There was a freewheeling spirit among Miami's artists then, Kohen remembers, a sense of community rather than career-making. "The art scene in the Eighties was very small, very backward; it was retro," she says. "And it was really spurred on here by the Cubans who either grew up here or came with Mariel. There's no question about that."
All but two of the artists in the exhibition (Coleman and Lurie) came from Cuban families. The artists known as "the Miami generation" grew up here, part of the first wave of postrevolutionary Cuban immigrants. In 1980 the Mariel boatlift brought to Miami a varied group of homosexual artists who had not been favored by the island government. Together, Kohen says, they "turned 'Miami the cultural desert' into a tired cliche." The onslaught of AIDS brought an abrupt end to the blooming vibrancy of that young Miami art scene, one that no one quite expected.
"Remember when they used to say only Haitians had AIDS? Of course nobody clean and white could have AIDS," Kohen says sarcastically. "But the first generation of people here who died from AIDS were from nice religious families. Who had ever heard of such a thing?"
Certainly not Beatriz Brito. A classically beautiful woman with stylishly short white hair, Brito looks younger than her 71 years. She sits on a plush chair in her living room in Kendall, flipping through a scrapbook that holds mementos of her son Wil, a jewelry designer. Photos show a ruggedly handsome, smiling young man, playing bingo with senior citizens in a nursing home and acting in a community theater production.
When Wil told Brito he had AIDS, she had only a vague idea of what the word meant. "He said 'Mom, this means I'm going to die,'" she remembers. "I said 'Well, we're all going to die sometime,' and he said 'No, Mom. This means I'm going to die before you.'" She began going with Wil to doctors and local AIDS organizations, and they gathered all the information they could. "We learned about AIDS together." He died in 1990, when he was 40 years old.
Brito wears several pieces of jewelry made by Wil, including a gold bracelet fastened with two clasping hands he described as "the hands of God." She goes to the bedroom and brings out an ornate crown of golden roses and leaves that will be put on display at the Centre Gallery.
Brito picks up a photo from the table showing a striking young woman with porcelain skin, wearing the headpiece at her wedding. The picture is of Brito's niece, Elena Alonso-Ochoa, who also died of AIDS in 1990. That was also the year that Brito's younger son Jon Fernando died, also of an AIDS-related illness. Jon was 35, an artist living in New York. Like his brother, he spent his last days in the front room of the family's Kendall home.
Jon made iconic paintings on glass and large glass plates with intricate, colorful designs of fruits or flowers and byzantine figures. Bette Midler collected them. Some of the plates are displayed, ethereally backlit, in a china cabinet in Brito's living room. When Jon became very ill she went to the New York gallery and brought all his work home. "I called the gallery owner and said: 'Do not sell another piece,'" she recalls.
Brito has turned her home into a museum of her family's works. Jon's paintings cover the living room walls. Wil's striking jewelry pieces are displayed on a side table. A sculpture by Brito's daughter -- a mask of Wil's face with antlers -- also decorates the living room, as do several Giacometti-like sculptures made by her husband, a lawyer and businessman who briefly made his living as an artist when he arrived here from Cuba in 1961. He now lives in a nursing home, having suffered a heart attack and several strokes Brito says were brought on by grief over the death of his sons.
Brito opens a second scrapbook, Jon's, and leafs through his old report cards, clippings about his plates from Town and Country and New York magazine, his resume, his obituary. "I had all these things in a box -- one for each of my sons," she says. "I decided to put things in order." Brito has documented all of her sons' work on slides in a manner that Pat Jones of the Estate Project considers exemplary. Organizing the work has been a way of keeping her family together, Brito says.
A third album is filled with articles about AIDS clipped from newspapers and magazines. Brito works with AIDS support groups and speaks publicly about her heartbreaking experience when asked, in order to educate other families dealing with the illness. She regularly volunteers with AIDS patients at Mercy Hospital. "Helping helps," Brito says, although she admits she's not really sure how she's survived. "All of a sudden my world came to an end." She shrugs and forces a smile. "I talk about these things, but I really can't believe they happened to me."
Her greatest comfort is living among the works her sons made. Brito's eyes sweep over Jon's paintings on the walls, the plates in the breakfront. Fingering the gold bracelet around her wrist that Wil gave her, she smiles. "This way I know that they'll always be here with me.
