There is a ruckus at the back gate of the Six Pack Shack on Prison Lane. In a few hours, a record crowd of 60,000 people will assemble in downtown Nassau to see who will win top prize in a competition the Bahamian Minister of Youth, Sports, & Culture calls…
In The Allegory of Painting, seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer paints a portrait of the artist painting a portrait. To the left of the canvas, a lavish curtain is drawn to reveal an empty chair, perhaps reserved for the viewer. Beyond the curtain a seated man has just begun the…
The stolid stone faces on Easter Island as rendered by German artist Wilhelm Moser remind viewers of one eternal truth: Nature will always reclaim even the most noble monuments built by human hands. The moment of creation also is the moment of gradual disintegration. On display at ArtCenter/South Florida in…
In the literary classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographer Walker Evans and journalist James Agee make heroes of three unknown families struggling to survive as tenant farmers in rural Alabama circa 1936. Evans and Agee’s praise for the poor but proud helped drum up support for President Franklin…
Among the neon lights and shimmery surfaces of the Magic City, it’s often easy to lose sight of the past, but the folks at Miami-Dade County’s Fruit and Spice Park remember a time when the world did not speed along the digital pathways of the Internet. Some even recall the…
“Oh, he’s joking!” laughs Barbarita Hernan, on-air personality at oldies radio station Clasica 92 (WCMQ-FM 92.3). Barbarita squeals as programming director German Estrada introduces the voluptuous bottled-honey-blonde as “Marilyn Monroe.” Consulting a log prepared for her by Estrada, Barbarita punches buttons on the control panel and pops numbered compact discs…
Six dancers dressed in white run their hands along their arms, cleansing themselves with invisible water. They push against the air as if sliding into a pool or rising from a river. The gesture is simple, repeated over and over in choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s work Water. The dancers’ arms…
“The Fiesta de Miami will be the biggest festival of them all,” boasts Oscar Alvarez of Eden Rock Promotions. No small claim in a town that hosts the annual Calle Ocho, officially the largest outdoor festival in the world in terms of both attendance and square feet. “Well, the biggest…
Long before the hipsters of Manhattan began lining up to see the venerable elders of the Buena Vista Social Club, country boys Nicholas Woloschuck and Aaron Halva were scraping together a meager living playing traditional Cuban son in New York City’s subways. Oregon-born Woloschuck and Iowa native Halva formed the…
Some Miami residents may be as inclined to visit Liberty City as they are to visit Timbuktu. Artist Marvin Weeks hopes to change that. This Friday Weeks, with 25 area artists, craftspeople, and vendors, will make a bid to revitalize the neighborhood with the Timbuktu African & Caribbean Marketplace. “There…
Yellow bandannas with black letters bearing the Western Union logo graced nearly every head, neck, or waist at Rasin ’99, held early this November at Bayfront Park. The fans of Haitian roots music — a music based on the rhythms and traditional refrains of Haitian vodou — wore the sponsor’s…
In the living room of David Font’s Little Haiti house, a poster of Kali, the Hindu god of destruction, hangs above a music stand that displays the centerfold of a reclining Michael Jackson from the album Thriller. Idol meets icon; sacred meets pop. Inside Font’s production room, an Akai sampler/sequencer…
