Dobbs and Paula Harper in the now defunct Miami News, and the catalogue essays and magazine articles by Ricardo Pau-Llosa and others reveal that these artists were hot; individually they caught the attention of these and other art critics who wrote from positive to glowing reviews of their art.The 1980s rise of the concept of multiculturalism and the national interest in the rapidly growing Hispanic (soon to be known as Latino) population projected Miami into the national conversation about the importance of the Hispanic presence in the United States. This new attitude was partly responsible for a number of major traveling exhibitions in which artists of the Miami Generation were well represented. The most relevant exhibition of that decade was Fuera de Cuba/Outside of Cuba, 1987-1989. Organized by Ileana Fuentes Pérez, Graciella Cruz-Taura, and Ricardo Pau- Llosa, the exhibition opened at Rutger’s State University Jane Zimmerli Art Museum, March 22-May 26, 1987 and travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Arts, New York City, June 25-August 2; Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio, October 16-December 20; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, July 15-September 8, 1988; Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, Florida, October 5-December 4; and New Visions Gallery of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, Georgia, March 20-April 19, 1989. It included forty-eight artists and had a substantial catalogue. 1980s<img width="1200" height="978" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/2fc397dc23f9dcafea59b5556d848eafd7fbb7447248d063fd63d1bfa3944087/img20170410_09105904_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 290.045px;" data-scale="75">Emilio Falero The Visit 1977 <img width="1200" height="767" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/df1d8cadd2e1396e5bc8648ae41e06fd650e2f0bd94c9a7830f0255538ce81ab/img20170405_13024372_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 227.469px;" data-scale="75">Juan González Mar de Lágrimas (Sea of Tears) 1987-88<img width="1200" height="721" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/628a525ef30228265638274b97cc7e4312c60354711f956bb92bdf2dc24f3e44/img20170405_13042389_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 213.826px;" data-scale="75">Pablo Cano La Santa Sebastiana 1983<img width="1079" height="1868" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1079/q/67/i/7efe78c6316f094f7ee80e685479d415316ea5984033ba2d9796e74da547fca3/img20170405_13050894_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 616.116px;" data-scale="75">Maria Brito Self-Portrait 1989 In the 1990s, Miami grew in leaps and bounds and its population became more diverse. To the east, Downtown Miami doubled the number of its skyscrapers and to the west, new neighborhoods sprung up close to the Everglades. Migration from all countries south of the border continued unabated.&nbsp; All of this growth fueled Miami’s first art “boom.” The art scene became more diffused throughout the city. There was an increase in the number of artists making Miami their home, more galleries opened up, and the collection of art picked up pace.&nbsp; The New World School of the Arts, Miami-Dade College, and Florida International University graduated ever-larger classes of art majors, many of Cuban-American descent and who represent a post Miami Generation.The Cuban-American population continued to grow mostly due to a new wave of Cubans fleeing an economic depression that the Cuban government called “Special Period in Times of Peace,” but is better known as “el period especial.” In that rather silent and large migration, many of the artists of the renowned 1980s Generation came to live in Miami. In two decades living in the same city, these artists have had little interaction with the Miami generation, except some personal acquaintances. Interestingly, the art of both groups was equally experimental in the early 1980s, as seen in the artworks exhibited 10,085, an exhibition at the Miami-Dade County Main Library in 1980, and those in the renowned Volumen I exhibition at the Havana International Arts Center, Cuba, 1981. Moreover, both generations’ post-1980s artworks, as shown together in three major group exhibitions in the 1990s, are difficult to tell apart. In Havana, as in Miami, these artists were exposed by teachers, art magazines, and travel to the same contemporary artistic trends, mostly coming out of New York.&nbsp; The Miami Generation, however, draws more from art history, particularly modern and pre modern European art, and there are more painters in its ranks.The decade also took its toll on the Miami Generation in the form of the AIDS epidemic, killing Blanc, Gónzalez and Macía. García died of AIDS at the end of the previous decade.The 1990s began with an ambitious exhibition of Cuban-American artists, Cuba-USA: The First Generation, 1991-92, curated by Marc Zuver. This exhibition opened in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and traveled to Fondo del Sol Visual Arts Center, Washington, DC; The Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul; and The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, Florida.&nbsp; The exhibition included forty-four artists living in the United States (a few were deceased) and over one hundred and fifty works in every imaginable medium.The catalogue includes various essays and artist statements. The decade ended with another large exhibition of Cuban American and Cuban artists: Breaking Barriers 1997, which originated at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale and traveled to the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida.&nbsp; This exhibition of eighty-eight artists from different generations, mostly living in the United States, included a catalogue with an essay by art historian, Carol Damian, and artist statements.Jorge Santis, curator, Nova Southeastern University Museum of Art Fort Laderdale, was curator for the exhibition and has&nbsp; facilitated the acquisition by the Museum of one of the most complete collections of contemporary Cuban and Cuban American art in the United States. Two other significant museum collections where the art of the Miami Generation artists is well represented are the University of Miami Lowe Art Museum, which inherited the art collection of the former Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, and Miami-Dade College, which houses the Oscar B. Cintas art collection. The Miami Generation artists thrived in the 1990s with participation in many group exhibitions and solo shows in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Their bibliography and recognition expanded during that decade. Locally, new art critics and art historians began to write about them, such as Elisa Turner, who was then writing for The Miami Herald, Armando Alvarez-Bravo, who was writing for El Nuevo Herald, Damian, Cris Hassold, and others writing essays for exhibition catalogues and magazine articles.Art historian, Lynette M. F. Bosch was curator for a number of exhibitions in the Northeast of Cuban- American artists from Miami, wrote magazine articles on their work, and in 2004 published the only monograph on the art of Cuban Americans, Cuban-American Art in Miami.The painters Bencomo, Calzada, and Falero stayed the course, honed their craft, and expanded their attention to more universal themes. Bencomo’s abstract paintings became bolder in color, more complex in form, and sensual. His ongoing inspiration in art history, which in the early 1990s led him to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1598-1680) Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1651 (Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome), motivated a series of paintings on the subject. An outstanding example is Extasis de Santa Teresa, 1993 (Private collection, Doral, Florida).This large painting suggests the pain and pleasure central to St. Teresa’s ecstasy through the contrast of pointed and rounded, expanding and contracting forms. His interest in literature also motivated important paintings in that decade, such as Lear, Father of Storms, 1995 (Private collection, Doral, Florida).Calzada’s fascination for Cuban colonial architecture rendered in tight illusionism persisted in the 1990s.&nbsp; The cool nostalgia of his 1980s paintings, with their ordered architectural perspective, emptiness, and distant seascapes gave way to the more universal images of the Flooded Spaces series.&nbsp; As seen in two excellent paintings from this phase, The Collapse of an Island, 1998 the artist) and A Conversation with the Sea, 1998 (Collection of Mr. Edward Guedes and Mr. Ric Ryan, Miami, Florida), flooded buildings suggest the destructive power of the sea, which symbolism ranges from the Biblical to the ruinous state of Havana’s architecture and infrastructure after years of neglect.Falero’s realism became more refined and illusionistic in the 1990s as he explored new subject matter based on his Cuban background. One outstanding painting from that period is As We Wait in Joyful Hope 1993 (Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida), which shows Napoleon’s hat and boots on a decaying plinth in the foreground against a view of the Sierra Maestra mountain, famous as Fidel Castro’s base of operation during his insurgency.&nbsp; Inspired by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the painting is about the transitory nature of tyranny in Cuba and elsewhere.Two other memorable paintings of that decade are Resurrection 1994 (Collection of Juan Carlos LLera, Miami, Florida), a homage to his friend Juan Gonzalez, and Untitled (Redemptor Hominis), 1994 (NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Florida). Both are about suffering and redemption and rooted in his deep, Christian, spiritual values and practice. His deliberate, patient manner of working further slowed down his production in the 1990s.Brito, Cano, and Trasobares kept working with found objects and mixed media constructions and installations. &nbsp; In the 1990s, Brito participated in the Decade Show, 1990 held at The New Museum, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, New York, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, May 12-August 19, and inclusion in Lucy Lippard’s book Mixed Blessings, 1990.Both the exhibition and the book promoted a new and more inclusive view of American art. During the 1990s, Brito’s mixed media tableaux and environments increased in size and complexity, such as El Patio de mi casa, 1991 (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC), Whitewash, 1990 (Collection of the artist),and Merely a Player, 1993 (Collection of the artist). These works, which in the language of dreams and memories allude to home, the roles we play, and life’s journey have a haunting beauty.Brito also turned her attention to painting, developing a solid body of work on the theme of self-portraiture. In a style and iconography adapted from Renaissance and Baroque paintings, she uses Catholic symbols to explore aspects of her persona and life.Cano continued to turn garbage into highly imaginative art objects in the 1990s, and his abiding interest in marionettes and the stage reached new heights. During that decade, he introduced performance and music to his mixed media practices, which culminated in the 1997 performance of Animated Altar Pieces and the Pursuit of Love (both, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida) and at MOCA.&nbsp; The former, is about Medieval stories of the saints and the latter, is about the pleasures of love set in the 18th century.Cano uses stories and characters from the Middle ages and the Rococo periods to explore his own cultural identity. MOCA went on to commission sixteen of his marionette productions, and staged one per year to critical and popular acclaim. His productions are a collaborative effort between the artist, a playwright, a composer, musicians and museum staff.Trasobares shifted gears in the 1990s from his interest in Cuban -American Miami culture to the politics of the art world and later to a minimal phase.&nbsp; Museum of American Democratic Art: Tumbling Chairs, 1994 (Collection of the artist) exposes the competing forces at work in contemporary art, whereas Gestalt Chairs Studio, 1995 (Collection of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz and Jill and Janet Eaglstein, Miami, Florida), offer a discreet aesthetic experience.Towards the end of his brief career, Maciá did drawings and hand crafted mixed media books. Of the latter, Novus Atlas Coelestis, 1992 (Collection of Ruth and Marvin Sackner, Miami, Florida) is a premier example. His last series of drawings are exquisite in technique and rich in symbolism, as seen in Jacob’s Ladder, 1993. In a style inspired by Renaissance art, the drawing depicts six angels hung from a tree, in which the trunk is carved into a ladder, presumably reaching heaven. The drawing is a personal and universal meditation on death and spiritualty, not unlike Gonzlez’s Sea of Tears.&nbsp; Macia’s mature art was strongly influence by his interest and study of theology and philosophy. 1990s<img width="1200" height="1315" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/5d65355b3e6427d0b024b8ac83525d7d0a89710622a43514f87d0b34e5a0ea21/img20170408_10194458_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 389.989px;" data-scale="75">Mario Bencomo Extasis de Santa Teresa 1993<img width="1200" height="1201" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/9ad2857a61f07203f7e48f1bf5d162bdfce376d1bb55e49f53e8adde2fe610ed/img20170408_10214652_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 356.18px;" data-scale="75">Humberto Calzada The Collapse of an Island 1998 The big art event of the new millennia in Miami was the arrival of Art Basel. It made the city a contemporary art market destination, supported by satellite art fairs and a mushrooming of galleries, most visible in Wynwood.&nbsp; Accompanying the growth in the art market for contemporary art, a number of museums and large private collections with their own facilities offered a wealth of contemporary art exhibitions and educational programs.As the art scene in Miami expanded exponentially in size and diversity, art coverage in the local media did not. Only three newspapers, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald and the Miami New Times print regular exhibition reviews. Recently bloggers have picked up the slack. &nbsp; In the new globalized Miami art market, far from the heyday of multiculturalism and identity politics of the 1980s, the Miami Generation as a group has been largely forgotten. Two exceptions are Bosch’s aforementioned book, and this exhibition, The Miami Generation: Revisited.Its artists are successful thirty years into their artistic career as measured by awards, solo shows in galleries and museums, participation in national and international exhibitions organized around diverse themes, and representation in numerous public and private collections.They have also enjoyed critical attention, with ever more art historians, curators, and critics writing about their work.&nbsp; In the last decade, aside from the aforementioned writers, Joel Weinstein, Alfredo Thriff, Alejandro Anreus, Elizabeth Cerejido, and Janet Batet, have written eloquent reviews and catalogue essays of individual artists from this generation.The journey has not been easy.&nbsp; On the local level, there has been little institutional support and modest private collecting, even though there is a sizable wealthy class of Cuban-Americans in Miami from their own generation. More difficult still, has been representation on the national and international stage for any artists coming from an ethnic minority and living in a peripheral city. Furthermore, the high international interest in contemporary Cuban art from the island has overshadowed the art of Cuban-Americans living in Miami, which is perceived to be less “authentic” and on the wrong side of history.The artists in The Miami Generation exhibition&nbsp; continued to evolve in the new millennia.&nbsp; Brito introduced the human figure into her mixed media tableaux and environments and took on social commentary on human follies, as seen in Crop, 2004, Of Mice and Man, 2005, and the monumental As of 24-03-07, 2007 (all, Collection of the artist). Brito’s contribution to contemporary art is evoking an intense psychological state of mind or biting social commentary in her work.&nbsp; Cano has steadily developed more complex marionettes and performances.&nbsp; His introduction of dance in the last decade has led to more agile marionettes, as seen in Queen Marie Antoinette (Collection of the artist), from the performance Viva Vaudeville 2007 at MOCA.&nbsp; He also continues to make freestanding sculpture, like Lady Electra, 2013 (Collection of the artist).Cano has brought the tradition of Dada and Russian avant-garde theater up-to-date, imbuing it with his own sense of humor and the absurd, as well as his cultural identity. Trasobares continues to mix art making, mostly installations, with art education and curatorship. He is a skillful wordsmith with a keen sense of satire and an eye for pop culture.&nbsp; Two outstanding works of the last decade are Social Fabric: Old Pillows and Recent Money Works, 2003 (Collection of the artist), and Conservatorium, 2005 (Collection of the artist). The latter, shown at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University Museum in Miami Beach during Art Basel, 2006, offered a large installation of his life long interest in reconstituting money bills and making and collecting rings.&nbsp; The complex piece explores, among other themes, the fascination with cash and consumption in a capitalist society.&nbsp; Trasobares’ work represents a significant contribution to conceptual art with a critical social edge.The painters of this generation pushed ahead with their craft in what amounts to an act of resistance, given the contemporary art world’s hostility to such a medium. &nbsp; Bencomo’s color poems deepened the painting’s spiritual resonance and visual pleasure. A master in the exploration of ambiguous and alluring organic forms, his abstractions gained in density as seen in Cocuyos (Location unknown), or Esther’s Journey (Collection of the artist) from the 2003 exhibition Wanderlust at Elite Fine Art in Coral Gables, Florida, or became more contained as in Metamorphosis (Collection of Mercy and Juan Esterripa, Miami, Florida) or Medusiana (Collection of Carlos Serradet, Miami, Florida) from the 2010 exhibition Utopia: If Québec were in the Tropics at Beaux-arts des Amériques, Montréal, Canada.Most recently, Bencomo has done a series of works with a striking use of black and is based on Federico García Lorca’s (1898-1936) poem Poet in New York.&nbsp; The piece, Ode To Whitman, 2013 (Collection of Ana M. Bermudez, Coconut Grove, Florida), is a prime example. Bencomo’s contribution to the tradition of modernist abstraction lies in his evocation of nature in the tropics as a dreamed and desired mental space.Since 2000, Calzada has developed new painting series in his signature style of meticulous, still, architectural visions, culminating in a retrospective exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum in 2006.&nbsp; He expanded his 1990s tribute to other painters with new homages, such as Edward Hopper in Cuba, 2004 (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. William Thompson, Miami, Florida), with whom he shares an interest in the representation of buildings, clear light, and quiet compositions.&nbsp; In the last few years, Calzada has stepped into new territory with his series Reconstructing Havana, 2009-10 and The Fire Next Time exhibition of 2011 at The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami Florida.In the former series, he paints over color photographs of dilapidated buildings in Havana, starkly juxtaposing their ruinous state with parts that he has painted to look repaired.&nbsp; These paintings look towards the past and the future simultaneously. The latter series represents a radical shift in his work. Using an expressionistic visual language that at times borders on abstraction, he explored new subjects like communication towers, an airport, cities, and landscapes enveloped in fire. Two outstanding examples are Presencing, 2011 (Collection of Mr. Bruce Loshusan, Miami, Florida), and Last Call, 2011 (Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida). More than the Flood paintings of the 1990s, these have an apocalyptic quality and a totally new emotional tenor.&nbsp; Calzada’s paintings have made a unique contribution to the universal theme of the ancestral home.Falero’s methodical approach, finishing no more than four paintings per year persists, so does his detailed (sur) realism. In mid-2000 paintings, such as La maja y el tomeguín, 2006 (Collection of the artist), he began to juxtapose appropriated European pre-modern art with the Cuban landscape. The figures range from Goya’s majas to the Virgin and Christ seen against a palm dotted landscape, the sea, or Havana’s Morro Castle. Falero’s interest in a Cuban setting for European figures/traditions jibes well with the predominantly white, Catholic Cuban American culture of the historic exile. Falero is an early practitioner of post-modernism in South Florida, a master of appropriation, juxtaposition, and art about art. 2000’s<img width="1200" height="1212" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/ca9b7357fa29fa3c66fe3cb5ac46206970d5f0a35a3d1e4a5daf9cda76e531a6/img20170408_10262349_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 359.442px;" data-scale="75">Cesar Trasobares Queen Marie Antoinette <img width="1200" height="876" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/a6b70b548f4ebbf5336d8e54e9fe8d366ccc482c5d06423f972e4c964156b07b/img20170408_10272714_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 259.795px;" data-scale="75">Mario Bencomo, Ode to Whitman Homage to Lorca, Poet in New York 2013<img width="1200" height="1195" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/7ace4cb218403603aafa90d2c4c0e06f8d53bab03a05f13fdecfc1c2f35e8f47/img20170408_10281958_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 354.4px;" data-scale="75">Humberto Calzada Presencing 2011 To paraphrase McCabe’s statement of thirty years ago, it has been interesting for me to watch these Cuban-American artists flourish, as they have become known nationally.&nbsp; What is more elusive is the expectation that their art, as she put it: “[will] retain the special bicultural qualities which permeate this [the 1983] exhibition.”&nbsp; Then and now what is Cuban-American about their art is usually more implicit than explicit.&nbsp; One may have expected that first generation of exiles living in the epicenter of a highly vocal exile community would have produced a sizable amount of political art, but that is not the case.While some have made memorable works of art that refer to Cuban socio-political themes, these are few and far between. Nevertheless, García’s 10,865, 1980 (Miami-Dade County Public Library), Brito’s Pero sin amo, 2000 (Collection of the artist), and Trasobares’ e-niño, 1996-2000 (The Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida) offer strong statements on Cuban migration in the last thirty some years. Falero’s As We Wait in Joyful Hope, 1993 (The Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami), and Cano’s Once Upon an Island, 2000 (Collection of the artist), address the subject of dictatorship. Brito, Calzada, González, and Falero have presented the exile themes of dislocation and memory in their work.Cultural traditions, like Catholicism, have influenced the art of González, Maciá, Falero, Brito, Cano, and Bencomo. On this subject, Lynette Bosch wrote: “By mining the symbolic imagery of Renaissance and Baroque art these artists have recontextualized the original meaning of these Italian and Spanish artists into a vehicle for conveying their thoughts about heir identity and their experience.” &nbsp;Images of paradise lost, suffering, ecstasy, and redemption served to express their exile-immigrant experiences. In some cases the European Catholic mind-set worked at a deeper level than iconography.&nbsp; As González put it: The organization, presentation and sense of ritual in my work draws from my Cuban-Catholic background. My American experience has provided me with a cultural and historical overview.”&nbsp; This generation, as with most Cuban exiles of the 1960s, were of Spanish and Catholic descent, and this heritage runs deep in terms of their cultural identity vis-à-vis American Protestantism, Cuban communism, and Afro-Cuban culture.Another generational characteristic is the broad “cultural and historical overview” that an American education provided. Taking advantage of globalization, technology, and travel as well as the permissiveness of post-modernism, these artists drew primarily from American and European artistic sources rather than Cuban and Latin American art.&nbsp; Each artist has freely incorporated the ideas, styles and/or techniques of&nbsp; international contemporary art to develop highly personal, content driven, and well crafted works of art.García may have spoken for his generation when he said,&nbsp; “I feel equally as comfortable in all situations, American or Cuban. Some of my personal habits have been shaped by my Cuban upbringing.&nbsp; In my work, though, I have at times incorporated Cuban themes, but in most instances however I deal with more universal themes.”All of these artists have at one point or another dealt with Cuban-American themes, but more often than not, the aim has been to create art without a hyphen. As Blanc succinctly and poetically concluded in his Miami Generation catalogue essay, “They are Cuban, they are American, and they are something more.” Concluding Remarks<img width="1200" height="964" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/55821cb2525dd5bb86498b745ea03a9870271360d5ea3f9763bcdd1eaa479123/img20170408_10315901_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 285.893px;" data-scale="75">Emilio Falero As We Wait in Joyful Hope 1993<img width="1200" height="1222" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/7b212faa22a9831932daa1c16d4a18462ed66d7441940c4f13209600c8a27f0a/img20170408_10361454_web.jpg" style="width: 308.432px; height: 314.087px;" data-scale="65">César Trasobares Conservatorium 2005 https://miamigeneration.com/An-Art-Opening Mon, 12 Dec 2022 16:49:35 +0000 The Miami Generation https://miamigeneration.com/An-Art-Opening An Art Opening and a Generation of Artists X︎ Juan A Martinez, 2017 The following narrative relates to an exhibition, a group of artists, and related people and art institutions. My memories come with opinions and interpretations. They may not be accurate in some details, given the perversity of memories, but they are lucid. The significance of the Miami Generation exhibition lies in that it was held at a museum, a first for the artists involved, travelled to other cities, had an essayed catalogue (actually three, one for each venue as artworks changed), and it gave a name and early recognition to a loose group of artists who today are well known in Miami and beyond.. <img width="1882" height="1056" width_o="1882" height_o="1056" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/294812c7d8774a3f771ade84ae7ef900cf5c3bf39800324f2eb7d88a549d00c2/Miami-gen-cover.jpg" data-mid="165419253" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/294812c7d8774a3f771ade84ae7ef900cf5c3bf39800324f2eb7d88a549d00c2/Miami-gen-cover.jpg" /> October 10th, 1983-evening. Driving south on nondescript 12th avenue to an opening at the Museo Cubano de Arte y Cultura, I was thinking: “the Miami Generation, what a smart title for an exhibition and a group of artists. Seemingly simple and straightforward, although in the context of Cuban culture in Miami, nothing is that simple.”&nbsp; I arrived early, and there was still parking on the side street. It always surprised me that the building was a fire station before conversion to museum. It looked like a modest house, like those of the rest of this working-class neighborhood, except this one had no windows. The Museo Cubano… was a museum without walls for a decade before the City of Miami, in 1982, rented this building to the Board of Directors for one dollar a year.I walked into the entrance with reservations. Giulio Blanc was the curator of the exhibition, who intelligently coined the term Miami Generation. I had recently met Giulio, an up and coming art critic/historian, a bit aloof, but always friendly towards me. Although his choice of artists was solid and the relatively small museum allowed best for a limited number of artists, I was troubled that Arturo Rodríguez was left out of the exhibition. Like the rest of the artists in the show, he was born in Cuba, came of age in Miami, and emerged in the late 1970s with numerous exhibitions in local galleries and glowing reviews in the local media. He is very much a part of this group, and so are others, like Miguel Padura, Connie Lloveras, and the photographers Ramón Guerrero, Mario Algaze, Mirta Gómez/Eduardo del Valle, and Sylvia Lizama. &nbsp;I came through the double glass door into the main rectangular space as people were just beginning to arrive. As usual, I turned to the right, going to the smallest square room, which is where I liked to start. This was Mario Bencomo’s space and it was practically empty. He (30 years of age at the time of this exhibition) is mostly a self-taught painter. When I first met him, Mario told me that he became an artist through an epiphany he had in the 1970s, in front of a Mark Rothko painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His paintings in the exhibition were medium-size abstractions of vibrating colors.&nbsp; The title of the series-- Insular Night: Invisible Gardens, alludes to a poem by José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), as abstract as the paintings Bencomo’s expressionistic abstractions in this show were intimate, lyrical, and easy on the eye.Juan González’ and Humberto Calzada’s paintings were in the main hall. González (38 years old) had an MFA degree from the University of Miami. By the late 1970s, he had developed his mature style, inspired by 15th century Northern Renaissance painting. He was an early sui-generis postmodernist. His small, jewel-like, colored pencil drawings are obsessive in execution, exquisite in looks, and dreamy. He is the Guillermo Collazo (1850-1896) of Cuban-American art. Some of his late 1970s works made reference to Cuba, especially its landscape, such as his masterpiece in the show, Nacimiento 1979. The new pieces in the exhibition did not refer to Cuba but did continue to show his interest in portraiture and self-portraiture. &nbsp;Calzada (36 years old) studied engineering and is a self-taught painter. By the mid-1970s, he had arrived at his subject matter and visual language: Cuban colonial architecture, specifically the homestead of Cuba’s white elite Creole class of the 19th century, painted in sharp focus realism. The subject of the paintings and the empty spaces of the interiors saturated the images with a sense of nostalgia. They represent his version of the Cuban historic (1960s) exile obsession with “la Cuba de ayer.”&nbsp; The paintings in the exhibition represented a second stage in his artistic development--well preserved flooded ruins of the same architecture, such as tightly composed The Paradox, 1983. The new paintings were still immaculate, static in composition, and cold. The iconography of these, however, is more complex and the sense of melancholy less pronounced. In Juan’s and Humberto’s paintings the ocean often plays an important role, which I read as a sign of that which separates/connects Havana from Miami, the past from the present.There I met Marta Gutierrez and Dora Valdes-Fauli, fire and ice, which were the owners of Forma Gallery (1977-1985). They were the first to exhibit major Latin American artists in Miami, like Fernando de Szyszlo, Antonio Amaral, Gunther Gerzo, Rogelio Polesello, and Elmar Rojas. They also showed Cuban artists Cundo Bermudez, Mario Carreño and Guido LLinás.&nbsp; Of the Miami Generation artists, Forma represented: Calzada, Falero, Bencomo, and Miguel Padura. The gallery had a streamline and elegant interior design. We exchanged pleasantries and they informed me that Forma was organizing an exhibition of Falero’s works in progress. He took so long to finish a painting that the only way to have a full exhibition was to include them. “I’ll be there”I moved into the room to the left of the entrance, pass the reception desk. Like in the rest of the interior, the ceiling was low and the walls bared white. By that time a steady stream of people was arriving. That room featured Pablo Cano’s and Emilio Falero’s work. Cano (22) had just returned from the Maryland Institute of Art with a BFA.&nbsp; His space was dominated by a large black, red, and white drawing with a curious juxtaposition of a female version of St Sebastian in martyrdom on the left, a seated Madonna with an elaborate halo to the right, and a side view of a horse in the middle. References to Catholicism are found in this generation of artists, which I interpret as cultural signs of identity, given the ethnic and religious background of the historical Cuban exile. According to the artist, Saint Sebastian(a) represents suffering Cuba, which will be difficult to ascertain by just looking at the image. It is nevertheless a memorable painting, where Catholicism, Freud and exile politics peculiarly meet. Cano also exhibited well-crafted art books, which when opened showed three-dimensional geometric designs, inspired by Russian Constructivism.Falero (36) studied art at Miami-Dade Community College with the famed New Realism sculptor Duane Hanson, and had developed his mature style by the mid 1970s. He showed a number of his illusionistic paintings with collage like composition, where two or more incongruous realities meet, such as the marvelous Findings, 1983. Major themes are the past crashing into the present, his Spanish heritage meeting his American upbringing, andrupture coalescing with continuity. The allusion to Spanish art, and by extension culture, that often appears in the paintings, may be seen as an affirmation of his heritage and that of 99% of the 1960s Cuban exile.Going through a door to the left came a somewhat narrow rectangular space with Maria Brito’s sculptures. She (36) earned an MFA from the University of Miami in 1979, and had developed her mature vision by the time of this exhibition. In the family tree of 20th-century art, her works hangs in the same branch as that of Joseph Cornell and Edward Kienholz. The sculptures in the show, made of used wood and other found objects, immediately called my attention and lured me in their direction. The pieces emanated a ghostly domestic presence, feminine, but not delicate, and definitely enigmatic. Maria’s assemblages did not make reference to Cuba or Miami. My favorite tableaux among the pieces she exhibited was Woman Before Mirror 1983, which suggests a fragment of a woman’s bedroom.&nbsp; The work is mostly made of found objects and consists of a floor made of unfinished wood planks, a small cabinet, and a wall with worn out wallpaper, on which hangs various objects: an oval mirror, part of which is transparent and one can see small objects floating in space, a small ledge with two clear glass jars, each containing a photo of a monarch butterfly, and hanging from the ledge there is a hand mirror with the face (photocopy) of the artist.&nbsp; The cabinet has pinned on the inner side religious stamps and is lined with purple cloth. Inside are small hand mirrors with photocopies of the artist’s face on the reflective side and a shell. It represents a fresh, personal, and feminine look at an old and tired subject.Somewhere near Maria’s pieces, I would have hung paintings from Arturo Rodríguez’s two series: Exiles and Survivors, both of 1983. He (27) is a self-taught painter and draughtsman whose visits to the Prado Museum as a young man led him to become an artist with a passion for the work of the old masters. In time he also looked intensely at the work of 20th-century expressionists artists and movie directors. The Exile and Survivors series synthesizes both traditions. In these paintings, he makes angst palpable through the distortion of figures inhabiting topsy-turvy spaces. At the time, Arturo’s work expressed in psychological exactness the mood of exile and displaced survival, without an iota of nostalgia.Right behind Brito’s Woman Before Mirror was the entrance to a small narrow room with an installation by Fernando García (38). He received a BA in mathematics from the University of Georgia, and later took art courses at Georgia State University. Garcia was attracted to Minimal and Conceptual art, as seen in the pieces in the show. Luckily the room with his site-specific piece was empty of people and I had the work all to myself. This site-specific piece (in its physical location and content) consisted of a medium size mirror, placed in one wall at eye level, with the outlines of a Cuban flag engraved on it. On the opposite wall was a quote, written backwards in white chalk on a black background and taking the whole wall, a supersized blackboard. The quote was from the Cuban writer and patriot hero José Martí, about the art of Michelangelo. Seen through the mirror the writing became legible. What a poetic piece: minimal in form and complex in meaning. Its reflective quality and distortions offered an intelligent metaphor for the nature of historical and cultural memory. Although it has a Cuban theme, there is nothing personal or wistful about it.In an interview related to the Miami Generation exhibition, Fernando spoke of the elusive relationship between his generation’s ethnicity and their art.&nbsp; He may have spoken for all when he said,&nbsp; “I feel equally as comfortable in all situations, American or Cuban. Some of my personal habits have been shaped by my Cuban upbringing.&nbsp; In my work, though, I have at times incorporated Cuban themes, but in most instances, however, I deal with more universal themes.” &nbsp;The next cubicle belonged to the art Carlos Macia (32), a thoughtful being with an MA in Theology from Barry University. His paintings and prints made absolutely no reference to Cuban anything. He exhibited two different series of work. One consisted of various large paintings of New York worn out facades, some with graffiti or signs, and done in a realistic style. They were impressive due to their mural size, detailed rendering, and matter of fact expression. Carlos’ other set of works was small etchings drawn in a Renaissance like style; outstanding among them was Jacobs Ladder (1983). I liked its elegant and precise line and and that it was an original and quite different interpretation of the story. By the time I returned to the main hall, the place was full of people in conversations.Someone had turned up the volume. I proceeded to César Trasobares’ space. He (34) had an MA in Art History from Florida State University and was drawn to Pop and Conceptual art.&nbsp; César exhibited a number of works related to his Quinceñera series, an innovative artistic-anthropological exploration of this coming of age ritual that Cubans transplanted to Miami. My favorite Quinceñera piece in the show was Potentate, 1978, a multi layer assemblage representing the alpha male in such rituals. My other favorite piece was De donde son los cantantes?, 1983, a mixed-media construction with sound, which makes multiple references to Cuban popular culture. César’s carefully arranged assemblages are witty darts pointed at Miami’s Cuban pop culture and certain sectors of the community.Walking around I met Helen Kohen, the long-time critic for the Miami Herald. She greeted me with:“Juan, isn’t this a magnificent exhibition?“Yes, it is.”“Don’t ask him, he doesn’t know good art if it bites him in the ass.”Thus, joked my friend and colleague Sheldon Lurie. He was dressed all in black, which in Miami at that time was not yet the uniform of the art world. Sheldon was an artist and director of the art gallery at Miami-Dade Community College, New World campus (today, the Wolfson campus of Miami-Dade College). In a small awkward space in the fifth floor of the main building, he curated shows with essay catalogues of many emerging Cuban American artists: Luis Cruz Azaceta, 1978; Juan Gónzalez, 1980; Latin American Art, A Woman's View/ Maria Brito, Ana Mendieta, Elena Presser, 1981; Pablo Cano, 1981; César Trasobares: Quinseñera Works, 1984; Arturo Rodríguez: 1977-1987, 1987; Abstraction: Four from Latin America: Carlos Alfonzo, Jake Fernandez, Ramiro Llona and Francisca Sutil, 1988; Manipulations: Photographs by Roger Cutforth &amp; María Martínez-Cañas, 1988; and The Art of Carlos Alfonzo, 1988, among others.Four days after the opening, Kohen published a review of the exhibition entitled Miami Generation: Cuban artists in Transition.&nbsp; In writing about the group as a whole, she pointed out that there are references to Cuba in their art, even nostalgia, but such references are indirect.“There is knowledge of their homeland and some nostalgia for it in their artwork. That is true even though Cuba, per se, is seldom flat-out conspicuous. With each artist, the past is manifested through references to history, high culture, folkways, topography, architecture and art.”In contrast, Rafael Casalins, the food and art critic for El Nuevo Herald in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wrote a review six days after the opening entitled, Nueve artistas, nueve conceptos (Nine Artists, Nine Concepts) in which he rejected any references to Cuba in the current art ofthis group or any sense of nostalgia.&nbsp; After arguing his point of view for each artist, he concluded:“Maybe the best of La generación de Miami is having escaped tradition. To live in the past is always dangerous, especially in art.”Both critics are actually right. In some of the pieces in the show there were references to Cuba: one landscape (Gonzalez), architecture (rather generalized, Calzada), a flag (Garcia), icons of popular culture (actually Miami Cuban culture, Trasobares). However, the current (dated 1983) pieces of each artist did not make such references, with the exception of Garcia’s A Marti, which is unique in his production. I did not detect nostalgia in the exhibition as a whole, nor the influence of Cuban Modern Art, and much less the presence of Cuban exile politics. The connections suggested by Blanc in the catalog between the art of Portocarrero and Peláez and that of say Trasobares, Calzada and Cano are tenuous at best. Many of the Miami Generation artists were aware of the work of some Cuban modernist artists and liked it, but did not use it as models for their art.The organization of the exhibition into discrete spaces reflected the fact that these artists’ visions were quite different. Their biographies had commonalities, but their art did not, at least in any obvious way. The title of Casalins’ review noted this phenomenon from the get-go - Nueve artistas, nueve conceptos.The crowd that night was made up of young and old faces in a place where the old had prevailed. Walking around I saw Margarita (Cano) talking to Giulio. Margarita was the mastermind of the exhibition, a member of the Board of Directors of the museum, and the director of the art program at Miami-Dade County Public Library. Over the years she had organized a number of exhibitions featuring Cuban American artists. She championed their exposure.One of the most memorable exhibitions Margarita organized was: 10,865… A participation piece, June 1980. This was a rare political exhibition in support of the people who rushed into the Peruvian embassy in Havana that led to the Mariel Boatlift. It was also about the brutal response of the Cuban government to such events. The participants were, Brito, Calzada, Cano, Rodríguez, Pedro Hernández, Roberto Montes de Oca, and the filmmakers Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde. It took place in the second floor of the Miami-Dade Main Public Library when it was on Biscayne Boulevard. “In the exhibition space there was a figure of a man cut out of paper with sad eyes and placed on the floor. He was trying to jump a fence with barbed wire. … There were walls pasted with newspapers, which headlines related to the Mariel events.&nbsp; It looked like a mastaba. A short narrow corridor led to a very small room.&nbsp; It was a desolate place covered with heartbreaking photos. … I saw on the wall a white painting replete with nostalgia and multimedia drawings of impressive black, gray, and white ink. There was a small TV with a fixed image.&nbsp; Behind it, next to the image of the Virgin, were shoes, dirty shirts, socks and broken things. In the back there was a dump and the tyrant hung, all in a dry green. … Another piece consisted of a chair, a table, and a window. The window was close, the table was clean, and the chair was empty. All of it was made of wood, colorless and silent. In the back wall, militia men made of paper, without faces, watched house and sea. On the floor, broken up, some drowned men floated in water and many others were beaten.”&nbsp; The visual experience was disturbed by the sound of two musical notes in endless repetition. The exhibition/installation was visually/auditory stimulating and disturbing.Returning to Margarita and Giulio, I approached them and enthusiastically congratulated both. They smiled and Giulio asked: “Do you like it?” Margarita did not wait for my answer, saying:“ I am looking forward to your lecture.” Then Giulio intervened: “Come, let me give you a catalogue.”At that time, it always called my attention how people in an opening would talk about everything but the artworks on the wall. As I walked around the place, I heard shards of conversations like:--“Que cubano-americano, ni cubano-americano, yo soy cubano…”--“El es tu hernamo, ahora y siempre. Este no es tiempo para aclaraciones…”--“Gardel estaba comiendo mierda cuando dijo en su tango que 20 años no son nada…"As I started my last round about the museum, I saw the Scull sisters, twin folk artists. Better yet, they were consummate performance artists, without any knowledge of that practice in contemporary art. They usually wore matching loud dresses, lots of make-up, and were always smiling. That night they wore tight long white dresses with flower motif, red stone necklaces, and hats to match. I saluted them: “Hola Haydé, hola Sahara. Están acabando como siempre.” &nbsp; “Gracias. Jih, jih, jih.”After a few more encounters with friends and acquaintances, I had enough. The interrupted conversations in openings always left me a bit dizzy and uncomfortable.Before going out, I stopped by the long l-shape reception desk to say hello to Carlos M. Luis, who was standing there. He was a well-read intellectual with a passion for Surrealism and the director of Meeting Point Art Center in Coral Gables (1978-1983), one of the first places to show extensively the work Cuban and Cuban Americans artists. It was a combination of commercial gallery and meeting place. A few years later, Carlos became the director of the Cuban Museum.Meeting Point was located in a quaint Neo-Spanish building on Aragon street, presently the site of Books and Books. You entered through an intimate courtyard into a rather dark space.&nbsp; The first thing in sight was a magazine rack with a wide variety of art magazines in English and Spanish, which could not be found anywhere else in Miami. Next came the exhibition space. In one of my first visits I saw a signed small Antoni Tapies collage and a Wifredo Lam drawing for $150 each. Unfortunately, I let them slip through my hands. Carlos encouraged avant-guard exhibitions, such as Viva Tristan 1980, a homage to one of the founders of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara. It was what may be called today an installation/performance event, organized by the Villaverde husband and wife team mentioned above and Arturo Rodríguez, with the collaboration of Pablo Cano. “The ambience was achieved through collages, photos, prints, and postcards displayed with care; alternating with the oblique projection of a very short film, endlessly repeating itself, of a couple having sex in bed. You could also hear a loud speech about the work of Tzara in three languages, and a musical descarga,” wrote Norma Niurka, the theater and at times art critic for El Nuevo Herald.At the end of the reception desk I saw a small stack of the free Mariel magazine, which had a newspaper like format. This was the third issue of the magazine and was dedicated to Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902- 1991), who since 1978 had lived a more or less obscure life in Miami. He was one of Cuba’s most irreverent and innovative novelists and poets. This magazine published in-depth articles about Cuban culture and politics, and reproduced a variety of artworks by Cuban, Cuban American, and other artists. It had a national distribution, and I consider it still today one of Miami’s few Cuban cultural treasures of the 1980s.On the way to my car I crossed path with Juan Espinoza, who greeted me with:&nbsp; “Hola tocayo. Ya te vas?“Si.”“Para Tropicama tan temprano.”“Me leíste la mente.”Juan was an interesting character, who at the time had no driver’s license or bank account.&nbsp; This is way before people spoke of living off the grid.&nbsp; He was the director of the Bacardi Art Gallery, which was located in the first floor of the company’s award-winning headquarters building in Biscayne Boulevard. The space was all glass on three sides and had temporary walls to show the art. It was the first gallery to exhibit Cuban art in Miami going back to 1964.&nbsp; Juan was the director for most of the 1980s, organizing exhibitions not only of Cuban art, but also of young Cuban American and Mariel generation artists. Small catalogues usually accompanied the shows.The gallery directors, non-profit and profit galleries, the Cuban Museum, and art critics mentioned were pivotal in the development and exposure of the Miami Generation, as well as other artists.Driving home, I was thinking about the many young people I saw at the opening. That was new. The museum was created to keep the memory and flame alive of pre-revolutionary Cuban culture, “la Cuba de ayer,” and for the first time the old guard, who was in charge of the institution, acknowledged that a new generation was creating a Miami Cuban culture worth owing. In fact the exhibition marked the first anniversary of the opening of the building. It certainly brought the young crowd in. It was about time. As my thoughts drifted from conversations at the opening to the artwork, the diversity of the artists’ style and content hit me. The artists shared similar experiences growing up, but their artistic response to those experiences was quite varied. They did not represent a movement. I was also surprised by the variety of their artistic sources: the Italian and Northern Renaissance, Baroque art, European Modern art, and contemporary American art. Absent were references to the modern Cuban artists best known in Miami at that time: Victor Manuel (who’s exhibition the museum opened a year earlier), Amelia Peláez, René Portocarrero, Wifredo Lam, Carlos Enríquez, and Fidelio Ponce. Under the roof of a small museum in Little Havana you could see, with a little imagination and knowledge of art history, the presence of Renaissance Florence and Bruges, Baroque Madrid, Modern Paris and Moscow, and contemporary New York. “In this great future we can not forget our past…” sang Bob MarLey on the radio as I reached home. The Exhibition The next day, I sat to eat my regular breakfast, which in those days was pan cubano and café con leche. It took me too many years to realize this was a nutrition-free meal and it was time to change how I welcomed the day. Afterwards, I started eyeing the catalog. The preface by Cynthia Jaffee McAbe mentions that she would like for the work of these artists to retain “the special bicultural qualities” seen in the art of this exhibition.&nbsp; I wished that she was more specific about the bicultural qualities she saw in their work. In his essay, Giulio inserted the work of the Miami Generation in the history of Cuban Modern Art. I was skeptical of that assertion. I did like his conclusion and its implied open possibilities: “They are Cuban, they are American, and they are something more.” &nbsp; Next came the illustrations...“Daddy what are you doing?’“I am reading.”“I am bored”“Okay, I’ll take you to the park in a while.”“When?”“Soon, let me finish.”“Ivan, leave your father alone. Come play with Natalia.”“Never mind let’s go. I will continue when we come back.”Thirty years later, Jorge Santis asked me to write an essay on the trajectory of the Miami Generation for a commemorative exhibition of the original one, which he was curating for the Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale.&nbsp; Santis was a long-time curator of that museum, and the architect of its magnificent collection of the art of Cuban Americans.I began by revisiting the catalogue of the original show. On it, the exhibition title, the Miami Generation, stood out. It called my attention. Let’s remember that Miami in those days was not a city to be proud of. In May 1980, following the acquittal of four Miami-Dade Police officers in the wrongful death of Arthur McDuffie, an African-American, we had the deadliest riots since the 1960s. From April to October of that year we had another social tsunami, the Mariel Boatlift. 125,000 Cubans arrived during that period, some were common criminals and mentally ill, taken out of prisons and mental hospitals, and many dumped in the streets of Miami. And Miami was ground zero in the 1980s drug wars. “Cocaine cowboys” were fighting each other and being sought after by the local police and Federal agents. According to a 1981 front-page article in Time magazine, Miami was “Paradise Lost.” &nbsp;To appropriate the name Miami at that time was an act of hope and defiance.&nbsp; Actually, the Miami Generation exhibition was one of a few cultural events that in retrospect opened the way for a bigger and better future regarding the visual arts in this city. On May 7, 1983, the installation of Surrounded Islands by Christo and Jeanne-Claude was displayed in Biscayne Bay, putting Miami on the world cultural map. In 1984 the Center for the Fine Arts, today the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), opened its doors to the public and became a major venue for the exhibition of contemporary art. Around this time commercial art galleries and alternative spaces began to proliferate as well. The Miami Generation exhibition in the Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, also a new institution, was part of a cultural birth that acted as a counterpoint to the ugly side of the Miami narrative of that time.And then there was Miami Vice (1984-1990).&nbsp; This TV series beamed to the world an image of Miami as a dangerous, sexy, metropolitan border city of beaches, Art Deco, and postmodern architecture, all presented in pastel colors. This look was superficial, but attractive, and put the city upfront in the American imaginary. I will put this popular culture show in the positive column.From the Cuban perspective, Miami, which in the catalog is reinforced by having a map the city on the inside frontispiece, has other connotations. It refers to the home of the historical Cuban exile.&nbsp; It is not only a geographical location within the map of the United States, but a home away from home, and a state of mind.&nbsp; By way of duality, as all cities with large exile and/ or migrant communities, Miami points to another place--La Habana. Miami is the yang to La Habana’s yin. Miami is not Havana, but…&nbsp; Here Havana often signifies Cuba at large. The connection between Miami, Cuba, and this exhibition is alluded to by the fact that it opened on October 10,th &nbsp; the day that Cubans celebrate El Grito de Yara, which marks the beginning of The Ten Years War (1868-1878), the first of Cuba’s three wars of independence. By the 1980s, Miami was also beginning to carry its own weight as the place where exile turned to immigration, Cubans to Cuban Americans, teenagers to adults, and in our case students to artists.Twenty some years into exile, Miami Cubans reluctantly began to use the term Cuban American, an acknowledgment, new at the time, embedded in the title of the exhibition: The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban-American Artists. For those who arrived as children or teenagers, the Cuban side of the identity is based on narratives about family history, tales of their home town, admiring statements concerning Cuba’s natural beauty, stories about Cuban history, society, and culture, seen through the lenses of exile, thus centering on lost, desire, hope, and resentments. That side of the identity is also grounded in the perseverance of the Spanish language, collective self-confidence (resulting from the fact that the adults who came in the 1960s, their parents, were mostly well educated professionals or businessmen), and an attitude of being survivors, rather than victims, which seems deep-seated in the Cuban psyche. The American side involved the command of the English language, Spanglish aside, the experience of the American school system from elementary or middle school through college and embrace of this country’s high and popular culture. For the Miami Generation artists integrating into American life also mean the participation in a creative profession in the United States and being contributors to its diverse contemporary art scene. Already by the 1970s, the artists in question and their generation in general were at ease in both worlds, however, because of the Cubanization of Miami, the Cuban side seemed stronger.Another term in the catalog that also called my attention was “generation.” This word/concept is widely used in Cuban art historiography to study modern and contemporary art, rather than the more usual expression: movement.&nbsp; Generation is a looser term and thus more appropriate to study an art of multiple adapted isms. The same can be said of the Cuban American artists. The work of the aforementioned artists never coalesced into a movement.&nbsp; Although aware of each other’s work, they never formed a group or even met informally.&nbsp; They do not share any particular visual language or theme or wanted to advance any collective cause. What they have in common is a life story-born in Cuba to white middle-class Catholic families, part of the 1960s historical exile, grew up in Miami, and developed an artistic career here.&nbsp; I believe that Blanc also used the term generation to connect this group of artists to the history of Cuban art.&nbsp; The first part of his essay in the catalogue of the Miami Generation exhibition is a summary of Cuban Modern Art from the 1930s through the 1950s using the generational concept.&nbsp; By implication the work of the Miami Generation discussed next and seamlessly in the essay is an extension of that art and history. A friend of mine, who at the time was part of the museum’s board of directors, told me that the reason Giulio included Cuban art in his essay and made a connection to the Miami Generation was to win approval for the exhibition, given the museum’s mission to show Cuban art from a certain period. Also, because the art of some--Garcia, Trasobares, and Brito-- did not conform to the esthetics the board was familiar with. I think both reasons do not exclude each other. Giulio had a strong interest in Cuban Modern Art of the Republican period (1902– 1959) and believed these artists were connected more or less to that tradition, especially its cosmopolitanism. An aside, I wonder to what extend Giulio and I developed an attraction to Cuban art of the Republican period because of living in Miami exposed to pre-revolutionary Cuban culture and the identity/nostalgia issues that went with it. Giulio also grew up looking at a premier collection of Cuban Modern Art owed by his parents. The Catalogue &nbsp; Two years before the Miami Generation exhibition, César Trasobares introduced me to Ana Mendieta at an opening in the Frances Wolfson Art Gallery, where she was part of a three- person exhibition. As immigrants or exiles from the same country often do when they first meet each other, her first question was:“De donde eres?”“De Jaruco”She gave me a sly smile, paused, and told me that she recently did a piece in a cave at the Escaleras de Jaruco. Las escaleras… is a chain of limestone hills adjacent to my native town. Her carvings there are considered a major work in her production. In our brief conversation, she mentioned that she met a group of young Cuban artists working in Havana, who were doing pretty exciting work. I did not pay much attention to that information and did not get to know their work until 1989, during my first visit to Cuba. For most of the 1980s, young artists working in Havana and in Miami were not aware of each other. Nevertheless, a comparison of both groups I believe sheds light on the Miami Generation by way of contrast.In the early 1980s, a new generation of artists was emerging in Havana: José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, José Manuel Fors, Flavio Garciandía, Israel Leon, Rogelio López Marín, aka Gory, Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Tomás Sánchez, Leandro Soto, and Rubén Torres Llorca (to mention only those associated with the historic Volumen I art exhibition held in Havana in 1981). Like the Miami Generation these artists broke with Cuban artistic traditions and represented a restless and dynamic group, whose strength lied in their diversity. There, the similarities end. The Havana 1980s generation emerged in an artistic context that included strong state support for the arts, that valued cooperation among artists, had no art market, and had a tradition of artists gathering in endless conversations. The Miami Generation emerged without institutional support, except for the exhibition in question. They came on the scene when the art market began to grow in Miami as the number of galleries increased, the culture was/is one of competition and individualism. Another characteristic of their formation is that the city had no tradition of artistic gatherings. Miami did not have a center with cafes where people gravitated to meet and converse.&nbsp; The art departments in the colleges and universities seemingly did not encourage after class meetings and discussions. The Miami Generation came together only at art openings and there was a soft sense of comradely.Most of the artists of Cuba’s 1980s Generation (Volumen I and post Volumen I) left the island in the early 1990s, during the beginning of that decade’s depression, known as the Periodo Especial. Many ended up living in Miami up until today. Once in Miami each artist kept more and more to himself/herself, their art became less experimental, more product oriented, and less Cuban centered. Interestingly these artists have been working in Miami for at least twenty years and have produced their best works in this city, and yet they are still talked about in relation to Cuba.In regards to the art of these two groups, one important difference is their artistic sources. Whereas the Cuban Americans, as I have just observed, were inspired by a wide variety of sources from different historical periods and places, the Cubans were mostly appropriating contemporary art from New York. Why were most of the Cuban Americans so open to European historical art or even American art from the 50s and 60s?&nbsp; Was it due to their artistic formation in American universities, sitting in art history classes seeing color slides of a wide range of European and American art, and looking/reading the accompanying textbooks? Was it their ability to visit museums in the US and Europe at will? Was it their exile mentality that opened them to look at the art of the past as well as the present? Probably it is a combination of these and other factors. In general, the Cuban Americans were also more conservative in the use of media. Many opted for painting, mixed-media/found objects sculpture, and straight photography. Only García and to some extent Trasobares practiced conceptual and performance art.&nbsp; Through contact with visiting artist from the United States and Europe, and the acquisition of a trickle of art magazines and books that streamed into Cuba, the Havana 1980s Generation was strongly influenced by Arte Povera, Minimal, Conceptual, and Performance art. To a lesser degree by abstraction and Pop art as well. There was strong desire to be up to date on new developments, as it often happens when artists feel isolated.Given their different upbringing and social realities, each group of artists explored dissimilar themes.&nbsp; In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Miami Generation main themes were art as aesthetic experience, social commentary, memory, and above all personal identity; the Havana 1980s Generation were concerned with the idea of revolution/utopia, popular culture, and interestingly, given their atheist upbringing, non-western religions and mysticism. In Cuban art of the 1940s Afro-Cuban and Catholic religious subjects existed side-by-side in tension. Interest in these subjects disappeared in the next decades as artists turned their attention to other issues. The exception was Wifredo Lam, who continued to find inspiration in Afro-Cuban culture for the rest of his career, and Manuel Mendive, who has consistently explored Afro-Cuban subjects since the late 1960s.&nbsp; A number of artists of Havana’s 1980s generation recovered the subject of Afro-Cuban religions, however, their interest went beyond national identity (as it was the case in the 1930s and 1940s) and had a more universal ring to it.&nbsp; Some of the artists of the Miami Generation used Catholic symbols as part of an assertion of personal identity based on their Spanish Catholic background, in counterpoint to the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in which they came to live.Another difference in themes between these two generations that calls my attention is the interest on the part of Cuban American artists for self-portraiture.&nbsp; I believe that the conspicuous individualism found in the United States does not alone explain this phenomenon. Self-portraiture, an under studied subject, combines observation and imagination to project a persona. Among the varied postures promoted by self-portraiture, the one shared by the Cuban American artists in question is one of emotional and psychological self-scrutiny. It may be described as a search for personal identity and affirmation of such an identity. The condition of exile and/or immigration puts into question personal and cultural identity when confronted with a new society and culture. There is a process of deconstructing and reconstructing one’s identity to negotiate a new and different reality, which calls into question who you are and where you came from.&nbsp; It is also about making yourself visible and confident in the new environment. This I believe is the major motivation for the symbolic self-portraits of González, Brito, and Ana Mendieta, and the existential ones of Rodríguez and Luis Cruz Azaceta.Maybe because of their very different trajectories and probably also because of artistic and tribal jealousies, Havana’s and Miami’s 80s Generation have not mixed.&nbsp; At most they have exhibited together in a few occasions and some individuals have developed personal relationships. They exhibited together in the 1990s at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the former Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, and the Lowe Art Museum in shows curated by Jorge Santis, Ileana Fuentes, and myself respectively.Closer to home, the Miami Generation shared the stage in the 1980s with the Mariel Generation. In August 1983, the same year of the Miami Generation exhibition, the Mariel Generation had their official debut in an exhibition at Tamiami Park, entitled Festival de las Artes. It included a large number of artists, not all marielitos: Juan Abreu Felippe, Carlos Jose Alfonzo, Angel Luis Balmaseda, Juan Boza, Ernesto Briel, Odilia Casañas, Jose Chiu-Suarez, Nelson Curras, Ronald Curras, Pedro Damian, Humberto Dionisio, Manuel Fernandez, Denise Ferrera, Gilberto Marino Garcia, Victor Gómez, Carlos Gonzalez, Felix Gonzalez, Jorge Alberto Gonzalez, Oscar Hernandez Pizarro, Oscar L. Herrera, Juan de Lara, Laura Luna del Campillo, Eduardo Michaelsen, Eliel Milian, Orestes Miqueli, Luis Molina, Victor M. Navarrete, Hector Nieblas, Miguel Ordoqui, Luis Pardini, Luciano Raffart, Manuel Revuelta, Gilberto Ruiz, Jesus Selgas, Marcos Soneira, Fernando G. Trujillo, Andrés G Varelio, Luis Vega, Julio Venegas, and Raul Vilaboa Rodriguez. When I saw this exhibition, it hit me that a good number were actually graphic or craft artists. The ones that stood out for me were Boza and Alfonzo, the latter receiving national recognition by the end of the 1980s. The humble catalogue accompanying the exhibition had one brief essay by José Gómez Sicre and another co-authored by Juan Espinoza and Dr. Nuncio Mainieri.&nbsp; The Mariel Generation artists also practiced diverse styles and used a variety of subjects, a few incorporating Afro-Cuban religions into the form and content of their art. Understandingly, their art expressed zero nostalgia. Again, given their very different trajectories, the Miami and Mariel Generation artists generally did not mix. Two or Three 1980s Generations In retrospect, the early 1980s was a pivotal time for the visual arts in Miami.&nbsp; As I see it, the Miami generation artists made a significant contribution to the emerging art scene in Miami and their art and legacy have withstood the test of time. I hope this collage of memories, which comes, as you may have noticed, with a tinge of longing, gives a glimpse into a moment and shard of Miami’s cultural history. Epilogue https://miamigeneration.com/Arturo-Rodriguez Thu, 15 Dec 2022 19:07:09 +0000 The Miami Generation https://miamigeneration.com/Arturo-Rodriguez The Human Figure in theArt of Arturo Rodríguez X︎ Juan A Martinez, 1987 The use of the human figure in art as a means of visual discourse on humanity is one of the most persistent tendencies in western art, even though it has had its ups and downs in the twentieth century. In the 1980s the strong return of figurative painting has renewed attention to the potential of the human figure in art. It is roughly in this context that l see the work of Arturo Rodríguez. Since his emergence as an artist a decade ago, Arturo has been partial to drawing, collage, and painting the human form with an interest in the exploration of the psyche.In his early works from about 1978 to 1980, such as The Prisoner and the Debris series, human characters are torn apart, apparently brutalized by their own emotional discharges and social pressures. The slashing marks of the pen or brush, distorted bodies and fragmented compositions reflect a violent and volatile humanity. These paintings and collages share many formal and conceptual elements with the 1930's surrealism of Dali as well as the later expressionism of Bacon.The images of disintegrated body-consciousness gave way around 1982 to a more introspective, but equally disturbing presentation of the human condition. In oils like Survivors and those of the Madhouse series, the human figure is rendered in a more painterly, descriptive and personal style. The characters' empty expressions, tentative gestures, blurred and displaced body parts express mental disorder as oppose to physical brutality. Rodriguez' view of the world and humanity's place in it went from torture chamber to madhouse. The artistic relatives of the characters in these paintings are the alienated figures of Beckmann's later works, the madmen of Gericault, and Goya's brutes; their human counterparts are to be found not only in mental wards but in the streets of his neighborhood.About 1985 Arturo's paintings underwent a change in style and content. They acquired a more descriptive drawing, richer palette, and a more normative view of humanity. In works like The Gathering 1986 and The Burden of Memory 1987, characters of all ages carry on improbable actions hardly acknowledging each others presence. These figures take on the role of Everyman, and their environment, which is usually the interior of a house or patio, acts as a stage. This view of the world and humanity as "Theatrum Mundi" still has its edge: Life is a theater of the absurd. In these works direct observation of nature increases and artistic influences are more diffuse; nevertheless they seem to pay homage to the Venetian school of painting in the brushwork, depth of color, and composition.These three phases are only the highlights of an incipient, yet very productive artistic career. Rodriguez has focused on the human figure to establish a dialogue with the art of the past and to comment on the present human condition, particularly its propensity for irrationality. From the early visual screams to the more recent whispers about an out-of-joint humanity, change and growth have been key elements in his work. In fact, his recent works (1987) are already moving in a new direction towards lyrical fantasy. As usual, the latest paintings emerge naturally out of the previous works, reflect human concerns (apparently of a more autobiographical nature) and open fresh possibilities for a promising future. <img width="1152" height="1522" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1152/q/67/i/fd16759e72321cb664bc005a5868e75182dc2637fb86f7d1a4a7b57b9067c2cd/arturocover.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 470.186px;" data-scale="75"> <img width="1112" height="757" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1112/q/94/i/fb23954f820eba937850d1e64e8eb0b77d57dedab04331f3bde25b08ddffd056/arturo4.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 242.269px;" data-scale="75">Survivors 1984<img width="755" height="1149" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/755/q/94/i/542c8028e8ad26d49bac53927992c1d9766287a637264bf92e2c847f396268ba/arturo3.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 541.602px;" data-scale="75">Mad House 1982<img width="959" height="1152" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/959/q/67/i/a6c6c19e5feb4963941b63eb3923e303a6692bbeb1e41f6292a63957d0c9902a/arturo1.jpg" data-scale="75" style="width: 355.883px; height: 427.505px;">The Burden of Memory 1987 <img width="819" height="1150" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/819/q/67/i/4da13750ad4820be01446b6f254a52e86358a6473ad161c680f45894639b3b1e/arturo5.jpg" data-scale="75" style="width: 355.883px; height: 499.714px;">The Gathering 1986 https://miamigeneration.com/Jake-Fernandez Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:01:21 +0000 The Miami Generation https://miamigeneration.com/Jake-Fernandez From Artifice to Semblance, A Few Observation on Jake Fernández's Landscapes. X︎ Juan A Martinez, 1997 The adage goes that some artists are like foxes and others are like hedgehogs, the first know many things and the second know one big thing. Jake Fernández has managed to be both in an artistic career that expands twenty years. Although trained as a painter, he has effectively used drawing, collage, photography, and video to create a multifaceted art. At its most ephemeral, his art consists of the use of aliases, actions, and selected objects in a neo-Dada spirit to dramatize everyday life. The other, seemingly more traditional, end of his artistic spectrum consists of an extensive body of paintings, mostly landscapes. It is some of these landscapes that make uthe exhibition Sites and Composites and are the subject of this essay.Jake Fernández encountered landscape painting at an early age while taking private lessons from Félix Ramos. The combination of youth and studying under a renown Cuban landscape painter must have influenced his early and lasting interest in the subject. Paradoxically, the subject matter itself seems considerably less important than how it is represented. In college, Fernández expanded his knowledge of landscape painting from Giotto to Gorky. Notably, he always approached the art of his predecessors with artistic inquisitiveness, rather that mimicry. Years of living in New York City after graduate school completed his artistic education and led to his first mature works in the early 1980's. Since then Fernández has developed an exquisite mastery over his craft (be it oil, pastel, or photo-collage) and over his own artistic vision He works in a zone between representation and abstraction, the study from nature (aided by photography) and the analysis of representation itself, illusion and mark making. Along these lines his landscapes may be divided into three categories: Sites, Composites and Fields. The first depict a specific site, the second are composites from a site, and the third are undifferentiated images suggestive of vague landscapes.The current exhibition of Sites and Composites pastels, photo collages, computer prints, and oils offers for the first time the opportunity to appreciate the richness and complexity of Jake Fernández's creative process. He works in series, which he begins by taking multiple photographs of a site, then reproducing and altering the photo-image (s) in pastels and photo-collages. The end result are large oil paintings.In the Sites series, such as Houston Street Garden and Deliverance, the original photo image(s) remain more or less unaltered as they are transformed into collages, pastels and oils. In the Composite series, like Fugue from the Bridge for instance, the composition of the original photo-mosaic is subtly reconstructed in other media. In both types of series the transposition from photo to collage and pastel, and then to oil is anything but mechanical. He reproduces the original photo image(s) of a site by way of a complex "geometric mesh" that removes and abstracts the image from its source. His artistic process is also far from mechanical as seen in the obsessive hand work that goes into his labor intensive pieces.At a distance Fernandez’s landscapes reassure us with familiar scenes of nature and on closer view the image dissolves into enchanting marks, making our nervous system vibrate. In a few steps we move from the known into the speculative. In the end, the blink of the original photo is turned into a prolonged and meditative look, a calming and rich visual experience. <img width="745" height="1149" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/745/q/94/i/0b31e2d2ea3cf32a4260e2129a70cb2ec504c27d93602d496b95bc25c6f8f220/jakecover.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 548.872px;" data-scale="75"><img width="1089" height="1113" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1089/q/94/i/911007105f7431955086e5a2d699a6ab9e8577f29b68277998b06cbc26598727/Fernandez--J.-Hidden-Mandala-oil-on-wood_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 363.726px;" data-scale="75"> Hidden Mandala<img width="900" height="556" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/900/q/94/i/460347fe6fb3f44360397e36a897311ca8c5fb388ac1ec7378f076524c94f348/3879574_orig_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 219.857px;" data-scale="75"><img width="1100" height="724" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1100/q/94/i/2e14e8590a8b2f6b5aee2b683ad4eb8094a8f8c7472df77b02f548fa5a85b138/Myakka-Fork_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 234.236px;" data-scale="75"> Myakka Fork<img width="800" height="800" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/800/q/94/i/3247b58549df08dabe4896d692da8b72bcadd4b005ef1c0251678ec71bb476ae/Dance-of-the-Strand_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 355.883px;" data-scale="75"> Dance of the Strand<img width="1200" height="900" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/1200/q/94/i/9a07e083cdc8e402890a66dcf52294259ca13e101dc44a7486a81eae9f127d61/fernandez-jake-Prairies-collage-Oct-Nov-2015_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 266.912px;" data-scale="75"> Prairies<img width="792" height="527" src="https://cortex.persona.co/w/792/q/94/i/f29e9245cf0ae255b6fe4991d92b2e5c575e61ddf787e2001c0452b63df4cc8f/Springs-pastel-on-paper_web.jpg" style="width: 355.883px; height: 236.806px;" data-scale="75"> Springs https://miamigeneration.com/Information Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:38:09 +0000 The Miami Generation https://miamigeneration.com/Information INFO ︎X Juan Martínez was born September 2, 1951 in Jaruco, Cuba, a rural town east of Havana. He died on October 11, 2020 in Miami, Fl.Dr. Martínez helped create the foundation for scholarly work about Cuban art. In 1994, Martínez published Cuban Art &amp; National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters 1927-1950, the first book to examine the art of the Vanguardia painters. He also authored Carlos Enríquez: The Painter of Cuban Ballads and María Brito, the latter of which won first place in the Best Arts Book category at the 11th Annual International Latino Book Awards in 2010. He was a renowned scholar who brought Cuban art to the forefront of scholarship. His journey researching Cuban art history and his dedication to education transformed a generation of artists and scholars. EducationFlorida State University, Tallahassee, FLPh.D. in Art History, Modern Art. 1991.Dissertation title:Cuban Art and National Identity, The Vanguardia Painters: 1920s-1940s.Florida State University, Tallahassee, FLM.A. in Art History, Medieval Art. 1977.Thesis title: A Study of the Sculpture on the Portal of the Basilica of Santa Maria of Ripoll.University of Florida, Gainesville, FLB.A. in Liberal Arts. 1974. Major: Art History. Minor: Philosophy.Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, FLA.A. in Liberal Arts. 1972.Teaching ExperienceFlorida International University, M &amp; M Campus, Art and Art History Department, Miami, Fl. 33199. Professor Emeritus 2013- present. Chair 2006-2011; Professor 2005-2013; Associate Professor 1996; Assistant Professor 1990. Teaching responsibilities: Modern Art, Art and Politics, History of Cuban Art, Latin American Modern Art, Methodology, and Special Topics in 20th Century Art.Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus, Arts Department, Miami, Fl. 33132. Associate Professor 1984-89; Assistant Professor 1981-84; Instructor 1978-81. Teaching responsibilities: Art History Survey I and II, Modern Art, and Interdisciplinary Humanities.Book, Chapters, Articles, and Catalogue Essays“On Walker Evans Havana Citizen, 1933,” Art on Cuba 20(December 18- May 2019): 48-50.“Juan A. Martinez and Demi- A Conversation,” Demi, New York: Skira, 2018“Modern Cuban Art: An Introduction.” Cuban Art in the 20th Century Tallahassee, Museum of Fine Arts, FSU, February, 2016“Demi’s Sun and Moon Children.” Demi: In The Eyes of a Child Miami, MIA Central Terminal Gallery, October 2015“The Miami Generation: 1983-2013.” The Miami Generation Revisited The Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, July-September 2014“Representing lo cubano: Cuban Painting, 1900-1950.” Cuban Art and Identity: 1900-1950 Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida. October 2013-February 2014.Carlos Enríquez 1900-1957: The Painter of Cuban Ballads. Miami, Editorial Cernuda Arte. 2010.Maria Brito. A Ver: Rethinking Art History monograph series. Los Angeles, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2010. (Peer Reviewed)“Wifredo Lam in North American Collections: A Look at The Eternal Presence, 1944.”Wifredo Lam. Miami: Miami Art Museum, 2008: 32-39.“Social and Political Commentary in Cuban Modernist Painting of the 1930s,”Social Realism in the Western Hemisphere: A Critical Examination of Art Between the Wars. Alejandro Anreus, Diane Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006 (Peer Reviewed)“Guido Llinás the Printmaker: An Interview/Essay” Guido Llinás: Forgotten Cuban Master. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Art Galleries, 2003: 17-20.&nbsp; &nbsp;“Los Paisajes Míticos de un Pintor Cubano: La Jungla de Wifredo Lam.” José Manuel Noceda ed. Wifredo Lam: La cosecha de un brujo La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2002: 425-37 (Reprint and translation of 1986 article in Caribbean Review)“Cuban Vanguardia Painting in the 1930s.” José Veigas, Cristina Vives, et al. Eds. Memoria: Cuban Art in the Twentieth Century. Los Angeles: California International Arts Foundation, 2002: 52-55.&nbsp; &nbsp;“Modernismo, Criollismo e identidad: el romancero guajiro de Carlos Enríquez (1934-43)” Estudios 19 (Caracas, enero-julio, 2002):209-226. (Peer Reviewed)“Carlos Enríquez y sus declaraciones artísticas sobre el romancero guajiro,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, 3-4(La Habana, julio-diciembre, 2000): 24-29.“Lo Blanco-Criollo as lo Cubano: The Symbolization of a Cuban National Identity in Modernist Painting of the 1940s.” Damian J. Fernandez and Madeline Cámara eds. Cuba, the Elusive Nation. Interpretations of National Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000: 277-291. (Peer Reviewed)“Cuban Painting in the Republican Period,1902-1959.” Cuba-A History in Art. Daytona Beach: The Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1997.“The Invisible Modernism: Early Twentieth Century Latin American Vanguard Art.” Art Nexus. 24 (Bogotá, April-June 1997) (Peer Reviewed)&nbsp; &nbsp;“The Group Los Once and Cuban art in the 1950s.” Guido Llinás and Los Once After Cuba. Miami: The Art Museum at Florida International University, 1997“Una introdución a la pintura cubana moderna, 1927-1950.” Cuba: Siglo XX, Modernidad y Sincretismo. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 1996. (Peer Reviewed)"Antonia Eiriz in Retrospect." Antonia Eiriz.Fort Lauderdale: Museum of Art, 1995.Some Observations on Arturo Rodríguez's Life and Paintings." Crossings. Fort Lauderdale: Museum of Art, 1994.Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-50. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. (Peer Reviewed)&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;"Cuban Vanguard Painting in the 1930s." Latin American Art. 2 (Arizona: Spring 1993): 36-39. (Peer Reviewed)&nbsp; &nbsp;"A Preliminary Study of Agustín Fernández' Formative Phase," Agustín Fernández: A Retrospective. Miami: The Art Museum at Florida International University, 1992."Afrocubans and National Identity, Modern Cuban Painting: 1920s-1940s." Athanor XI. (Tallahassee: Florida State University, FL 1992): 70-75 (Peer Reviewed)"Modernism, Tradition, and Nationalism: Carlos Enríquez' 'El Rapto de las Mulatas'." Caribbean Studies. 1-2 (San Juan PR: Summer 1989): 101-111 (Peer Reviewed)"The Mythical Landscapes of a Cuban Painter: Wifredo Lam's 'La Jungla'." Caribbean Review. 2 (Miami: Florida International University, 1986): 32-36 (Peer Reviewed)Exhibitions and Book Reviews&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Andrea O’Reilly Herrera. Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora, Latino Studies (submitted)Alejandro Anreus. Orozco in Gringoland. Art Journal vol.62 no.1, Spring 2003Lynette M.F. Bosch. Ernesto Barreda, 1946-1996. Art Nexus No. 23, January-March, 1997Edward Lucie-Smith. Latin American Art and Marta Traba. Art of Latin America 1900-1980 Hispanic-American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 2, May 1996Luis Camnitzer. New Art of Cuba. Art Nexus No. 14, October-December 1994The Studio Museum in Harlem. Wifredo Lam and his Contemporaries 1938-1952. Art Nexus. No. 57, January-March 1994Catalogue and Encyclopedia EntriesChristie’s Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I and II) New York, NY. November 15 and 16, 2005 (Entry: Wifredo Lam)Christie’s Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I and II) New York, NY. May 25 and 26, 2005 (Entry: Wifredo Lam)Encyclopedia of Cuba (2 vols.) Luis Martínez Fernández, D.H. Figueredo, &amp; Louis Pérez Jr. Eds. Westport, CT: The Oryx Press, 2003. (Entries: Carlos Enríquez, Wifredo Lam, Víctor Manuel, Amelia Pélaez, and Fidelio Ponce)Christie’s Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I and II) New York, NY. May 28 &amp; 29, 1997 (Entries: Mario Carreño, Mirta Cerra, and Rene Portocarrero)Christie’s Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I) New York, NY. May 15, 1996. (Entries: Mario Carreño and Fidelio Ponce)Christie's Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I &amp; II) New York, NY. November 21, 1995. (Entries: Mario Carreño, Carlos Enríquez, Víctor Manuel, and René Portocarrero).Christie's Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I) New York, NY. May 16, 1995. (Entries: Mario Carreño and Mariano Rodríguez).Selected Papers Presented in Professional Conferences and Invited Lectures&nbsp; &nbsp;Wifredo Lam, entre el Caribe y Europa Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico, October 30th, 2008&nbsp; &nbsp;Cuban Art in Miami since 2000 Cuban Art Today Symposium, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, April 10, 2008.The Artistic Vanguard in Cuba, 1920s-1940s Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, Canada, April 2, 2008Beyond Picasso and Afro-Cuban Culture: Wifredo Lam’s The Eternal Presence, 1944 Wifredo Lam in North America, Miami Art Museum, Florida, February 10, 2008Maria Brito’s Symbolic Interiors and the Cuban-American Experience Siglo XXI, Latino Research into the 21st Century, University of Texas at Austin, TX. January 27-30, 2005 (Peer Reviewed)Primitivism from Within, Aspects of the Life and Work of Wifredo Lam and Carlos Enríquez. Conference on Caribbean Visual Culture. Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University, New York, April 24-25, 2003 (Peer Reviewed)La representación de una cultura blanco-criolla en la pintura moderna cubana de la década del 1940 Centenario del Natalicio de Wifredo Lam (a conference on the occasion of Lam’s centennial birthday)) Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, La Habana, Cuba. December 10, 2002 (Peer Reviewed)Afrocubanismo, Criollismo, Barroquismo y Lo Cubano en la pintura del período republicano. Latin American Studies Association, XXIII International Congress, Washington D.C., September 7, 2001 (Peer Reviewed)Cuban Colonial and Republican Art: Thematic Continuities. Cuban Collection, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida, May 1, 2001Contemporary Cuban Art, A Synthesis of the National and the International.Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Clarion, Pennsylvania, March 15, 2001 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;From Modern to Contemporary: Cuban and Cuban American Art from the Lowe’s Permanent Collection. Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida, February 1, 2001From the Good Neighbor Policy to the Trade with the Enemy Act: Cuban Art Exhibitions in the United States, 1939-1995 Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, September 24, 1999Imagining the Nation: Cuban Painting in the Republican Period, 1902-1958 Institute of Latin American Sudies, University College London, London, UK. November 27, 1998La Pintura Moderna en Cuba, la Escuela de París y la Expresión de lo Cubano. Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. April 16, 1996The Invisible Modernism: Early 20th Century Latin American Vanguard Art. Southeastern College Art Conference, Washington D.C., October 13, 1995 (Peer Reviewed)&nbsp; &nbsp;The African Presence in Cuban Art, 1920-1995. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. March 17, 1995Memory and National Identity in Cuban Art. Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. October 23, 1994The African Presence in Contemporary Cuban Art, 1945-1993. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. April 22, 1994Afrocubanismo and its History. Panelist, Brandeis University, Boston, April 20, 1994Examining the African Presence in Cuban Art and Society. Panelist. Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA. February 25, 1994The Art and Experiences of the First Generation of Cuban-American Artists. Panelist. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. November 8, 1993Latin American Art and Its Impact on Contemporary Art. Panelist. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. January 23, 1993Fidelio Ponce and his Times. The Cuban Museum of Art and Culture, Miami, FL. November 20, 1992The Representation of the Peasant as a Metaphor for the Nation: Cuban Painting 1930s. Latin American Studies Association, XV International Congress, Los Angeles, CA. September 25, 1992. (Peer Reviewed)The Art and Experiences of the First-Generation of Cuban-American Artists in Miami. College Art Association, 80th Annual Conference, Chicago, IL. February 12-15, 1992.The Art of Juan González: 1975-1990. Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL. February 6, 1992.The Afro-Cuban Presence in Cuban Art, 1850-1950. International Congress of Americanists, New Orleans, LA. July 7-11, 1991. (Peer Reviewed)Other Conference Related ActivitiesWifredo Lam in North America: A Symposium. Moderator. Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL. May 17, 2008Women in Cuban Art: The Artist and the Image. Chair/Discussant. 6th CRI Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. Florida International University, Miami, FL. February 6-7, 2006&nbsp; &nbsp;Latin American Art: The Critical Discourse from Within. Co-chair with Dr. Alejandro Anreus. 28th Annual Conference of the Association of British Art Historians, Liverpool, UK. April 5-7, 2002&nbsp; &nbsp;Points of Contact Between Cuban and American Art. Chair, 4th CRI Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, Florida International University, Miami, FL. March 6-9, 2002&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Cuban Art: Encounters, Divergences, Transculturation, and Crossovers, Chair. College Art Association 87th Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA. February 10-13, 1999Contemporary Cuban Art: from Modernism to Post-Modernism, Chair. 1st CRI Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. Florida International University, Miami, FL. October 10, 1997Curatorship&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Cuban Art and Identity: 1900-1950 Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida, October 17, 2013- February 2, 2014.From Modern to Contemporary, A Selection of Cuban and Cuban-&nbsp; &nbsp; American Art from the Lowe’s Collection Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, November 15, 2000Origins of Modern Cuban Painting Frances Wolfson Art Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, Florida, October 12, 1982Film AppearancesAlice Neel 2007, documentary by Andrew Neel. Interview&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Current ResearchWriting a monograph on the Cuban modern painter Fidelio Ponce de León (1895-1949)AwardsCintas Foundation Life Achievement Award, 2018FIU Top Scholar Award, 2013&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;12th Annual International Latino Book Award. First Place, Triple CrownAward Winner for monograph: Maria Brito, 2010MacArthur Foundation Grant, 2001Ford Foundation Travel Grant, 1996Ford Foundation Travel Grant, 1995Teaching Incentive Program Award, FIU 1995Faculty Development Grant, FIU, 1995Ford Foundation Travel Grant, 1993Mellon Research Grant, 1992.Samuel H. Kress Foundation Traveling Fellowship, 1990.Florida State University Fellowship, 1986.Florida Endowment for the Humanities, 1982Membership in Professional OrganizationsCollege Art Association of America.Latin American Studies Association <img width="900" height="909" width_o="900" height_o="909" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f05f59e18765f2286dcb73cda252852b4977629baf6ec90acdd27cb51d6ed50/juan-martinez.jpg" data-mid="165310107" border="0" data-scale="80" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/900/i/2f05f59e18765f2286dcb73cda252852b4977629baf6ec90acdd27cb51d6ed50/juan-martinez.jpg" />