Summer in the city of Miami, backs of our necks getting sunburned and sandy. In this season of jet skis and lobster diving, the main branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library offers two exhibitions of nautically themed work, most of it done by local artists. “Boat Images from South Florida…
Fulano de tal stands on a portable stage in the Hard Rock Cafe at Bayside, framed by a stained glass portrait of Jim Morrison. “Who’s here tonight?” he barks. “Colombia!” “Argentina!” “Venezuela!” “Peru!” shouts the crowd. “No speak English?” goads the singer with an exaggerated Spanish accent. “Yo tampoco, porque…
A restaurateur often experiences an understandable preoccupation with his restaurant, particularly if he spends every minute nurturing it, christens it with his own name, or takes dramatic steps to prevent its death. Should he choose (or be forced) to sell it too early — say, in the first few years…
For four years, Flippers served as Miami’s premier source for world music. DJs, musicians, students, and foreign film directors congregated at the disheveled storefront on NE Second Avenue, combing sections marked flamenco, reggae, Spanish reggae, North Africa, West Africa, South Africa, Cuba (before and after the revolution), Brazil, Latin jazz,…
Dust rises from the dirt trenches in front of the Thunderbird Resort Motel on Collins Avenue at 184th Street, where a state highway renovation project lately has created an obstacle course for summer tourists. Repairs are in progress at the motel as well. On a recent afternoon, two painters perched…
The term “Haitian art” inevitably evokes several enduring cliches, manifested in images of quaint island landscapes painted by self-taught artists, “primitive” personifications of Vodou gods, and “derivative” works executed in expressionist or figurative styles. As with art from Africa, art from Haiti traditionally has defied Eurocentric notions of originality and…
Next month the main branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library celebrates its tenth anniversary at its current location in architect Philip Johnson’s fortresslike cultural complex on West Flagler Street. When the library building opened in July 1985, artist Edward Ruscha’s site-specific paintings already had been installed; ringing the interior of…
At the opening-night talent showcase for Billboard magazine’s Latin Music Conference, held here last week, Cuban singer Albita Rodriguez was the obvious star attraction. A crowd of about 450 recording executives, distributors, producers, promoters, journalists, and musicians mingled vigorously during acts that included a Venezuelan model-turned-pop-singer and one half of…
At the May 20 opening for The New Collection — I, the Cuban Museum’s current exhibition of recent permanent acquisitions, Ermita Fuentes, visiting from New York City, stands by the back door, chiding guests who attempt to carry their cocktails from the Bacardi tent (set up in the museum’s small…
“I’m basically interested in the big ones,” Andres Serrano tells a group of local artists gathered to meet him at the South Florida Art Center on Lincoln Road. “Life, death, and everything in between.” Serrano visited Miami recently to attend the opening of a ten-year retrospective of his work at…
Rush-hour traffic rumbles down the 1100 block of Little Havana’s Calle Ocho at 8:00 a.m. on a humid Thursday morning. Young men wearing work clothes and boots, as well as older men in guayaberas, huddle over coffee at the window counter of La Reina Restaurant. A similar group has settled…
The 1994-95 exhibition season has offered a number of group shows of works by local artists. These demonstrations of support have called upon a handful of artists who seem, for the moment at least, to top every curator’s list. With all due respect to those artists, a spectator’s sense of…
Laurie Anderson’s first CD/ROM, The Puppet Motel, just released by the New York software company Voyager, offers six hours of music and talk during a tour of 30 virtual rooms. Entering these meticulously detailed 3-D environments, which she designed with graphic artist Hsin-Chien Huang, users can take a stab at…
Like many artists educated in Cuba who have moved to Miami over the past few years, Consuelo Castaneda speaks only a little English, communicating with Anglos through a translator. The clever, slickly executed paintings in To Be Bilingual, Castaneda’s current exhibition at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Coral Gables, explore…
Shortly before New York City’s Guggenheim Museum opened the first major American exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys in 1979, the institution’s then-director Thomas Messer sent a letter to members of his board of trustees, warning them that the work would not find favor with the general public. Indeed,…
The spectral presence of a seemingly ordinary piano emitting music without the aid of human fingers has become, if not common, not especially alarming. Barely an eyebrow is raised when they’re sighted boisterously playing show tunes in hotel bars, or providing promenade music from a platform in the center of…
As a sculptural element, wood is warm and inviting to the touch. Humble yet elegant, naturally marked by time, wood sculpture connotes a long-standing tradition of noble craftsmanship. But sculptor Ingrid Hartlieb often employs wood to recall an archaeological legacy wrought from other, more monumental materials. In her current exhibition…
“To step from the critical domain to the curatorial takes some courage,” writes former Miami Herald architecture critic Beth Dunlop in the catalogue for Art + Architecture = Miami, now on view at the Center of Contemporary Art (COCA) in North Miami. “An exhibition tests abstract ideas by examining them…
A white custom Cadillac sits on the bleached lawn at the side entrance of the Conni Gordon School of Art, whose screen door has been posted with a note instructing visitors to “ring bell or yell.” The long, low, white building, formerly Bill Jordan’s Bar of Music, an old Miami…
In the 1960s, Brazilian musician Tom Ze took part in founding the polemical popular culture movement tropicalismo, with a group of like-minded compatriots that included Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa. But while his collaborators emerged from a period of political strife to achieve international fame, Ze, the story…
The polyglot makeup of Miami’s population shapes culture in a city where, increasingly, the performing arts, museums, and the presence of the film industry function as a draw for tourism, a tool for the renewal of depressed areas such as downtown, and, overall, a catalyst for improving the quality of…
An extensive survey of works of art by Arab women, Forces of Change: Women Artists of the Arab World, currently can be seen at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus Centre Gallery and its InterAmerican Gallery in Little Havana. Organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington,…
