Audio By Carbonatix
Hialeah has its fair share of weird architecture, but there’s only one building in “La Ciudad del Progreso” that looks like something transported from Star Wars’ eerie planet Tatooine. Chayo Frank’s Amertec Building, completed in 1969, gives you the sense that Luke Skywalker might zoom by in a landspeeder or that you might get roughed up by some nasty hood Jawas.
Frank’s peculiar opus is now recognized as a historical gem, lauded for its “uncompromising biomechanical assemblage of inverted anatomical appendages, ribbed conduits, psychedelic swirls, and ocular accents” by the art experts at Little Haiti’s Guccivuitton (8375 NE Second Ave., Miami). The building Frank designed for his father, owner of Amertec-Granada Inc., when Frank was just 23 years old and fresh out of college has placed him alongside 20th-century pioneers of organic aesthetics such as Gustav Klimt, Antoni Gaudí, Max Ernst, and Javier Senosiain.
You can learn more about Frank’s creative genius at Guccivuitton, where the edgy alt-haven is presenting “Chayo Frank: Sculptures, 1969-2012.” The exhibit delivers an arresting survey of the conceptual Jedi master’s ceramic sculptures, beginning with his early output in the late ’60s and continuing through his re-entry into artistic practice in the early 2000s and to the present day.
At Guccivuitton, Frank’s work will blow you away with the “mysterious yet vitally functional limbs, centers of sentience, and sensory organs akin to the exoticism found in Indonesian sea slugs,” organizers promise.
Saturdays, 6 p.m. Starts: July 12. Continues through Aug. 9, 2014
