SMDCAC Grand Opening Photos by Heidi Miami Marshall

The Base Paint Project

MIAMI (AP) – A young boy reaching toward a glimmer of light took shape as Haitian graffiti artist Jerry Rosembert Moise sprayed paint on the wall of an impoverished neighborhood’s youth center.

It’s the kind of clearly hopeful image Moise developed after a catastrophic earthquake leveled his hometown of Port-au-Prince in January.

“I used to do caricatures, but now I try to be more realistic to get more attention for helping the country,” Moise said during a break from his painting Thursday night.

Moise, who gained international attention for his images after the earthquake, is among the artists taking advantage of the art fair crowds in Miami this week to highlight Haiti‘s ongoing struggles and raise funds for earthquake victims.

Thousands of collectors are in Miami for the annual Art Basel Miami Beach international art fair, and for other contemporary art fairs and museum exhibits.

Haitian artists and advocates hope they can gain influence and money for projects to improve the lives of more than 1.5 million people still homeless nearly a year after the earthquake, amid a cholera outbreak that has killed nearly 1,900 since October.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami scheduled an exhibit of portraits of Miami’s Haitian community by fashion photographer Bruce Weber specifically for the Art Basel crowds. Some of the images in “Bruce Weber: Haiti/Little Haiti” were shot in the same streets where Weber has photographed fashion magazine spreads.

The faces Weber has captured on film in Little Haiti since 2003 show the long-reaching effects of the earthquake and U.S. foreign policy.

A young girl detained for six months by U.S. immigration authorities won’t smile and fixes her eyes on the ground. A plumber with an intravenous tube running from his nose spreads his scarred hands on his hospital bed to show he can still work. Women cradling small children in their laps crowd shoulder to shoulder in church pews. A young couple in wheelchairs tentatively hold hands.

The Haiti Art Expo is selling new paintings by contemporary artist Philippe Dodard, along with artwork by other Haitian artists, to benefit earthquake relief efforts. At its opening Thursday night, Haitian voodoo drumming rivaled a DJ’s electronic beats in the next gallery.

Meanwhile, outside a downtown hotel, a cluster of large, colorful tents isn’t just for show. In the words of Antuan, the artist who organized the Base Paint Tents project with Fundacion Manos del Sur and the Step by Step Foundation, it is a “utilitarian art installation.”

The 10 heavy-duty tents will become classrooms for children living near the Port-au-Prince airport in a camp managed by Haitian soccer star Bobby Duval.

While Haiti desperately needs new housing and schools, reconstruction efforts have stalled with just a trickle of pledged international aid delivered to the Caribbean country. These tents were chosen for their mobility and ability to withstand harsh conditions for years.

“We see the reality of almost a year (since the quake) and the rubble is still there,” Antuan said. “The tents are going to be there for a long time.”

Duval‘s brother, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval Carrie, is among the 10 artists who painted the tents. Duval Carrie also organized a separate, two-part show at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, “The Global Caribbean II: Caribbean Trilogy.”

Along with works by Duval Carrie, Cuban artist Jose Bedia and Dominican artist Jose Garcia Cordero, it includes new textiles commissioned from three Haitian artists after the quake. Jean Joseph Jean-Baptiste stitched Voodoo-inspired fantasies into beaded and sequined flags, while deities emerge from layers of buttons and found objects sewn together by a pair who sign their work as Kongo Laroze.

Duval Carrie said he commissioned textiles instead of paintings because textile artists will employ more earthquake survivors.

“They’re like ateliers. They have 15 families working for them,” Duval Carrie said.

None of the textile artists could secure a visa to travel to Miami for the exhibit’s opening Friday. Ira Lowenthal of Men Nou Gallery, which represents Jean-Baptiste, blamed U.S. bureaucracy and said he planned to return to Port-au-Prince to argue on the artists’ behalf.

“The U.S. should be trying to promote what’s positive in Haiti, what makes Haiti special and why we should be helping Haiti,” Lowenthal said.

J Pat Carter

In this Nov. 30, 2010 photo, five of ten colorful tents, a utilitarian art installation organized the Base Paint Tents project with Fundacion Manos del Sur and the Step by Step Foundation, are on display for Art Basel in downtown Miami. The tents will become classrooms for children living near the Port-au-Prince airport in a camp managed by Haitian soccer star Bobby Duval. (AP Photo/J Pat Carter)

<via: Washington Times>

by: Jaclyn Giovis

Bored or delayed at the Miami airport? Check this out!

Miami International Airport on Thursday will unveil an art exhibit, called Hands of Haiti, from Haitian artists who have continued their craft despite challenges from the country’s devastating earthquake in January.

The exhibit, featuring more than 60 major works, will be on display for the first time ever at the airport’s South Terminal Gallery where it will stay until March 2011. It includes works of cut metal, woven sequined flags, beaded artwork on leather, sculptures made from discarded urban materials, carnival masks, clay pottery and photography.

The Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance, a non-profit foundation based in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, created the Haitian Art Relief Fund after the earthquake. The goal was to help preserve Haitian art salvaged from the devastation and to support the ongoing work of artists living in Haiti.

MIA’s South Terminal Gallery is located pre-security at the Terminal J International Greeter’s Lobby on the fourth floor mezzanine. <via: Sun Sentinel>

(Exhibition curator: Edouard Duval Carrie)

Hew Locke

Artist Hew Locke, of Guyana, talks to a reporter at the opening of “The Global Caribbean” exhibit in the Little Haiti area of Miami, Friday, Dec. 4, 2009. Locke’s installation “Kingdom of the Blind” is shown in the background. The exhibit includes paintings, sculpture and other installations by 25 contemporary artists from Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, the Bahamas and other Caribbean countries. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

MIAMI, FL – Hundreds of hours of shiny black cassette tape pour through a toothy shark jaw suspended from the ceiling in an untitled artwork by Bahamian artist Blue Curry.

This is not the Caribbean art tourists expect to find on their hotel walls or in gift shops.

A new exhibit showcasing Curry and 22 other Caribbean-born contemporary artists intends to expand the imagery associated with the archipelago of tropical islands between Florida and South America.

“It’s not folk art. It’s not souvenirs,” said Miami-based Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie, curator of “The Global Caribbean” exhibit.

“It’s real art based on very deep historical, psychological, social, economic upheavals and movements that make this region quite a fascinating one,” he said.

The exhibit opened Friday as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual four-day contemporary art fair that draws collectors to the Miami area. “The Global Caribbean” is being staged in a new cultural center in Miami’s gritty Little Haiti district.

Caribbean contemporary artists are seldom seen in the international art market, and “The Global Caribbean” presents their work both to regional communities and to a wider audience, said officials from Culturesfrance, a French government agency whose initiatives in the islands led to the exhibit.

Visitors looks at artist’s exhibits at the opening of “The Global Caribbean” exhibit in the Little Haiti area of Miami, Friday, Dec. 4, 2009. The exhibit includes paintings, sculpture and other installations by 25 contemporary artists from Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, the Bahamas and other Caribbean countries. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

The 23 artists are linked by their Caribbean heritage – hailing from Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico – though many now live in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

The exhibit includes photography, paintings, sculptures and video installations. Duval-Carrie said each artist was selected to illustrate the region’s diverse talents, connections and experiences with natural disasters, colonization and migration.

Some pieces clearly reference the legacy of slavery on Caribbean plantations. Faceless fabric dolls line up in an untitled installation by Alex Burke of Martinique. Colored pencils before the dolls appear to be oars, and the overall piece evokes a ship of stoic prisoners.

Three canvas prints by Jamaican artist Charles Campbell swirl geometric shapes with knots, bloody hand prints and indistinguishable faces. Combined, the images appear to be a mass of people struggling with an oppression beyond the frame.

Roberto Diago

A visitor looks at a painting by Cuban artist Roberto Diago at the opening of “The Global Caribbean” exhibit in the Little Haiti area of Miami, Friday, Dec. 4, 2009. The exhibit includes paintings, sculpture and other installations by 25 contemporary artists from Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, the Bahamas and other Caribbean countries. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

The metal wires binding scrap wood, beer bottles and cast-off wheels in two sculptures initially appear as simple nets catching ocean debris. But Jamaican-born Arthur Simms said each material in his two works has a specific meaning: hemp rope for the drugs associated with that island; glass and metal for the superstition in some black communities that reflected light wards off evil; wheels for constant migration throughout the Caribbean. The deceptively rough assembly of each piece is meant to suggest the handmade carts poor Jamaican vendors push to sell their wares in the market.

“It’s about the diaspora, it’s about me leaving Jamaica as a child, it’s about the journey of the Africans coming to this hemisphere,” Simms said.

Some artists’ Caribbean links aren’t immediately apparent. Abstract fan shapes drip down the pastel canvases of Haitian-American painter Vickie Pierre. A series of black and white close-ups by Puerto Rican photographer Betty Rosado of a man’s face, tattoo, chest hair and a prayer card pulled halfway from a pocket reveal his personality but nothing about Caribbean culture.

Arthur Simms

Artist Arthur Simms, of Jamaica, is shown with his sculptor in the background at the opening of “The Global Caribbean” exhibit in the Little Haiti area of Miami, Friday, Dec. 4, 2009. The exhibit includes paintings, sculpture and other installations by 25 contemporary artists from Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, the Bahamas and other Caribbean countries. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

Hew Locke warns viewers not to assume that the politics underlying many Caribbean artists’ works are always the politics of slavery and social class.

Locke, who grew up in Guyana, bound two adult-sized, seething figures with chains to a much larger horned figure between them in an installation titled “Kingdom of the Blind.”

The work, about the control of power, was created in a post-9/11 context, influenced by the wars being fought by the U.S. and the U.K., where he lives, Locke said.

“Slavery is probably there, because being who I am as soon as I put chains on something it alludes to that, but the chains keep that power in,” Locke said. “If these small figures are let off the leash, then who knows what could happen.”

“The Global Caribbean” runs through March 30 and then travels to France.

<Via: Associated Press – © 2008 YellowBrix, Inc.>

The cover of the May 2007 issue of the CRB features the painting Little Crippled Haiti (mixed media on aluminium, 48″ x 48″), by the Haitian artist Edouard Duval Carrié.

Duval Carrié is one of the artists participating in an event called Haiti Now!: Art, Film, Literature, which will be hosted by the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (in partnership with the University of Liverpool) from 15 to 17 May, 2007. The programme builds on that of UWI’s 2004 Haitian bicentenary conference, and asks how Haitian culture is adapting to the realities of the 21st century. Participants will include American writer Madison Smartt Bell, Haitian artists Mario Benjamin, Maksaens Denis, and Jerry Philogene, Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier, and scholars Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Martin Munro, Charles Forsdick, and J. Michael Dash. All events are open to the public, and entry is free.