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| Wifredo Lam Meets Miami |
The terrible beauty of Afro-Cuban art casts a long shadow in Miami. Its legacy is everywhere, from revitalized mangroves by once-segregated Virginia Key to the transformed skyline of downtown, from the Miami Art Museum’s show of art by Wifredo Lam in North American collections to the University of Miami, where the Lowe Art Museum show about Afro Cuban art from 1968 to 2003 just closed. Gallery shows devoted to Lam at Cernuda, Gary Nader, and Tresart enhance the luster of Afro-Cuban art in Miami.
Some art is so deeply freighted with cultural associations that its destiny is to unfurl a community’s psyche when it arrives. That’s the case with Afro-Cuban art by Wifredo Lam.
Finally, Miami heals its rift with Lam, whose support of the Cuban Revolution is now seen in the context of history. “It’s the first major exhibition of my father’s work in Miami,” said Eskil Lam of the MAM show. “I hope this will mark a new beginning.”
Lam’s best art blooms from anger about persistent racist residues of a slave-driven colonial past and from visionary determination to forge a pioneering visual language that could transform the present. Lam, a black man whose father was a Chinese trader and whose Cuban mother was of African and Spanish descent, left Cuba in 1923 with a scholarship to study art in Europe. Some believe he also needed to extricate himself from a Cuba beset by prejudice. When he returned in 1942, he was enlightened by time in Paris in touch with the era’s best painters and poets.
But despite the expanded world view he carried with him back to Cuba, Lam at 40 was disheartened by narrow attitudes about blacks held by the island’s white elite. “I refused to paint cha-cha-cha,” he said after sailing across the Atlantic to his home in the Caribbean.
Consider the dazzling painting at MAM, “Le sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour (Dark Malembo, God of the Crossroads)” from 1943. It portrays emerald sugar cane fields flickering with reminders of slaves who sailed the Atlantic with spiritual beliefs from West Africa to create, under duress, powerful hybrid Afro-Cuban religions of Santeria and Palo Monte. Spirited hybrid images of plants, animals, and people cluster throughout with dynamic energy new for its time.
Lam’s unique Afro-Cuban gift to 20th Century art history is a gift that keeps on giving, especially in Miami if you know where to look. Recent art here builds on this legacy of terrible beauty. Such building does much to create a grand mosaic of Miami’s spectacular “fusion culture,” as Alberto Ibargüen of the Knight Foundation recently called it.
A poignant piece of that mosaic is “Amazing Grace,” a video by Wangechi Mutu, the ferociously talented artist born in Kenya. Filming a woman in white vanishing into waves off Miami Beach, Mutu was inspired by the slave trade to create her video. MAM showed it in 2005 and now owns it.
As it plays, Mutu sings “Amazing Grace” in English and her native Kikuyu. This familiar hymn was written by a British man who once led ships loaded with African slaves across the Atlantic. After surviving a storm at sea, he gave up the slave trade and became an Abolitionist.
“One of the ideas behind the show is that there are all these communities that have come via the sea and survived the Middle Passage,” Mutu said. “Cuban and Haitian communities traversed the sea to be in this area.”
At MAM her collages of entangled black women recalled Africa’s violent diamond trade and civil wars, also Florida mangroves. “The mangrove represents a family tree or root system or a community structure that is embedded deep into the past and comes out to the future,” she said.
Her art is about being torn apart and slowly healing. That soulful story is retold with operatic splendor in public art at the Arsht Center downtown. Gary Moore’s “Pharoah’s Dance” on a corner plaza takes cues from the call and response of gospel music to interlace with architecture and culture from American jazz to ancient Egypt. Long inspired by Afro-Cuban religion, José Bedia has made lobby floors and balcony railings replete with the terrible beauty of ocean travel.
Rush past all the glorious artworks to and from performances at your peril. You miss chances to be inspired by richly nuanced stories they evoke. Curtains never fall on these premiere public art performances.
Let’s hope that healing the rift with Lam helps Miami behold the visual art abounding here. To those of us weary of being told for years that this is a young city, the time is ripe to savor culture thriving right in front of us. From galleries to gardens, art is all around. |
 Wifredo Lam in North America. Miami Art Museum / MAM. Feb. 8 - May 18. Lam, Personaje con Sombrero, 1942. Guache on paper, 37 x 30 in |
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 Lam an Homage. Cernuda Arte. Feb. 4 - April 10. Lam, Mujer Sentada, 1944, oil on paper,
42 x 33 ¼ in
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 Lam one Man Show. Gary Nader Fine Art / Feb. 29 - April 30 / Lam, La Femme Femmie, 1955, Oil on canvas,
35 7/8 x 283/8 in
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 Wifredo Lam. Tresart. from Feb. 22 - March 28. Lam, untitled, 1965, oil on canvas,
19.69 x 15.75 in |
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