You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
That’s when she found the tree,
the dark, crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told
this was forbidden. It wasn’t
a question of ownership—
who could lay claim to
such maddening perfection?
[…]
I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove
Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 organized by Curator María Elena Ortiz, at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, March 10, 2024 – July 28, 2024.
Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism, Surrealism and Us explores how Caribbean and Black artists interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks, framed within a pre-existing history of Black resistance and creativity, illustrate how Caribbean and Black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes.
“such silence
still divine presence
echoes immortal migrants
[…]
a cardinal framed in the glass
red light
calling away despair
eternal promise
everything changes and ends”
8., bell hooks
“each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”
“The clarity of a physical emotional response.”
-(KA)
We are thrilled to announce our forthcoming exhibition “A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance” curated by Laura Novoa and Adler Guerrier. The exhibition, which opens to the public on Friday, March 1 at 5pm, features work by 15 artists, each of whom explores the motif of the garden in its relation to the cultivation and expression of beauty and knowledge.
Each of the participating artists, including Laura Castro, Carolina Casusol, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Mark Fleuridor, Candice Lin, Cathy Lu, Lee Mary Manning, Ana Mendieta, Reginald O’Neal, Ebony Patterson, Ema Ri, Onajide Shabaka and Kandis Williams, consider the intricacies of the garden as a metaphor for the larger world, using it as a framework to consider cultural, social, political, geographical, and historical issues.
“A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance” builds on the exhibit’s first iteration, showcased at Locust Projects in Miami in 2021. There, works were displayed with dialogues addressing notions of fragility, remembrance, ornamentation, beauty, and affective traces in the landscape. At CEAM, the show’s themes extend to ecological interdependence, homage, reverence, refuge, renewal, and time emphatically spent on the creation and nourishment of our inner lives.
Laura Novoa is a curator and arts administrator based in Miami, FL, where she works as Assistant Director of Programs and Community Engagement at the Bakehouse Art Complex. She has curated exhibitions for the Miami Design District, Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, and YoungArts, among others. Adler Guerrier is an artist based in Miami who has presented his works in exhibitions at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Orlando Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and CEAM.
Again, as always, when the shadows fall,
[…]
I leave the present
And seek the dim past where
I dream a … far-off dream,
And think old thoughts and live old scenes anew,
Till suddenly I reach the heart of
[…]
Memory thwarting Time and Space and Death!
after/for/with (J R Fauset, Douce Souvenance)
The belief at the core of Lawrence Weiner’s work is that art is a material reality between human beings and objects and between sets of objects in relation to human beings. Weiner considers language to be a sculptural material and believes that a construction in language can function as sculpture as adequately as a fabricated object.
PR, Lisson Gallery, 2005
The protagonist of the exhibition is the series Radical Writings (from the early 1980s to the 1990s) with which Irma Blank makes her sign even more abstract with respect to the previous cycles, clarifying its relationship with time. The long writing-like signs of color (first rose-violet, then blue), applied with a brush on canvas, are linear and uniform. She literally paints “in one breath,” with absolute concentration, without hesitation. Writing is breathing, painting is breathing, working is living. Every trace matches the length of one breath, from left to right, start to finish, emptiness to fullness. A sign in total tension. At the start of the sign the color is more emphatic, fading as the sign gradually extends, generating a shadow zone at the center of the painting that reminds us of the space of a book. Here writing and painting blend in the continuity of a sign-time.
p420.it
“the sign may have other functions in addition to the communicative function” Mukarovsky
“to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder …” Sarah Ahmed
via Craig Dworkin, Radium of the Word
The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku—literally translated as “forest bathing”—is based on a simple premise: immerse yourself in the forest, absorb its sights, sounds, and smells, and you will reap numerous psychological and physiological benefits. The Forest Agency of Japan launched a campaign to introduce the activity in 1982, and, since then, its popularization there has been matched by a stream of supporting research concerning the role that nature can play in human health. Studies have shown that regular exposure to forest environments can lower blood pressure and anxiety, reduce anger, and strengthen the immune system. The forest-bathing ethos has gained traction in the United States, too: you can now sign up to join the national Forest Bathing Club (whose registration form includes a field for “spirit animal”), or apply to become a certified forest-therapy guide. Or you can simply go to a local greenspace, disconnect, and listen to the trees.
José Ginarte, newyorker, 012518