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 SUMMER 2021
Summer 2021.We made it.BREATH.How different it feels heading into this summer than last: a little less anxiety, a lot more joy.We remain mindful that the collective struggle for devalued lives persists here at home and abroad.Our summer selections offer a creole stew that includes a little bit of everything showcasing diverse artists working across various media.
MUSEUMS
Boca Raton Museum of Art
Vickie Pierre: Be My Herald of What’s to Come
Jun 09, 2021 - Sep 05, 2021
Vickie Pierre’s aesthetics blend elements of her Haitian heritage with contemporary pop culture. This exhibition includes freestanding sculptures and wall-hangings of the artist’s feminist reworking of classic classic fairytales.
ICA Miami
Janiva Ellis: Rats
Curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Stephanie Seidel
On View through Sep 12, 2021
The pandemic was also a time of artistic profundity, which can be seen in “Rats,” Janiva Ellis’s first solo museum exhibition.Featuring new works created over the past year, Ellis engages landscape and abstraction to critique white supremacy while using figuration to paint Blackness expansively.The irony and humor integral to her practice seeks to create spaces of release and renewal.
FIU Frost Art Museum
Peggy Levison Nolan
Blueprint for a Good Life
June 5, 2021 — August 22, 2021
Through photographs of domestic interiors, Nolan documents family life in the many working-class South Florida neighborhoods in which she has lived from Naranja to Hollywood.The Blueprint for a Good Life--evoked in the show’s title, is to embrace the support that such communal intimacies provide
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
The Carter Project
Curated by Bonnie Clearwater.
May 15 – January 9, 2022
Art is where the home is.Drawing on his practice of sculpting salvaged materials, Christopher Carter designs and builds a home using shipping containers and other reclaimed materials
The Bass
Rafael Domenech & Ernesto Oroza
Hialeah Electrica - Metavector
June 16 – October 10, 2021
Hialeah is the manufacturing epicenter for electronic products. In their first joint museum exhibition, these two Cuban artists create a site-specific installation using everyday elements such as vinyl, drywall, photos, newspaper, and other ephemera. The exhibition serves as both a creative archive and a material social history of this working-class community.
