“A Fantastic Journey” opens this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, joining Edouard Duval-Carrié at Perez Art Museum Miami and El Anatsui at Bass Museum in a rare and brilliant trifecta of contemporaneous shows.  Together, these artists pop the lid on race, colonialism, sexism, consumerism and environmental destruction.

No stranger to South Florida, Mutu’s last exhibit here was in 2005 at the former Miami Art Museum.  In Amazing Grace, she showed video art rooted in the origins of the Atlantic slave trade and that casts the ocean as a duplicitous character.  Mutu describes the water as both beautiful and intimidating, evoking metaphors of cleansing and drowning.  In the video, she immerses herself in the sea as a gesture for embracing a new home.  Its significance is not lost in Miami where illegal immigration, sexual trafficking and transience are overwhelming realities.

Coming full circle, Amazing Grace will return as part of “A Fantastic Journey” on April 18 – July 6, 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami (770 NE 125th Street, North Miami).  Mutu’s The End of eating Everything, a short animation film featuring Santigold, will also be on view and is an Afrofuturist gem not to be missed.

Light And Dark: The Racial Biases That Remain In Photography:

“When Syreeta McFadden was young, she dreaded being photographed. Cameras made her skin look darkened and distorted. Now a photographer herself, she’s learned to capture various hues of brown skin.”

(Via NPR Topics: Visual Arts.)

(Originally Published on Jun 15, 2012)

“Question Bridge: Black Male is an experimental non-fiction new media project designed to explore critically divisive issues within the African American male community. The project interweaves a series of questions wherein the subjects serve as both interviewers and interviewees– posing and answering each others’ questions– mediated only through the lens of video.

By facilitating a conversation between black men across the geographic, economic, generational, educational and social strata of American society, Question Bridge provides space for Black Men to dispel preconceptions and bring the full spectrum of their identity and beliefs to the forefront. The media installation and documentary film provide insight into 200 exchanges between 100 black men from a broad geographic area; and the interactive website expands this dialogue into a “”megalogue”” among a critical mass of Black men in America.

Question Bridge: Black Males is supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute, The Tribeca Film Institute, the LEF Foundation, The Center for Cultural Innovation, and The California College of the Arts.

The Oakland Museum has an installation of the Question Bridge January 21, 2012 – July 8, 2012.

Directors/Producers: Chris Johnson & Hank Willis Thomas Co-producers: Bayete Ross Smith & Kamal Sinclair
Visit http://www.questionbridge.com/ to learn more!”

Black Futurism: The Creative Destruction and Reconstruction of Race in Contemporary Art:

Wanuri Kahiu. Pumzi, film still, 2009. Courtesy Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program.

“For the online research project Liquid Blackness, Alessandra Raengo reflects on Harry Elam’s assertion that in contemporary culture, blackness is able to ‘travel on its own, separate and distinct from black people.’¹ Raengo writes that the detachability of blackness from black subjectivity, identity, and history ‘remains exceedingly attractive and possible’ in mainstream society and that this detachment opens up possibilities for artists.² Art exhibitions such as Nicola Vassell’s Black Eye leverage contemporary forms of mobility in blackness. Vassell states,

A black eye is our true tool—it’s the thing a lot of us rely heavily on for this art world to even exist… But at the same time, a black eye is the document of having been bruised.³

Artists who trouble notions of blackness include Wangechi Mutu, Jacolby Satterwhite, Sanford Biggers, Hank Willis Thomas, Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, and Wanuri Kahiu, who made Kenya’s first science-fiction film, Pumzi. These artists visualize the creative and symbolic dimensions of the future in ways that also resonate in the texts of black science-fiction writers such as Octavia Butler. In ‘The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,’ Jerry Phillips quotes Lewis Mumford’s idea of the author (or artist) as the creator. Mumford asserts that ‘the writer is still a maker, creator, not merely a recorder of fact, but above all an interpreter of possibilities.’⁴ Phillips further elaborates,

By exploring ‘possible worlds’ and ‘intuitions of the future’ that critique the present…the [artist] recovers purposive human time, the sense that history is not something that simply happens to us, irrespective of our will and desires, but is, indeed, ours to make.⁵

In her essay ‘Race as Technology,’ Beth Coleman provides a foundation for the social imaginary that moves race and gender away from the ‘biological and genetic systems that have historically dominated its definition and toward human agency.’⁶ Coleman offers a view of race that exists as if it were on par with an instrument, as a technology or system that is ‘denatured from its historical roots’ and ‘freely engaged as a productive tool.’ This is different than, for example, the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix films that envisioned a futuristic world in which machines rule and use humans as slaves. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Kahiu’s Pumzi convey visions of the future where people are slaves or enabled to leave their walled-in communities.

Wangechi Mutu. The End of eating Everything, video still, 2013. Animated video, color, sound; 8:10 minutes. Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Victoria Miro Gallery. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Contemporary black artists often refute conventional notions or images of blackness and replace them with altered realities. Their works exist in the social imaginary between the symbolic and the real—avatars with alternate, hybrid, or cyborg identities, surrounded by worlds that stimulate the viewer’s awareness of the future. Wangechi Mutu’s video The End of eating Everything features the head of the musician and singer Santigold consuming flocks of black birds. Slowly, the frame expands to reveal a massive ‘she-planetoid, comprising writhing limbs and embedded, useless machinery, powered by her/its own gaseous effluent.’⁷ Mutu’s collage Agave you portrays an encounter between a tree and a female pseudo-cyborg whose tentacles take root in the earth. In Pumzi, the character Asha, more scientist than cyborg, escapes enslavement and ecological devastation by sacrificing her body to grow a germinating seed.

Returning to Coleman’s ‘race as technology’—denaturing race from historical references—and futuristic expressions of style, rhythm, dance, and the body in art, we can see the formation of a social imaginary that disrupts the syntax. In Reifying Desire 6, a video installation presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Jacolby Satterwhite explores the narratives of his queerness in a surreal universe, mixing 3-D animation, digital drawings, and footage of himself performing in a spandex bodysuit and sculpted headpiece. ‘I wanted a gestation-cycle video where I get impregnated and give birth to a new language system,’ Satterwhite says. ‘All these elements create a friction, a thunderstorm.’⁸ Saya Woolfalk’s ChimaTek™ demonstrates the workings of a synthesizing, hybridizing machine that remixes identities to create hybrid human-plant creatures.

Saya Woolfalk. ChimaTEK: Hybridization Machine, 2013. Natural and synthetic fabric, foam mannequin, painted steel, converse shoes, plastic skull, glass and plastic beads, two television monitors, electronics; 74 wide x 82 high. Courtesy the artist.

In ‘Du Bois’s Ambient Poetics: Rethinking Environmental Imagination in The Souls of Black Folk,’ Anne Raine notes how nature is central to the articulation of the ‘spiritual world’ in which African Americans live and strive. According to Raine, W. E. B. Du Bois’s main concern is ‘not to foster attention to and concern for nonhuman nature, but to explore the strange meaning of being black.’⁹ In the twenty-first century, contemporary black artists are very much connected to nature. The movement of the body in space draws one’s attention to nature, to what normally goes unnoticed as background—as in ambient music and light, for example, or as in the poetics of race and place. In Hycide magazine’s video Black Magic, the dancer Storyboard P pops, twirls, and contorts his body in the light. Moon Medicin, the conceptual band and dream child of Sanford Biggers convenes to concoct a fuel elixir for inter-dimensional travel and perceptual shifts.¹⁰

Moon Medicin at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, Frieda and Roy Furman Stage, New York, NY, 2014.

Black futurism as a form of creative expression pushes against the conventional limits of black subjectivity. As seen in the works highlighted here, this mobility of blackness gives artists agency to freely engage in the processes of reattachment, immersion, or movement in the universe.”

(Via Art21 Blog.)

Navajo artist Bert Benally, for Navajo TIME (Temporary Installations Made for the Environment), a nine-year-old art event focused on bringing temporary, site-specific art to the Navajo nation.

PICKS: Adler Guerrier:

“Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, review written by Alpesh Kantilal Patel”

(Via artforum.com.)

Del 6 al 15 de marzo del 2015

En el marco del 32° Festival Internacional de Cine de Miami, se presentan cuatro películas de producción y co-producción mexicana de gran calidad.

Dólares de Arena

Dir. Laura Guzmán/Israel Cárdenas

Amor e intimidad se entremezclan con nociones de turismo sexual y colonialismo contemporáneo, dentro de esta película que nos enseña que el amor tiene etiqueta de precio.

Todos están Muertos 

Dir. Beatriz Sanchis

Toques cómicos y sutiles detalles de realismo mágico, envuelven este interesante filme; que teje alrededor de la historia de Lupe, las tradiciones de Día de Muertos con sus fantasmas personales.

 

Antes de que nos Olviden

Dir. Matías Gueilburt

El largometraje trata de capturar a través de imágenes, relatos y testimonios, la ola de violencia que genera el narcotráfico. 

 

Las Oscuras Primaveras

Dir. Ernesto Contreras

A través de un triángulo amoroso de consecuencias inesperadas, la película describe un grupo de relaciones humanas que entremezclan el amor, la pasión y la ilusión.

 

Para más información y venta de boletos

¡Usa nuestro descuento!

———————————————–

Kahlo, Rivera + Mexican Modern Art

26 de Febrero – 31 de Mayo, 2015

La exposición, inaugurada el pasado miércoles por el Cónsul General de México en Miami, José Zabalgoitia, en el Museo de Fort Lauderdale; exhibe 75 piezas de algunos de los artistas mexicanos más influyentes del siglo XX, entre ellos: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, entre otros.

Además de grandes obras de la plástica nacional, la exhibición nos ofrece tres colecciones fotográficas que capturaron la compleja y profunda relación de la pareja Kahlo-Rivera.

Esta muestra es, sin duda, una gran oportunidad para  apreciar piezas, pocas veces exhibidas fuera de México; además de permitirnos observar y contrastar el estilo particular que estos artistas desarrollaron, a partir del mismo país, México, pero diferentes intereses.

NSU Museo de Arte de Fort Lauderdale

One East Las Olas Boulevard

Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301

Para mayores informes visita: http://nsuartmuseum.org/

——————————————————————–

Marco Canale and Manuel Diaz
Canale-Diaz Art Center Directors,
cordially invite you to the
Grand Opening Reception

A new cultural space opens its door in Coral Gables! Canale-Diaz Art Center, focused primarily in fine arts, but also open to other arts such as literature, education, and music, among others.

March 6 – March 28

Consequences

The opening exhibition symbolizes the clear evolution in Latin-American Art. An art that is no longer afraid to wonder beyond its usual territory, to search and to dig for new techniques and that ultimately dares to step away from the typically known Latin artistic lines, while still achieving to capture the Latin-American identity with great success through tendencies that are not traditionally their own.

Regular Hours:
Monday to Saturday: 10 am to 6 pm

Canale-Diaz Art Center
1805 Ponce de Leon Blvd. #135
Coral Gables, Fl. 33134

More Than Words

Questioning The Black Male Experience In America:

“Redefining the narrative of what it means to be black and male in the U.S. is at the heart of ‘Question Bridge: Black Males,’ an award-winning, multimedia art project.

(Via .)

Antony Gormley: ‘I am beginning to learn how to make sculpture’:

“For his latest series, Antony Gormley has installed an iron man at each point of the compass in the UK. When Hannah Ellis-Petersen joined the artist for a whirlwind tour of his work on Lundy, she wasn’t expecting to build fires, break chocolate and contemplate humanity from a deckchair in a howling gale

Standing on a granite precipice, with the churning Bristol Channel stretching out endlessly before him, Antony Gormley throws his arms wide. ‘Isn’t it utterly magical?’ he roars into a gale force wind so strong it almost knocks the breath from you. ‘You feel like all the silliness of the world has just been blown out of you.’ Laughing, I follow his lead and throw out my limbs, letting my body be battered by the elements. But Gormley is already off, bounding with admirable agility down the treacherous path to get a better view of the nesting birds below us.

We have only been together on Lundy, the tiny former Norse settlement 12 miles off the coast of Devon, for less than an hour but one thing has become apparent. While Gormley’s sculptures have, for almost four decades, been firmly rooted in the physicality of the human body, he finds the natural world in its raw, untameable form just as intoxicating. He grabs armfuls of the white granite pebbles at our feet, marvelling at their milky colour; runs his hands over the rough lichen coating the rocks; and delightedly walks me over to a drystone wall where ancient ivy had grown into strange pointed shapes ‘like penises blowing in the wind’. Later, in the evening, he insists we collect wood to build a fire, and takes to breaking fallen branches with the enthusiasm of a huntsman.

I want these sculptures to be markers, 21st-century standing stones

Continue reading…“

(Via .)

Join the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science on Tuesday, July 14 for “Curious Vault Collaborations 002.” Explore the past, present and future of flight with a moderated discussion and the debut of the Museum’s latest Curious Vault Collaboration, Insight Flight, by sculptor Robert Chambers and Dr. GeCheng Zha, University of Miami professor and director the Aerodynamics and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) Lab.

Guests will enjoy free books from Spaceleggers, courtesy of Bookleggers, a community mobile library offering free books to the public with a special selection of science and science fiction books; a performance in the Museum’s historic Planetarium by DJ Le Spam of City of Progress Studio and Lance Vertok, under dome projections by Science Art Cinema, which mixes 20th century science and science-fiction films with performances and multimedia performances; and an exclusive auction of Miami Cityscapes created by ten local artists including Edouard Duval Carrié, Agustina Woodgate, Cesar Santos, Emmett Moore, Felice Grodin, Jenny Brillhart, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Maritza Molina, Monica Lopez de Victoria and Pablo Cano. The auction will also include limited-edition items by Bookleggers and City of Progress.

Throughout the night, attendees will enjoy burgers courtesy of Shake Shack and Gramps will serve complimentary cocktails provided by Tito’s Vodka.

When:

Tuesday, July 14, 2015, 7–10 p.m. (Moderated discussion will begin promptly at 7:45 p.m.)

Where:

Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL 33129

Admission:

Cost: $15 per person. Tickets available at Eventbrite.com; proceeds go to benefit the three Knight Arts Challenge winners: Bookleggers Library, City of Progress, and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science series Science Art Cinema. Museum members and Frost Science Young Patrons receive free admission.

Frost Museum of Science
3280 S Miami Ave
Miami, FL 33133
Ph: 305-646-4200
www.miamisci.org

Arthena Talks to Acclaimed Contemporary Artist, Zhang Huan:

“Arthena recently had the pleasure of interviewing Zhang Huan, the internationally distinguished performance artist, painter, photographer and sculptor. Based in Shanghai and New York, the artist has held recent solo exhibitions in Paris, London, New York and Florence, and his works have been acquired by top museums, galleries and public organizations around the world. Zhang Huan’s works are recognized for their complexity and depth, and for their ability to simultaneously capture intimate elements of personal identity while encompassing both cultural and political commentary.

Family Tree, 2000

‘I invited 3 calligraphers to write texts on my face from early morning until night. I told them what they should write and to always keep a serious attitude when writing the texts even when my face turns to dark. My face followed the daylight till it slowly darkened. I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared.

This work speaks about a family story, a spirit of family. In the middle of my forehead, the text means ‘Move the Mountain by Fool (Yu Kong Yi Shan)’. This traditional Chinese story is known by all common people, it is about determination and challenge. If you really want to do something, then it could really happen. Other texts are about human fate, like a kind of divination. Your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, cheekbone, and moles indicate your future, wealth, sex, disease, etc. I always feel that some mysterious fate surrounds human life which you can do nothing about, you can do nothing to control it, it just happened.’

Arthena: How did you get involved with art?

Zhang Huan: Art is my faith and my life. The first teacher is Mr. Gu Xijiu, my middle school art teacher.

A: Where do you derive your inspiration from?

ZH: It is related to the cultural background and my living conditions. My inspiration is from the most trivial things in daily life such as eating, sleeping, working, and those which are always ignored in our ordinary life. What I want to experience in my artworks are survival, the physical body and the truth. My root is in China, and so is the root of my inspiration.

I am a devout Buddhist at home. The ultimate purpose for Tibetan Buddhism is to resolve the problem of life and death. People in Tibet make a pilgrimage every day just for the sake of having a better rebirth. I cherish a genuine love for Tibetan religion and culture, believing that there is rebirth and paying more attention to the living conditions of humanities in this life. Influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, such subjects as fate, desire and death are usually adopted in my artworks

Spring Poppy Fields No. 33,oil on linen, 250 x 400cm, 2014

‘Poppy field embodies eternal illusions. This kind of magic will reincarnate endlessly in the ‘Poppy Field’. Likewise, ‘Spring Poppy Field’shares similar concept, premature life and spirit sprout in spring.’

A: Please tell us about your training in painting at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and how you transitioned to creating performance art.

ZH: When I was in college, I liked the French artist Millet very much. I also studied Rembrandt, although I learned only a few things because of the limited resources. What I learned in the art department in college was not very different from what I learned at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Both schools taught Russia-style painting and emphasized the texture and spatial quality of a painted object. Before I went to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, teachers there seemed worthy of respect and out of reach. Later, that curious feeling slowly faded. I read new books and saw new things. One book that influenced me a great deal was a small book written by Zhao Wuji, which was based on his lectures at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. At the time, people in art circles all made copies of the book. I learned two things from this book. First, Zhao says that every part of a painting should be different from its other parts. We need to activate every part to let it breathe and to give it life. Second, you don’t paint a thing because you want to paint that particular thing; you paint for your own heart, to express yourself. These two ideas completely changed my understanding of Su-style painting and broadened my thoughts. Before, I painted what a teacher asked me to paint. The teacher would spend two hours arranging lighting and positioning a model, but when the teacher stepped out of the studio, we would ask the model to lie on the floor. Later, I would paint only a hand or a foot as I chose. I even made sketches that looked like nothing at all. When the teachers at the art institute saw my work, they said that I didn’t need model any longer and could go home.

For a long time, I could not feel a connection with two-dimensional materials. I tried different mediums to get the feeling of closeness. Once, I found the bottom half of a plastic mannequin. One of the legs was black and hollowed. I put it on my bike and went home. I put one of my legs in one of the hollow mannequin legs-I had three legs. I suddenly felt I understood something extraordinary. Three legs! I tried to walk with three legs. The feeling was strange yet exciting. I felt that I found a way of walking-of being-that I could not have achieved before. The manner of my body’s participation completely moved me. This may be said to be the first work that I created with my body. The directness of using my own body made me feel grounded, and I told myself that this would be the only way for me. I need nothing more. Nothing else can move me. I don’t want anything. I only want my own body.

Sea No. 18, ash on linen, 150 x 280cm, 2012

“Lao Zi (a philosopher in the Spring and Autumn Period, founder of Daoism) said: ‘The highest excellence is like that of water. Water benefits all things and does not compete with them, but water is content with the places that all men disdain. It is this that makes water so near to the spirit of Daoism.’ It means that the top class of virtue is like water, which benefits all without any demands for return while it has no conflicts and disagreement with them. This is the classic view on water in the history of Chinese ancient philosophy and also it is propounding philosophy theory that had been influencing Chinese politics, economy and culture from the past till now. In the Seascape ash paintings, Zhang has his own interpretation of water, that is, everything starts from water and will end with it. It will repeat itself in endless cycles.”

A: What was it like being a pioneer in the field of performance art in China?

ZH: There was nothing that I wanted to prove or fight against. Actually it reflected my living condition at that time, which was a common condition of all the ordinary people. It looks like everything is determined by fate. What is important for artists is to make choices based on their own standards, to make interesting and familiar things according to their own surroundings, to discover the seemingly meaningless in ordinary life, and to walk into art in their own way.

For an artist, the important task is to raise questions to the society and art. The value of contemporary art is creating artworks which may represent the spirit of the era.

A: What is your state of mind when you are performing?

ZH: It makes me feel dependable to use the body as a media of art creation. I was physically involved in the artwork because I realized that the body was the most direct way to contact the society as well as a prove of one’s personal identity.Also the specific person is the most important character throughout the artwork.The need of my heart drives the body to perform in the required status and bear the significance in order to fulfill my intention.In this regard, the physical body is the carrier of my inner heart.

In the course of the performance hours, I tried to forget myself and separate my mind from my flesh, but I was pulled back to reality again and again. Only after the performance did I understand what I experienced.

Semele Opera

“In 2009, as director and stage art director of Semele, I am very excited to be able to take an ancestral family temple with over 450 years of history and use it on the stage of a 300 year-old European opera house. My goal is to allow the opera singers to reenact this classical Western opera on an Eastern stage latent with the tragic emotions of ‘Semele.’ While at the same time allowing Western guests who enter the opera house to experience the dramatic beauty and pain common to all human beings. Love and hate, life and death are topics that will forever hang over the human race. The fact that the roots of pain introduced thousands of years ago in a Western opera, reappear in the East in the fate of a single peasant family in the countryside of China can make us continually ponder the redemptive qualities of humanity.

At the 2010 Shanghai Biennale, I decided to display the installation of semele as version of art museum, because I want to try to restore the original scene and let audience gain experience and thinking from the scenery.”

A: We would love to hear about your emphasis on the body and spirituality, whether in performance art in which often features nudity, or sculptures of Buddhist figures.

ZH: I merely use the nature of Buddha to express the nature of human and the meaning of life. “Buddha is human and vice versa.” So the sculptures are focusing on the situation of human beings and they are expressed in Buddha’s figure, which are a common and universal shape of Buddha.

Hopefully the viewers may become a part of the art and set free their feelings sufficiently when they confront with the very works. Different people may have his own understanding derived from his life experience and outlook on life.

A: How does the social and political climate in China impact your artistic expression?

ZH: My art is not influenced by policies either in Beijing or New York, current or before. My biggest enemy is myself.

A: What are you currently working on?

ZH: I am working on oil paintings now. The creation of concrete ash paintings has ended with a huge historic work. I am doing some experiments on brand new art with ash ingredient, and people can see them when the works are finished.

Three Legged Buddha,steel and cooper

“The figure of ‘Three Legged Buddha’ symbolizes the courage of constantly challenging the self, the higher level of enlightenment that comes about after conquering the self.

The inspiration of Three-legged Buddha comes from Tibet. I collected a lot of fragments of Buddhist sculptures in Tibet. When I saw these fragments in Lhasa, a mysterious power impressed me. They are embedded with historical traces and religion, just like the limbs of a human being. I added a third leg to the fragment of two legs, and half of a human head under the foot of the third leg. I sketched the idea on a piece of paper, and asked assistants to make a model of it. The copper workshop then made it into the size and effect I wanted to achieve. When using pieces of copper to make Buddhist images, I like to keep the original characteristics of copper and traces of welding. For me, pieces of copper are like stitched skin after an operation.”

– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

“

(Via .)

A riot of color roars in Miami to usher in Art Basel season as the exhibitionWalls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hofmann opens October 10 at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU, the Smithsonian affiliate in Miami (on view through January 3). This exhibition is the first-ever to showcase a vital aspect of the mid-century Modern Master’s art, his large-scale public mural projects.

Opening reception free & open to the public on Saturday, October 10 (4 – 7 p.m.)
On view through January 3

The opening reception is free and open to the public on Saturday, October 10 from 4-7p.m. The museum is located at Florida International University, 10975 S.W. 17 St. (map/ directions).

Nine towering oil studies (each seven feet tall) are the show’s centerpieces, created by Hofmann for the famed 1950 project to re-design the Peruvian city of Chimbote (Hofmann’s visionary collaboration with Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, that was never realized).  The Chimbote Series and related architectural drawings and studies are presented thanks to the Trustees of the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust.

The exhibition also features several key paintings leading up to and following his murals.  Hofmann is recognized worldwide as a leader in the evolution of Abstract Expressionism, both as an artist and as a celebrated teacher who influenced a generation of America’s most distinguished artists.

“The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color,” said Hans Hofmann.

 

The Museum’s Steven and Dorothea Green Critics’ Lecture Series presents a lecture and Curator’s tour by  Dr. Kenneth Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art and Curator of this exhibition at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut (where Walls of Color originated before coming to the Frost), at 4:30 p.m. during the October 10th opening reception. (The lecture and Curator’s tour are also free and open to the public, but space is limited. RSVP to artinfo@fiu.edu is required by Oct. 7 to guarantee seating.)

(Out of This World, 1945 by Hans Hofmann / Collection of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU,
Gift of Dr. Paul Lambert Schmitz)

“Hans Hofmann was the linchpin for Abstract Expressionism, and the Frost Art Museum FIU is thrilled to bring this first-ever show about Hofmann’s mural works to Miami for Art Basel season,” said Dr. Jordana Pomeroy, the museum’s director.

“Walls of Color will provide valuable context for the history of collaboration between architects, artists and developers. A touchstone in a city like Miami, with its historic MiMo and Art Deco architectural districts and the recent contemporary mural movement in Wynwood that serve as hallmarks of Miami’s success as a cultural destination.”

“This aspect of Hofmann’s career will shed light on the wide-ranging ambitions of one of the most seminal artists of the 20th century,” adds Dr. Pomeroy.

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, located at 10975 SW 17th Street (across from the Blue Garage and adjacent to the Wertheim Performing Arts Center on the Modesto A. Maidique Campus).