Promotional materials for last week’s Art Miami ’96 conferred upon the event the dubious distinction of “America’s Largest Mid-Winter International Art Fair.” Since Art Miami’s debut in 1991, organizers David and Lee Ann Lester have striven to position the annual showcase as the art world’s working winter vacation — akin…
A sense of timelessness pervades the lobby of Teatro Trail, a former movie house located on SW Eighth Street at 37th Avenue, right where the littered sidewalks of Little Havana intersect with the manicured lawns of Coral Gables. Oil paintings of idyllic country landscapes and quaint village scenes of a…
Six dancers and some folding metal chairs set the stage for “The Office,” one of four works that the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Friday at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. The members of the sextet whirl, throw their hands in the air, and stamp in repetitive…
A psychedelic color field of cloudlike forms trails swiftly along one wall of the darkened gallery of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), engulfing visitors in a sublime hallucination. Smoke Screen (part of Jennifer Steinkamp: Video Projection), a computer-generated installation by Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Steinkamp, brings the purist…
Willy Chirino Asere (Sony Tropical) Family-style salsa pop with a light dance beat best suited for conservative hips has propeled Miami’s Willy Chirino to the top of the Latin tropical-music ranks. And here we go again: His new release, Asere, is as predictable as the menu of a Cuban restaurant…
Not surprisingly, boats, the most obvious symbols of exodus and displacement, have emerged as central pictorial components in the work of contemporary Cuban exile artists. The images of watercraft created by Cuban immigrants to Miami typically document real-life occurrences — most recently the rafter crisis in the summer of 1994…
Two school security guards in green T-shirts and khaki pants stand inside the doorway of Horace Mann Middle School as a group of seventh graders excitedly gather around a large mural painted in the front hallway. The face of a young man with a determined expression stares out from the…
Carlos Alves is talking on the phone in his studio, a high-ceiling storefront located in a building on Lincoln Road, just off Lenox Avenue. “You say you’re waiting for your artwork?” he chuckles into the receiver, speaking loudly over the rumble of construction activity outside. “Well great, I’m waiting for…
With Designing Modernity, the Wolfsonian museum’s much-anticipated inaugural exhibition, Mitchell (Micky) Wolfson, Jr., finally reveals his infamous private obsession to the public. Wolfson’s massive assemblage of furniture, household appliances, books, architectural maquettes, prints, paintings, objets d’art, and ephemera tells the story of modernism through “The Arts of Reform and Persuasion”…
One morning last month, Gustavo Matamoros arrived at Miami International Airport to find that his flight to Tampa had been canceled. For Matamoros, the director of the South Florida Composers Alliance, the two-hour wait for the next plane to Tampa was not so much an inconvenience as it was what…
Purvis Young, known for his fiery mixed-media paintings of Overtown crowds and streaming boat people, recently visited the Bass Museum, where his works are included in Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. Young headed straight for the selections from the permanent collection located…
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in East Hialeah, a rooster crows in a shady, fenced-in yard located a few blocks from LeJeune Road. Across the street, in the carport of a pink stucco house, sits a truck emblazoned with a sign that reads “Efrain Box Lunch.” Not far away is…
An excerpt from writer Derek Walcott’s 1992 Nobel lecture is included in the catalogue that accompanies “Caribbean Visions: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture,” currently at the Center for the Fine Arts. In his moving essay, Walcott, a St. Lucia native who was awarded the prestigious prize for literature, remarks on the…
Antonia Eiriz’s Reincarnation, six oil-on-canvas panels clustered on one wall of the upstairs gallery at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, depicts 99 masklike faces floating on a background as dark and deep as a black hole. Placed side by side in rows — an arrangement that resembles skeletons…
Paco de Lucia made his unlikely MTV debut earlier this year in Bryan Adams’s video “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman,” the theme song from the movie Don Juan de Marco. Portraying a wistful guitar player seated quietly among lovers in a dusty taberna, de Lucia easily steals the…
For listeners of Boom, DJ Kike Posada’s Latin-rock radio show, it was the day the music died. On Sunday, September 17, the weekly hourlong program failed to air for the first time since it premiered almost two years ago as Miami’s first Spanish-rock program on commercial Latin radio. “I immediately…
In an MTV Latino studio lined with silky batik banners, a producer introduces herself and leads an audience in “applause practice,” throwing her arms above her head and bringing them down slowly. But the crowd — a stylish group of about 200 bilingual Latin rock fans, Latin American journalists, and…
Last year Tag Purvis lost three of his best friends to AIDS-related illnesses. They now appear in one part of Purvis’s film installation, Devil or Angel, at the South Florida Art Center’s Ground Level Gallery on Lincoln Road: images of two men and one woman projected onto sheets of translucent…
Gripping the back of the folding chair at her small make-up table, China Chang lifts up one muscular, caramel-colored leg and forcefully pries her foot into the declivitous instep of a purple sequined pump. A few seconds later, a male dancer in a cropped tuxedo jacket and snug white Lycra…
Remember museums? Right after Labor Day, the new exhibition season begins. Upcoming shows at Miami institutions will focus on contemporary work and historical themes that provide context for art today, mostly eschewing blockbuster shows in favor of small, purposeful exhibitions. A lot of these are prepackaged displays put together by…
The Gipsy Kings were already busting the charts abroad with their Eurotrash favorite, “Bamboleo,” when they first hit the United States in 1988. Standing somewhat stiffly in identical black leather pants and patterned blouses, the six husky, dark-eyed members of two gypsy families from the south of France performed at…
La Covacha, the Northwest Dade salsa and Latin rock roadhouse, has a new logo — a red parrot wearing a fireman’s hat. The bird appears on the club’s invitation to a “hot, hot, hot party,” which reads, “We told you and we proved it. We are so hot we burned…
