Dr. Donette Francis
2021 Art Circuits’ Critic’s Choice art writer
Donette Francis is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Miami, where she is a founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective. She is the author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.
ART CIRCUITS
CRITIC'S CHOICE NOVEMBER 2021
Landscapes of the Imagination
This month’s selections encourage art connoisseurs to explore the wealth of institutions across South Florida to encounter the works of art that transform our visual relation to space, place, and history.
MUSEUMS
Boca Raton Museum of Art
Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru
Curated by Stephanie Seidel
On View through Mar 06, 2022
South Florida has the largest population of people of Peruvian heritage in the United States thus it is particularly fitting that Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru premiers here before its international tour. This immersive exhibition takes viewers into the ancient cultural landscape of Peru’s UNESCO World Heritage site built over 600 years ago by the Incas as a mountain retreat for its rulers. Museum goers will encounter the creative arts of the diverse Andean cultures of this region.
Norton Art Museum
Origin Stories: Photography of Africa and Its Diaspora
On View through Jan 16, 2022
Origin Stories is a rare opportunity to see in conversation photography that takes its subjects contemporary Africa and its various diasporas. From the Norton’s collection these works tell more dynamic stories about global Black subjects. Featuring the museum’s acquisition of Yinka Shonibare’s Le Méduse as well as works by Les sœurs Chevalme, Delphine Fawundu, Ana Mendieta, Malick Sidibé, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Origin Stories: Photography of Africa and Its Diaspora | Norton Museum of Art
Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
Jedd Novatt: Monotypes and More
On View through June 26, 2022
C Jedd Novatt’s small sculptures and works on paper communicate magnificently with the artist’s large-scale work just outside the museum.
Art Initiatives
Art and Culture Center Hollywood
T. Elliott Mansa: On Memory and the Radical Black Imagination
Organized by Meaghan Kent
On view through Feb 27, 2022
Oolite Arts and the Arts and Culture Center in Hollywood collaborate in this cross-county partnership to bring us a solo exhibition by artist T. Elliot Mansa. In his process of assemblage and vernacular sculpture, Mansa taps into Black Diasporic ritual practices to honor and remember Black lives lost to violence. Items such as toys and flowers -often used at roadside graves- are covered in a signature black monochrome in an act of poignant memorial.
T. Eliott Mansa: On Memory and the Radical Black Imagination | Art and Culture Center Hollywood
Introspective: A Reckoning of the Soul
Curated by Marie Vickles with Meaghan Kent
On view through Feb 27, 2022
Be sure to also catch the Introspective show, where local artists explore the layered generational realities that have shaped South Florida’s social and cultural present. The curator, scholar and artists invite viewers to actively participate in creating “beautiful futures” by learning of our collective pasts. The exhibition includes archival material from Dr. Kitty Oliver’s research and book, Voices of America: Race and Change in Hollywood, Florida, and a site-specific installation by artist Chire Regans (aka VantaBlack). Participating artists include: Adrienne Chadwick, Armando Zamora, Carolina Cueva, Emmanuel George, Errol Miller, John English, Keisha Rae Witherspoon, Khaulah Naima Nuruddin, Loni Johnson, Michiko Kurisu, Niki Lopez, Roscoè B. Thické III, Sophia Lacroix, Vanessa Charlot, Victoria Ravelo, william cordova, and Yves Gabriel.
Artists Residence
Bakehouse Art Complex
Viewpoints: Expressions of an artist community
Co-curated by Edouard Duval-Carrié and Laura Novoa
Opens Nov. 13, 2021
On View through March 27, 2022
In celebration of its 35th anniversary, Viewpoints is a group show of twenty-seven Bakehouse artists interrogating their individual and collective experiences of the last year and a half. Predominantly in two-dimensional media, the exhibition includes recent work by artists working in painting, drawing, print-making, and photography. The show is a testament to the diverse artistic communities fostered in Bakehouse as well as the wider Miami scene.
Viewpoints: Expressions of an artist community — Bakehouse Art Complex (bacfl.org)
Ode to Bakehouse
Opens Nov. 13, 2021
On View through March 27, 2022
To continue the festivities, Bakehouse has also commissioned a new public art project with text by poet Arsimmer McCoy and visuals by artist Chris Friday.
Ode to Bakehouse — Bakehouse Art Complex (bacfl.org) .
Galleries
Locust Projects
Locust Projects
On view November 20, 2021 through February 5, 2022
The gallery showcases the works of artists who re-imagine the entangled relationships between gardening and botany toward making new speculative, fantastical but certainly democratic futures between humans and their natural environments.
Field Companion features an immersive forest-placed video installation by Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib. Transplanted to the forest as a natural ecosystem that provides refuge, especially in pandemic times.
A landscape longed for: the garden as disturbance
Guest curated by Adler Guerrier and Laura Novoa featuring Andrea Bowers, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Ebony Patterson, and commissioned works by Miami artists, Ema Ri, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Onajide Shabaka. This exhibition invites reconsideration of the garden not just as manicured spaces produced for leisure, but rather as sites of disruptive worldmaking.
