Caribbean Beat — November/December 2017 (#148)

mr interior/shutterstock.com
The Pérez Art Museum Miami has a prominent
location in the city’s new Museum Park
You always remember your first
visit to a truly great museum. For
me, it was the Museo del Prado
in Madrid — where my dad and I
dragged ourselves, after a gruelling
nine-hour flight, little sleep, and a
few too many welcome glasses of wine the night
before. It turned out to be a six-hour trek through
wide galleries hung with art treasures. I found myself
encouraged into a meditative trance — by the works
of art, yes, but also by the museum’s grandiose
spaces, shrouded in heavy silence.
Years later, and on the other side of the Atlantic,
that memory returned as I sat in a cavernous room,
taking in the Cuban artist Yoan Capote’s Isla — a
monumental work of art created with oil, nails, and
fish-hooks, composing the view from the sea wall
in Havana, looking north to Miami. It’s currently
on display — through April 2018 — at the Pérez Art
Museum Miami (PAMM). A visit to this world-class
museum on Biscayne Bay — like my experience of
the Prado — will also transform your fuzzy head
from the night before into a soothed, Zen-like zone.
Before entering PAMM’s caverns, I slumped
myself gently into the contemporarily designed yet
dramatically comfortable swings on the entrance
patio overlooking the bay, letting the wet, hot,
breeze waft over me.
Sudden relaxation started in my shoulders
and moved down through my legs. Grumpiness
was leaving me. Museums are great places to
wash away grumpy vibes. They are like spas. And
although Miami may be better known for its beaches, upscale shopping, and
nightlife, South Florida is also a cultural hotspot, attracting artists and audiences
alike from across the world.
As a Trini living in South Florida, I invite you to put the temptations of
the warm blue Atlantic aside for a moment, along with this gold coast’s
twenty-three miles of sand — and have a look at the stimulating
sensations that make the region an arts magnet. There’s no shortage of
contemporary visual art and local or international theatre, ballet, and opera
around the southernmost peninsula of the continental United States.
Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator of the NSU Art Museum
Fort Lauderdale, is said to have coined the name “the Art Coast” for the
area between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Designed by leading modernist
architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and associated with Nova Southeastern
University, the landmark 83,000-square foot museum has important collections
of Caribbean art — like Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié’s
mixed-media installation, The Indigo Room. The star attraction opening in
November is a major retrospective of the American artist Frank Stella, on
view through July 2018. One of the exhibition’s highlights is Deauville (1970),
a forty-five-foot-long canvas shaped like a thoroughbred racetrack.
Not far away, Bonnet House Museum and Gardens — an artist’s estate
on Fort Lauderdale beach — is a mixture of exotic landscape, old Florida
décor, eclectic art, and an inside look at the lives of the artist and collector
Frederic Clay Bartlett (1873–1953) and his wives Helen (who passed
away in 1925) and Evelyn, ex-wife of the millionaire businessman Eli Lilly.
This gracious estate includes an art studio, an island theatre, and a famous
orchid house, as well as endearing stories about alligators.
For me, a museum is a place where I learn about culture mostly through
osmosis. Images of ancient and contemporary stories wash over me, rather
than demand I study them. Keepers of art, history, creativity, and talent, the
museums of South Florida connect us to the past while enriching our present,
creating new spaces within our psyche.
64 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM