MSA-X 2018-20 coverage of Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince, at Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

Exhibition on view April 23 – August 11, 2019 In conjunction with ...

Exhibition on view April 23 – August 11, 2019

In conjunction with Haitian Heritage Month, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami will present “PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince” which ...brings together the work of over 20 artists working in the Haitian capital. The exhibition features work that illuminates the history, music, politics, religion, magic, architecture, art, and literature that intersect in Port-au-Prince, enabling the viewer to reflect upon the past and speculate about the future of this vital city and its country.

Co-curated by Haitian-American artist and curator Edouard Duval-Carrié and British artist and curator Leah Gordon, PÒTOPRENS is a large-scale exhibition of sculptures, photographs, and films, accompanied by a recreated Port-au-Prince barbershop as well as extensive public programming.

The exhibition mirrors the organization of the city itself by highlighting specific districts in Port-au-Prince where art is produced—each with its own particular subjects, forms, and materials. Bel Air, situated on a hill that rises behind the remains of the Catholic Cathedral in downtown Port-au- Prince, has a rich concentration of Vodou flag artists and sequin sculptors—a tradition alleged to have originated from the royal flags and banners of Benin. Rivière Froide is a community of sculptors living on the banks of the river that passes through the city’s Carrefour neighborhood, who carve their work from limestone and other detritus found at the water’s edge. At the southern end of Grand Rue, the main avenue that runs north to south through downtown Port-au-Prince, artists make assemblages that transform the detritus of the world’s failing economies into apocalyptic images. Sculptors include Katelyne Alexis, Karim Bléus, Jean Hérard Céleur, Myrlande Constant, Lhérisson Dubréus, Ronald Edmond, André Eugène, Guyodo (Frantz Jacques), Ti Pelin (Jean Salomon Horace), Evel Romain, Jean Claude Saintilus, and Yves Telemaque.

The exhibition includes a selection of photographs and films that further contextualize Port-au-Prince as a far more complex city than is often represented in the news. Photographers Josué Azor, Maggie Steber, and Roberto Stephenson portray the city as one of radical sexual politics, seductive interiors and informal economies, as well as loss and destruction. Meanwhile, the film series illustrates many decades of the city’s history, with a program including includes Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Marché Salomon (2015), a poetic response to the lives of the market people of Port-au-Prince; and Jørgen Leth’s Dreamers (2002), a decades-long tribute to the last generation of Haitian artists.

Additionally, an installation pays tribute to Port-au-Prince’s innumerable barbershops, constructed and furnished with off cast materials and distinguished by vivid portraits of both foreign and domestic athletes, rappers, and models. Organized by Richard Fleming, the installation at MOCA features newly commissioned portraits by painter Michel Lafleur, and will provide visitors the opportunity to get a haircut from a Haitian barber.

“PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince” was organized by Pioneer Works, with special advisor Jean-Daniel Lafontant. The exhibition was made possible with generous support from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The presentation at MOCA is generously supported by the Green Family Foundation, Inc. Special thanks to Sharona El-Saieh. MOCA’s exhibitions and programs are made possible with the continued support of the North Miami Mayor and Council and the City of North Miami, the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.[+] Show More

AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, MOCA museum, Miami,1918

AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People MOCA presents a groundbreaking ...

AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People

MOCA presents a groundbreaking exhibition celebrating the founding of AFRICOBRA – the Black artist collective that helped define the visual aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement ...of the 1960s and 1970s. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the collective, which came out of Chicago.

Art is a tool: a visual language, an experiential form and a revelation. When art successfully combines all of three of these characteristics, it speaks to and moves those who encounter it. The artist collective AFRICOBRA exemplifies these traits while defining for themselves how they want their art to function in the world.

Founded in 1968, by Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams, AFRICOBRA, which stands for the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, created images that defined the visual aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement. The artistic movement was a complement to the Black Power Movement that centered the liberation of Black people, taking up and extending the arms of the Civil Rights Movement. The founders, like many artists of the 1960s and 1970s, understood that their artistic voices could contribute to the liberation and continue unifying the Black community as a whole.

On the occasion of the collective’s 50th anniversary, AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People brings together the founding artists with five early members: Sherman Beck, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Omar Lama, Carolyn Lawrence and Nelson Stevens to look back at their early contributions to the shaping of AFRICOBRA while presenting the artists’ current works of art. These ten artists provided an artistic foundation from which the group evolved over time through the guiding philosophy of art for the people, art that appeals to the senses, and art that is inspired by African people. The artists presented this as a unit in the exhibition Ten in Search of a Nation organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem.

With Ten in Search of a Nation as the framework, the show at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami will introduce the foundational work of one the longest organized artist collective and the ways in which they used a visual aesthetic as a tool to act: communicate with their community, resist mainstream narratives about Black people, and encourage unity through community. Through a selection of mixed-media works, installation, archival documents and photographs and oral histories, AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People will also connect to the Miami as a place, by extending an invitation to the community to participate by sharing their stories from the Black Power period, ways in which community exists for them in the city, and stories of family.

AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People is an invitation to be part of a community and part of family. It is an invitation to reconnect to the core of humanity.
Curator Jeffreen M. Hayes earned a Ph.D. in American studies from the College of William and Mary, a Master of Arts in art history from Howard University, and a Bachelor of Arts in humanities from Florida International University. She is currently the executive director of Threewalls in Chicago, and has previously worked at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Hampton University Art Museum, the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art. Her curatorial projects include “Intimate Interiors” (2012), “Etched in Collective History” (2013), “SILOS” (2016), “Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman” (2018), and “Process” (2019). She was a guest curator for Artpace San Antonio’s International Artist in Residence Program from May–August 2018.[+] Show More

Cecilia Vicuña: "About to Happen", Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2019-20

Cecilia Vicuña: "About to Happen", Museum of Contemporary Art, North ...

Cecilia Vicuña: "About to Happen", Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2019-20

In celebration of Miami Art Week 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA) will present the first major U.S. ...solo exhibition of influential Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña. “About to Happen” traces Vicuña’s career-long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, peoples, and landscapes in a time of global climate change,

“Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen” is comprised of Vicuña’s multidisciplinary work in performance, sculpture, drawing, video, text, and site-specific installations created over 40 years. Reframing dematerialization as both a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism and radical climate change, the exhibition examines a process that shapes public memory and responsibility. Operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile, Vicuña’s practice merges dissimilar disciplines and communities with shared relationships to land and sea, and to the economic and environmental disparities of the 21st century.

Vicuña’s work reflects the overlapping dialogs of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices. For the first time in this traveling exhibition, the show will include painting, a practice which Vicuña began in the 1970s and to which she has recently returned – in some cases, repainting lost paintings from memory. The addition of painting to “Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen” is an affirmation of a practice that exists, in its entirety, in the logic of every single work – and yet – is also, always evolving.

The exhibition will include an expansive presentation of Vicuña’s precario sculptures, which the artist began creating in 1966. Vicuña assembles these “precarious works” from bits of wood, thread, and other found objects into temporary small sculptures that despite their modest scale have a surprising dynamism and energy. The exhibition also features the installation “Burnt Quipu” (2018), in which lengths of dyed wool hang floor to ceiling, connecting earth and sky, in tribute to recent forest fires in the greater West Coast region. “Burnt Quipu” is part of Vicuña’s longstanding artistic exploration of the ancient Andean writing tradition of “talking knots,” an advanced communication system inhibited during colonization.

Born in Santiago de Chile, Vicuña is a poet, visual artist, and filmmaker. She is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, and exhibits and performs internationally. Her multidimensional works begin as an image that becomes a poem, a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance.

Vicuña’s work is included in the collections of The Tate Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chile, Santiago, Chile; MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She was appointed Messenger Lecturer 2015 at Cornell University, an honor bestowed on authors who contribute to the “Evolution of Civilization for the special purpose of raising the moral standard of our political, business, and social life.” She lives in New York City, where she co-founded oysi.org, a site for the oral cultures and poetries of the world. Vicuña’s work is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Vicuna’s art has also been featured inDocumenta 14 and shown at Witte de With. She most recently was awarded the CINTAS, a very prestigious United States artist fellowship.

“Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen” is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC), and co-curated by Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts at the CAC, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor, University of California, Berkeley. Support for this exhibition is provided by Sydney & Walda Besthoff Foundation, The Helis Foundation, The Kabacoff Family Foundation, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog.

The exhibition at MOCA is made possible, in part, with support from Funding Arts Network and Citizens Interested in the Arts. MOCA’s exhibitions and programs are made possible with the continued support of the North Miami Mayor and Council and the City of North Miami, the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.

Also on view at MOCA November 26, 2019 – March 29, 2020, a new exhibition featuring works of French-Mexican surrealist painter Alice Rahon (1904–1987). Guest curated by Mexico-City based art historian Tere Arcq, “Poetic Invocations,” marks the first solo show in 55 years dedicated to Rahon’s work in the United States.

https://mocanomi.org/2019/12/cecilia-vicuna-about-to-happen/[+] Show More

Alice Rahon: Poetic Invocations, The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA) is proud to present ...

The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA) is proud to present a new exhibition featuring works of French-Mexican surrealist painter Alice Rahon (1904–1987). “Poetic Invocations” is guest curated by ...Mexico-City based art historian Tere Arcq. The exhibition aims to contribute to the scholarship and recognition of under-explored women artists, and to the intercultural influences on European artists in exile in the Americas, whose work was often deeply marked by indigenous and archaic cultures.

Born in France and later nationalized as a Mexican, Rahon joined the Parisian Surrealist circle as a poet, but once in Mexico, she turned her creativity mainly to painting. She became an active a member of a group of European Surrealists artists in exile including Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna.

Rahon’s production was a far cry from that of her contemporaries. She was drawn to light and color, and established a continuous dialogue between painting and poetry. Her creations brought together Mexican landscapes, myths, legends and fiestas, and she was a pioneer in the use of sand and texture on her canvases, which included subtle graffito markings. Her oeuvre has been overlooked for many years.

“Poetic Invocations” marks the first solo show dedicated to Rahon’s work in the United States in 55 years since her exhibition at the Louisiana Gallery in Houston, Texas in 1964. The exhibition examines a robust art-historical moment that emerged in 1940 as an international community of artists fled World War II in Europe and settled in Mexico. It will feature approximately 30 works including paintings, works on paper, assemblages, as well as archival material such as the Dyn journal, original poems and manuscripts and photographs to put an emphasis on Rahon´s oeuvre as a whole. The exhibition will explore five fundamental themes: art as poetic invocation, the power of the immemorial past, the journal that challenged limits, the volcano and the Mexican landscape and light: the dilution of inside and outside, and the metaphorical experience of the inside out: fiestas and popular art in Mexico.

Rahon exhibited regularly in Mexico, New York and California and had solo shows in Paris and Lebanon. Her last solo exhibition took place in 1986 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, just a year before her death. In 2009, with the discovery of her archive, Teresa Arcq curated an Alice Rahon retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and then at El Cubo in Tijuana.

Arcq has worked as chief curator at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and as an independent curator has produced many high-profile exhibitions. She has served as a professor of Art History at Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm and published several essays for catalogues on Mexican modern art and women artists in Mexico, as well as Surrealism. She is currently advising the exhibition and catalog for the show Global Surrealism opening in 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Modern Gallery in London. She is also collaborating with the Schirn Kunsthalle Museum in Frankurt and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark for the upcoming exhibition Fantastik Women, in Spring 2020 and writing for a publication on Leonora Carrington’s Tarot and one on Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington’s creative collaboration. She will be co-curating a Leonora Carrington retrospective for the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid and the Arken Museum in Denmark opening on the fall of 2020.[+] Show More

Mira Lehr: Tracing the Red Thread... Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

Mira Lehr: Tracing the Red Thread September 6, 2018 – November 4, 2018 ...

Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami,Lionel Smit: Obscura, 2018

Chana Budgazad Sheldon turns the focus on local artists and community ...

MSA-X 2018-20 coverage of Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

MSA-X 2018-20 coverage of Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami,

We thank, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and the gallery staff for there kind help, we also thank the artist for there creative phenomena.

PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince, at Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami