Arts & Entertainment

Art Capsules

By Carlos Suarez De Jesus 

Sol LeWitt x 2: Sol LeWitt earned himself a place in history books as one of the Johnny Appleseeds of the minimal and conceptual art movements during the Sixties. He's also among the most prolific artists of the mid-Twentieth Century. "Sol LeWitt x 2," a two-part exhibition at Miami Art Museum (MAM), offers fertile ground to explore both the artist's influential work and the contemporary art collection he has created over the past 50 years. Featuring 45 works on paper and sculptures, "Sol LeWitt: Structure and Line" provides a broad look at the artist's oeuvre, spanning from his early grid-based modular constructions of the Sixties to his recent series of Scribble drawings making their debut at MAM. -- Carlos Suarez De Jesus Through June 3. Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; 305-305-375-3000, www.miamiartmuseum.org.

Merce Cunningham: Dancing on the Cutting Edge Part 2, Daniel Arsham: MoCA's much-ballyhooed salute to the avant choreographer culminates with a turbo-charged bang at its Wynwood annex space. This exhibit focuses on Merce Cunningham's eyeSpace, a collaboration with Miami artist Daniel Arsham and composer Daniel Berman, which premiered at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts this past February. The set Arsham designed for eyeSpace anchors the show. In ODE/EON, Arsham used forced perspective to create a set resembling the faade of an Art Deco movie theater, with the top half suspended overhead and the lower section crashing through the stage. A huge neon marquee rips like a steamer's prow through a wall. Arsham has also re-created the performance's lighting in the space for dramatic effect and included a series of gouache-on-Mylar studies inspired by his tete-a-tetes with Merce during the legend's South Florida debut. The electronic soundtrack of Berman's score, Long Throw, pierces the air, adding a haunting note to the affair. -- Carlos Suarez De Jesus Through June 23. MoCA at the Goldman Warehouse, 404 NW 26th St., Miami; 305-893-6211, www.mocanomi.org.

Panorama LatinoAmericano Part II: Culled from the gallery's holdings, and mixed and matched as Virginia Miller's ongoing summer sale continues, this painting and sculpture exhibit pairs the work of established masters with that of midcareer artists from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. It includes an oil-on-canvas painting by Cuba's Wifredo Lam from 1959, and a warped perspective watercolor of several bird-brained figures in a room dating to 1965 by Mexico's Francisco Toledo. Carrousel, a whopping canvas by El Salvador's Cesar Menendez, depicts two voluptuous female nudes atop mechanical ponies on a spinning merry-go-round. Half-Hidden, a huge work by Brazil's Antonio Amaral, engulfs the spectator with lush bamboolike tropical green ribbons arcing upward across the canvas and swallowing pink lobster claws and thorny gray structures as if they were the inexorable tide of nature decimating a futuristic city. Argentine Mateo Arguello Pitt's installation features a large mixed-media-on-panel painting covered in a riot of figures celebrating a wedding and confronted by three of his life-size mutt sculptures coated in nifty mosaic patterns. Venezuelan Alfredo Arcia's pillow-case-size oil-on-canvas scream, Dos Demagogos en la Bay Street, depicts a scrawny Satan scrapping over scripture with a pork-bellied preacher in a gritty urban setting. -- Carlos Suarez De Jesus Through June 30. ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, 169 Madeira Ave., Coral Gables; 305-444-4493, www.virginiamiller.com.

You've Got to Trust Space: Video artist Natalia Benedetti's work is just one part of Dr. Arturo Mosquera's Art @ Work project, in which the orthodontist showcases the work of local artists at his office in West Dade. Near the office entrance, check out Perfume, a video piece in which a veil of mist detonates over what appears to be the bottom of a copper pot. As the fountain catches the light like a Fourth of July sparkler, the sweet scent of lavender from an atomizer freshens the air. In Everything in Between, colorful grains of rice seem to magically fall from the sky and onto a metal surface, filling the screen and ricocheting off the metal as they produce the sound of a tinny drum. The green, yellow, blue, and pink candylike bits fly about like salmon swimming upstream until a hand appears to clear the mound in a clean sweep. On a small DVD monitor tucked in the far lobby corner, The Sun and the Moon captures incandescent drops of water as they accumulate on a pane of glass. The light illuminating the rising steam from behind gives the impression of a canopy of stars under the night sky. Next to the monitor, the artist has used graphite to draw right onto the wall a pair of disembodied hands, which appear to hover in space in a prayerful pose. -- Carlos Suarez De Jesus Through June 30. Art @ Work, 1245 SW 87th Ave., Miami; 305-264-3355.

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