Award-winning artist Milton Schwartz charts the course of Western civilization on a growing sheaf of manila file folders that he keeps in a desk drawer. Each of the folders is covered inside and out with a crowded collage of words and pictures. Schwartz’s meticulously arranged constructions reveal a sublime world…
Latin American Women Artists 1915-1995, currently at the Center for the Fine Arts, is an equal opportunity exhibition, embracing both mastery and mediocrity under the guise of revisionist history. A broad, academic survey, it was organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum as a showcase for female artists from Latin America…
thursday august 1 Naturalist Lectures: Summer is the time to look out over your yard (if you happen to have one), survey your domain, and realize that a crappy little mower and some hedge clippers aren’t going to cut it, so to speak. With this idea in mind, some local…
thursday july 25 Fito Paez: The music of classic rocker Fito Paez, like that of his mentor Charly Garcia, embodies the quintessential sound of rock argentino: a mix of emotional melodic vocals, literary lyrics, tango rhythms, Beatles-esque psychedelia, and the occasional funk beat. The 33-year-old singer, songwriter, and occasional actor…
A large fiberglass satellite dish sits on the floor of Fredric Snitzer’s gallery in Coral Gables. Fourteen feet across and about three feet high, the old parabolic antenna that artist Mark Handforth found junked in a Hialeah yard makes for a formidable piece of furniture. Visitors to the dimly lit…
thursday july 18 Art Hour Concerts: Meza Fine Arts (275 Giralda Ave., Coral Gables), a gallery devoted to works by Latin American and local and national American artists, becomes a music venue six nights a week, with regular weeknight concerts and special Saturday dinner concerts. Every Thursday singer Malena Burke…
thursday july 11 Miccosukee Freedom Festival: Once fervent enemies, cowboys and Indians appear to have made amends, at least for commercial purposes. Accordingly, the Miccosukee Tribe hosts Randy Travis as the headliner for its fourth annual Freedom Festival. Travis gained considerable attention with his 1986 major-label debut Storms of Life,…
Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were in Miami on June 12 to give a slide lecture at the Bass Museum of Art in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition Monumental Propaganda. Komar and Melamid initiated the show in 1992 when they solicited artists’ proposals for salvaging socialist-realist…
Info: Home Truths After decades of living month to month in trailer parks, some South Dade migrant workers have found a permanent address By Judy Cantor A burly man cradling a black-haired baby strides across the empty shuffleboard courts at the Royal Colonial Mobile Home Park in Naranja and walks…
When you add it all together, the 26 visual arts majors graduating from the New World School of the Arts high school have won two and a half million dollars in scholarships to university-level art programs around the nation. New York City’s esteemed Cooper Union School of Art alone courted…
Even before the air turns to soup, an endless summer of eclectic group shows takes over local museums and galleries. For example, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale is currently exhibiting the works of seven artists awarded fellowships by the South Florida Cultural Consortium, a partnership of publicly funded…
A trained architect, artist David Rohn works a day job at a local design studio, while at night he’s a fixture on the South Beach drag scene. That admission in itself would hardly raise a penciled eyebrow on Washington Avenue, where transvestites have become as common as parking meters. But…
In a cockfighting-arena-turned-nightclub perched on a sheer cliff, high on a mountain overlooking Port-au-Prince, the eleven members of Kanpech crowd on-stage on a warm Sunday night in late March. Frederic “Fredo” Pierre Louis, the band’s cherub-faced leader, sporting short braids and a blue print dashiki, throws his hands in the…
“M is for Miami,” architect Roberto Behar declares. “And Metro, memory, magnet, magic, and mother. Motherland.” Behar, who teaches at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, and artist Rosario Marquardt, his wife and collaborator, are standing high up in the eight-story Riverwalk Metromover station late on a recent afternoon…
Felix Morisseau-Leroy speaks six languages fluently, but when he writes poetry it is not in French, English, Spanish, or in the African tongues Twi or Wolof. He writes in Creole — in the voice of the people. His people. The people of Haiti. “Peeee-pulll.” When Morisseau says the word in…
Costume exhibitions generally pose a challenge to their organizers and their audiences, simply because clothes are created to be worn, not displayed. Fashion designers show off their wares on runway models. Curators, however, must come up with other devices to bring empty garments to life. The idea of turning costumes…
Ruth Regina’s Kane Concourse salon sports the kind of glitzy, Hollywood-French Provincial decor that Morris Lapidus designed for the Fontainebleau Hotel lobby in the Fifties. A curved red velvet loveseat and two white leather chairs surround a mirrored coffee table set with a plaster-of-Paris bust of a classical hero –…
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MoCA) new 23,000-square-foot space in North Miami is a triumph. Opinions may differ on architect Charles Gwathmey’s multicolor building, a geometric study painted in earthy colors. But strictly as a physical space, MoCA offers what Miami’s other major art venues lack. For starters it’s in…
Three television camera crews, about a dozen radio DJs and print journalists, and some bilingual college students convened in a hospitality room at the Miami International Airport Hotel early one morning in February to await the arrival of the Argentine rock group Soda Stereo. Dressed in stylish grungewear and sporting…
Last November the New York City-based artist team Leone & McDonald placed a classified ad in New Times: “Ever passed for something you’re not? Celebrated NY artists need story for video on Miami.” The responses the pair received confirmed their perception of Miami as the perfect place to create a…
In the spring of 1968, just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., photographer Jill Freedman hit the freedom trail with King’s Poor People’s Campaign, marching from New York City to a plywood lean-to on the mall in Washington, D.C., chanting “No More Hunger” and “Give Peace a Chance”…
A small striped rubber ball bobs in a claw-footed bathtub half-filled with dingy water. The words “Since Marcel Duchamp all the avant-garde artists are soaking in the same water of the same bathtub” have been scrawled in black script around the rim of the tub, a 1991 work by French…
