Miami Art Week – Cuban Art in Museums, Art Spaces, Galleries

Miami Art Week starts early for Cuban art, with openings starting this Friday and more shows already running in museums and galleries around town. Here’s a roundup of shows to catch before—and during—the fairs.

Opening this Friday, December 1

Martínez Celaya at Fredric Snitzer. The gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with Nothing That Is Ours, a show of new works by Enrique Martínez Celaya. The pieces on view consider the sea as a metaphor of possibility, desire, and destruction, and include paintings, sculpture, and a large-scale outdoor installation. The show opens on Friday, with a reception and book signing scheduled for Thursday, December 7, 10 a.m. to noon. The show runs through January 14.

Rosabal at Latin Art Core. A member of the legendary 1950s art group Los Diez Pintores Concretosis still creating powerful abstract work. At Latin Art Core, José Rosabal: À la Recherché du Temps Perdu opens with a 7 p.m. reception this Friday evening. The exhibition will run through January 10.

Allora & Calzadilla at ICA. Despite falling from its construction crane during installation, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s massive sculpture, Unspecified Promise, should be in place for its opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. A rusted backhoe tractor owned by the Havana-born Calzadilla’s father is part of the work, which is a response to the recent devastation in Puerto Rico, where the duo are based.

Opening Monday, December 4

Valdés at Tresart. Rachel Valdés: Into the Space brings the Havana artist’s abstract canvases—from the series of the same name—to Tresart’s Wynwood gallery. The opening reception runs 6–8 p.m., and the show runs through January 15.

Opening Wednesday, December 6

Triángulo at CIFO. Paying tribute to three pioneers of Cuban geometric art, Triángulo – Loló Soldevilla, Sandú Darié and Carmen Herrera presents 50 works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, all executed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thanks to a partnership between CIFO and Microsoft, the exhibition includes Sandú Darié: An Immersive Experience, which uses mixed-reality and hologram software to allow viewers to experience Darié works that are permanently located in Cuba.

Sandú Darié: An Immersive Experience will be available for viewing only during Art Basel Week, December 6–10.

The exhibition, curated by Elsa Vega, will remain on view at CIFO Art Space through March 4.

Valella at RAW. To coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, the Young Artists Initiative is presenting RAW, a 3-floor, immersive pop-up exhibition of cutting-edge and emerging artists at the historic Post Office building in downtown Miami.

For RAW, Angela Valella will present Every House is a Haunted House, an installation that plays with viewers’ perception, combining an aura of voyeurism with a sense of concealment. RAW runs through Sunday, December 10. Ticket information here.

Media Under Dystopia 1.0. After two years of planning, the MUD Foundation debuts with Media Under Dystopia 1.0, an exhibition of technology-related art curated by Rudolfo Peraza and Yunekys Villalonga. The group show features half a dozen artists, including Peraza and Ernesto Oroza. The exhibition, which runs through March 2, is the kickoff event for Art+Hack+Data 2018, a program of conferences and events scheduled for next year. 7–9 p.m. at the foundation’s space on SW First Street, Miami. Details here.

Now on View

On the Horizon at PAMM. On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection continues at the Pérez Art Museum Miami with Part 2, Abstracting History. Like Triángulo at CIFO, the exhibition focuses on the vast tradition of abstraction in Cuban art as a significant conceptual line. Along with work by Sandú Daríe, José Rosabal, and other pioneers of Cuban abstraction, the show also includes work by contemporary artists, like José Ángel Vincench and Reynier Leyva Novo, who use abstraction in their work. On view through January 7.

Soriano and Reflections at the Frost. The long-awaited retrospective Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic is now in residence at the Frost Art Museum, along with Reflections of the Americas: New Acquisitions from the Collection of Univision. With more than 90 works, the Soriano show traces the artist’s development from early geometric abstractions to the luminous imagery of his mature years. Reflections includes the work of Cuban masters Cundo Bermúdez, Wifredo Lam, and Soriano too. Rafael Soriano runs through January 28; Reflections of the Americas runs through January 3.

Force and Form at the de la Cruz Collection. Drawn from the collection, the 2017–2018 exhibition features the work of more than 40 international artists—among them, Félix González-Torres, Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta, and Jorge Pardo. Special hours from Wednesday, December 5 through Saturday, December 9.

Ruben Millares: Paint by Numbers at Pan American Art Projects. Multimedia artist Ruben Millares is perhaps best known for his provocative performance and video art. In Paint by Numbers, he focuses exclusively on two-dimensional works—and numbers, which he presents as codes capable of deciphering contemporary society. Through December 15 at PAAP’s Little Haiti art space.

Art vs. Fetishism at Pan American Art Projects Annex. Sandra Ramos, José Ángel Toirac, and Mabel Poblet are among the artists joining an international lineup to explore how fetishism—the excessive veneration of material objects—has permeated contemporary culture, and how artists have responded. “Is art a weapon used to denounce fetishism as a tool of manipulation, or does it work because of that tool?” asks curator Alejandro Machado. “Do we have to respond to this question? Does art have to prove anything?” The answers, or some of them, are on view at the Pan American Art Project Annex in Little River, where Art vs. Fetishism or The Utility of Idolatry runs through January 13.

Castillo at Miami Hispanic Cultural Arts Center. Art in Motion by Claudio Castillo presents a full range of work by the artist, from watercolors to videos, interactive pieces, and “generative art” created at least partially by a non-human system or algorithm. Through December 16.

Torres Llorca at Conde Contemporary. Rubén Torres Llorca has brought a selection of New Works to the gallery on Coral Gable’s Miracle Mile.

“The artist has never shied away from exploring the dissembling, double dealing side of togetherness,” wrote critic Joel Weinstein, “and if you root around beneath those second hand, faux nostalgic, plain spoken surfaces of his—If you don’t take them at face value, in other words—you might catch him at some furtive business of his own, quoting speciously and making things up, but why not?  As he himself declared in an interview, ‘We all tell fairy tales,’ he most certainly did not mean that in a nice way.”

On view through December 18.