Carol Damian
2020 Art Circuits’ Critic’s Choice art writer
Carol Damian, Ph.D. is an Art Historian and Independent Curator specializing in the Art of Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the former chairperson of the Art and Art History Department and former Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University.
ART CIRCUITS MARCH
March comes in like a lion as the Miami art season continues into the Spring with new exhibitions and the continuation of others that opened earlier. There is always a long list of places to visit and find something new.
Museums:
HistoryMiami: EMBRACING THE LENS: THE BLACK FLORIDA PROJECT
March 20 – October 11, 2020
Exhibition featuring the work of documentary photographer Johanne Rahaman, with special guest curator Dr. Jeffreen M. Hayes. Highlights Black communities in Florida, depicting rural towns and inner cities spanning the entirety of the state. The project seeks to provide a nuanced view of marginalized Black communities by highlighting their richness through images of entrepreneurship, beauty, sensuality, aging, mortality, youth, and resilience.
Also: The 27th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL MAP FAIR
March 13-15, 2020
Come experience the largest and longest running antique map fair in the Americas at HistoryMiami Museum. The fair features world-renowned speakers and 34 of the finest dealers, exhibiting their exceptional antique maps, rare antiquarian books, globes, atlases and ephemera.
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale: I PAINT MY REALITY: SURREALISM IN LATIN AMERICA
November 2019 – Fall 2020
The avant-garde Surrealist movement emerged in France in the wake of World War I and spread globally as artists and art works traveled, and ideas circulated through art journals and mass media. Dreams, psychoanalysis, automatism, and chance were among the methods the Surrealists used to tap into the subconscious and stimulate the imagination. This exhibition follows the flowering of the Surrealist movement in Latin America in the 1930s and examines its continued influence through today, including in South Florida, with works by prominent local artists. European Surrealists embraced their Latin American colleagues, who nevertheless expressed ambivalence about the movement. Latin America’s complex history, magical landscapes, indigenous cultures, archeological sites, mythologies, migrations, and European and African religious traditions shaped these artists’ reality.
Non-Profits:
Little Haiti Cultural Complex and the Tout-Monde Festival present the exhibition
DUST SPECKS ON THE SEA: Contemporary Sculpture from the French Caribbean & Haiti
March 7 – April 25, 2020
Dust Specks on the Sea focuses on sculptural works by over a dozen contemporary artists from Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Haiti and addresses the various positionings of the postcolonial condition in this region. The exhibition’s title—Dust Specks on the Sea—is derived from a quote by former French President Charles de Gaulle, describing his view of the French Caribbean islands from an airplane in 1964.
Galleries:
Piero Atchugarry Gallery:
Yuken Teruya – WE BELONG HERE
February 15 – April 18, 2020
The first solo exhibition of the multi-media works of Yuken Teruya in Miami, curated by Martin Craciun, features an important new body of work traversing mediums of 2D, 3D, and installation. WE BELONG HERE presents a sharp critique of contemporary society through Yuken Teruya’s use of monumental landmarks as places of community and commodity. His artistic production often recalls the Japanese tradition of honesty and simplicity, as well as his homeland, Okinawa. However, Teruya emerges with a singular voice from his twenty-year experience in western society.
Also on view:
Andrés Michelena: ...THE TWO
15 February - 14 March 2020
This solo exhibition features works by the contemporary conceptual artist that are a masterful counterpoint to Japanese artist Yuken Teruya in the accompanying space. Based on the Haiku poetry of Japan, Michelena’s elegant and minimal installation deconstructs the poetry to create relationships between language and language itself through graphic signs.
Gary Nader Art Centre: WIFREDO LAM AND THE BLACK SPIRIT
February 27 – May 31, 2020
"I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the black spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks." Wifredo Lam. Gary Nader Art Centre has a major collection of masterworks by one of Cuba's most celebrated artists and this selection focuses on the symbolism from Africa that is significant to his work.
Pan American Art Projects: PAPER BOUNDARIES | Collective exhibition
February 1 - March 21, 2020
Paper is an ironic material, delicate, yet resilient. It is so thin and fine, and yet the content on it can carry so much weight. Paper has been the base upon which we record our history, reveal secret loves, mark victories and disasters, express sorrow and joy. Paper is so fragile, and yet some of our most important remnants of our past have been preserved on this fine material.
The artists in this exhibition can manipulate and contort paper to bring actual dimension and weight to it sculpturally, through folding, shadow play, and layering. The act of complex engineering converts the two-dimensional paper into a three-dimensional object that pushes the physical boundaries between the second and third dimensions.
Artscape Lab: ILLUMINATIONS – THE ART OF SANDRA MUSS
March 12 – April 30, 2020
The exhibit, Muss’s first with the gallery, focuses on her use of light in a diversity of media. The simplicity of a tube of light can transform spaces and shapes into magical entities, and the properties of refraction and reflection further enhance her message of transcendence in this multi-media exhibition.