What may well be the most powerful, unique and mesmerizing work in all of Miami Art Week is buried in a room at the side of the Fillmore Miami Beach. In Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak, the dead come alive and speak directly to us. The piece is an indefinable mix of installation, story-telling, sound,…
Tag: art
Art Goes Boom – Massive ICA sculpture falls from crane
Art is supposed to have an impact, but not like this. On Monday a 20,000 pound sculpture fell from some fifteen feet in the air as it was being lifted into the sculpture garden at the new ICA, the lavish contemporary art museum in the Design District. The giant granite work, a ridged rectangular cube,…
Bread, Roses, and a Declaration of Joy
[Photo – Jennifer Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra of Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami] This is a cultural blog, but celebrating culture often feels difficult these days. Politics is so enraging and frightening. The abuse, lies, stupidity and nastiness of President Trump; the meanness of politicians who seem determined to decimate support for the environment, health,…
Telling her story: Jamilah Sabur defines herself
If you were puzzled, as I was, by artist Jamilah Sabur’s haunting, opaque show at Dimensions Variable at Miami Dade College, this Thursday night is your chance to hear her explain. Miami-based Sabur’s exhibit If Defined, Then Undefine, is packed with personal memories and meaning related to her Jamaican roots. Among them are her mother’s…
Carlos Betancourt talks Memory, Identity and Illuminations
I’ve been friends with artist Carlos Betancourt since the now-famous Imperfect Utopia days on Lincoln Road in the early 90’s, when his studio was a gathering place for the community of artists and art lovers, thrift shop glamour pusses, experimental designers, South Beach socialites (we didn’t call it Sobe yet), the simply fabulous and those…
New horizons: PAMM Opens Sweeping Contemporary Cuban Art Exhibit
(Above: Yoan Capote. Island (see-escape), 2010. Oil, nails, and fishhooks on jute mounted on plywood. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami.) When the man who put the Pérez in Pérez Art Museum Miami opens a Cuban art exhibit in the U.S. capital of Cuba-obsessives, it’s guaranteed to be a major event. And the launch of On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from…
Toba Khedoori – The World in a Drawing
Toba Khedoori, the artist now on exhibit at PAMM, sounds as if she has a fascinating backstory. She is from a Jewish Iraqi family, born and raised in Australia, and is an identical twin. PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, who curated a slightly smaller version of this show for LACMA, where he was formerly head of…
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