"I am hoping to be amazed."
Those were the words of Miami-based artist Ruben Ubiera as he set out to paint his new mural "Monkey Bidness" onto the back wall of sculptor Chris Carter's Wynwood studio. With a larger-than-life personality, Ubiera himself is just as captivating as his art, which he creates on bricks, plywood and broken skateboards -- painting "from the environment", as he says, in a style he calls "Urban Pop" or "Post-Graffism."
The new mural takes Ubiera to the streets of Miami, putting down his own artistic roots in the Wynwood community.
The main character of the mural is a giant gorilla, a recurring theme in Ubiera 's work that personifies street art invading
the museum space. "This mural is basically about the underground coming
finally into the limelight, into the galleries and the museums," he
says. Around the gorilla are the faces of people in the community and in Ubiera 's life.
A wheelchair-bound man stopped by the mural every day checking on
Ruben's progress and offering encouragement, so Ubiera painted him into
the mural. But Ubiera's goal wasn't to merely make his mural a part of the community; he
set out to make the community a part of the mural. "I want to see the average,
everyday person stop in awe and touch the wall and come back," he
explains.
Ruben also weaves his own Dominican cultural heritage as well as his
Miami experience into his work. The Mexican TV character El Chapulin
Colorado, dominoes with the numbers 3, 0 and 5 as well as a can of Goya
Red Kidney Beans pay homage to the people of the Hispanic and Caribbean diasporas that compose Miami. The mural also shows respect to
the artists who have come before him, as pieces of graffiti by one
of the Surface Merchants are incorporated.
So what is Ruben's reaction to a completed "Monkey Bidness"?
"I am
amazed," he says " It's always an experiment, and it was successful. I
think this is the beginning of a lot of other things. This is just the
tip of the iceberg. It's gonna be good."
See Ubiera's "Monkey Business" at the corner of North Miami Avenue and 15th Street in Wynwood.
--Heike Wollenweber
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