On the last Friday of 1994, there were few visitors at the Center for the Fine Arts (CFA), and most of the staff was on holiday. Outside, near the bottom of the ramp leading to the esplanade of the Metro-Dade Cultural Center (which consists of the CFA, the main branch…
Conspicuous white spaces and thick strands of loose picture wire evidence the absence of some of the artworks that usually hang in the high-walled, sunlit living room of Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz’s spacious Key Biscayne home. Two paintings — Star Gazer, by the Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo, and…
The American artist Man Ray had his first Paris show at the gallery Librairie Six in December 1921. The opening party, as recounted in the catalogue of “Man Ray’s Man Rays,” an exhibition now on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, was one of the…
The selection of flamenco recordings in local music stores tends to be limited to a choice between the venerable Paco de Lucia’s classic albums and Eurohits by the dubious Gipsy Kings. Duende, a recently released three-CD box set with 48 pages of illustrated liner notes, substantially fills the gap: This…
“Cuba: The Last Sixty Years,” an exhibition of 220 works that Texas art collector-businessman Robert Borlenghi purchased at state art galleries in Cuba earlier this year, has been on display at Borlenghi’s Pan American Art Gallery in Dallas for the past three months. It’s been causing controversy ever since. Some…
“Good morning, thanks for calling X-isle surf report for Friday morning. Come by the shop, we’re open today, we’re getting lots of new things in, getting ready for the holidays. So don’t forget, make X-isle your place for Christmas shopping. As for the wind and waves, not much is happening…
“There’s something happening here,” a Coral Gables gallery owner told me over lunch recently. “I’m just not sure what it is.” Me neither. The infusion of new blood into renovated South Beach, Miami’s growing reputation as a Latin American capital, local museum expansions, and the sudden arrival of a large…
Art conservator Garth Francis is at work outside the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts (TOPA), restoring renowned pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Mermaid sculpture. It’s a job Francis estimates will cost the City of Miami Beach nearly $10,000. Francis, a specialist in outdoor sculpture restoration, holds up two snapshots…
The elevator doors open, wafting a sweet strawberry smell through the sterile, silver-toned lobby of Estefan Enterprises, a gated building on Bird Road at 62nd Avenue that separates a commercial strip from a quiet residential area just west of Coral Gables. On this hot summer afternoon, the outside parking lot…
In the early Sixties, in the spring of the Cuban revolution, five slim young black men who wore sharkskin suits and sang like Smokey Robinson were all the rage. Friends from a Havana neighborhood with no professional musical experience and not much else to do, they formed a finger-snapping group…
Africa Fete ’94, a summer tour of dance-oriented global-beat bands put together by Island Records, features Caribbean zouk pioneers Kassav, electro-funk chanteuse Angelique Kidjo, and Ziskakan, a group of musicians from the East African island of Reunion who mixes Eastern melodies with rock rhythms. An Africa Fete compilation CD and…
A group of bare-chested green men with African features and leaves for hair are gathered together in a large, unfinished island landscape propped against the wall in the back room of Edouard Duval-Carrie’s Miami Beach house. Palm trees line the lush, painted shoreline, their slim trunks positioned in a row…
In the Big Time Productions studio space in the old Paris Theater on South Beach, two trendily clad girls are scampering around on a scaffold, lip-synching the backup vocals of “Money Makes the Monkey Dance,” the first track on Nil Lara’s soon-to-be-released four-song CD. The models are accompanied by a…
Max Orlando Ba*os was a mechanic until he picked up an old Russian camera a few years ago. Before he knew it he’d become a photographer, shooting the streets of Old Havana where he has always lived and where he knows everyone. The roof literally caved in on his family’s…
Dozens of crudely constructed little sailboats, canoes, rowboats, and rafts were strewn like scattered driftwood on the stone floor of a room in the Spanish Morro castle that overlooks Havana’s harbor. Arranged in the form of a ship with the bow pointing north, the clumsy, crowded armada of toy boats…
Joaquin Cortes, 24 years old and a dangerously handsome Gypsy trained in classical ballet, is the first flamenco dancer to achieve the popular status of a rock star. In Spain his mix of strong flamenco stomps and lyrical jumps and turns have seduced both jaded postmodern payos (non-Gypsies) and gitano…
Argentina’s Eighties transition from military dictatorship to democracy was sung by an army of balladeer poets, postpunk nihilists, and pop pretty boys. The national-rock scene roared with optimism at government-sponsored festivals, and multinational labels opened subsidiaries to commercialize the abundant local talent. (The newly “discovered” scene had been happening on…
On a hot afternoon this past January, Herbert Siguenza, Richard Montoya, and Ric Salinas were driving south on I-95 in a white Alamo rent-a-car, looking for a dead cat. For the members of the Los Angeles-based comedy theater troupe Culture Clash, on a two-week visit to Miami to acquire firsthand…
It was last summer and local band Lavalas was playing the Orange Blossom Lounge in Ft. Pierce, another booking in an obscure out-of-town venue they were told attracts a Haitian crowd. In a video of the concert you can see a few disinterested patrons of undetermined nationality standing around what…
Like many homes in Cuba, the small ranch-style house off Bird Road that artist Jose Bedia bought when he moved to Miami with his family last summer is protected by what is known as the “Indian commission.” Its members, an assortment of small ceramic statuettes of braves and squaws depicted…
Transmitting from studios on Lincoln Road since October, the Spanish-language music network MTV Latino now reaches more than two million 12-to-34-year-old viewers in seventeen Latin American countries and another 500,000 in the U.S. Producers at the cable station are realizing that they must deal with a cultural obstacle to their…
In an Argentine restaurant on Coral Way trombone player Juan Pablo Torres and percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo are working their way through a pile of grilled beef and talking tango. A restorative midday breakfast of stuffed large intestine, blood sausage, and cold Heineken stems the drain of the previous night’s descarga:…
