Project Gallery: Mario Garcia Torres – R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics  

Opening Tuesday, December 2

On view: December 2, 2014 – April 19, 2015

Open to the public – general museum admission

R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics   is a project developed by Mexico City-based artist Mario Garcia Torres (b.1975, Monclova, Mexico) specifically for the Pérez Art Museum Miami in which a number of seemingly unrelated subjects such as Robert Rauschenberg, climate change and Florida are threaded together to form a series of conceptual and political questions. Garcia Torres has long been interested in exploring little-known issues within recent art history and in addressing parallel subjects that find new meanings and contexts through his careful juxtapositions. This project will create a number of gestures, including photographic documentation, film, music and other types of information displays.

Project Gallery: Mario Garcia Torres is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander.

Beatriz Milhazes book signing

Thursday, December 4, 2014 10am-12pm

Open to the public – general museum admission

Artist Beatriz Milhazes will be at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) signing copies of the 200 page, full-color catalog Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico, which documents the first U.S. retrospective of the Brazilian artist’s work. The catalog includes essays by PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander and Paulo Herkenhoff, a Rio de Janeiro-based scholar and curator, as well as an interview with the artist by Tate Curator, Tanya Barson. The book includes a detailed bibliography and chronology on the artist’s practice, as well as plates of all the works in the exhibition and images of the works installed in PAMM’s galleries. The book is available for $60 in the PAMM Shop. The book signing is open to the public and free with museum admission.

PAMM Presents Future Brown featuring Kelela

A DIS Magazine + THV Entertainment Production

Thursday, December 4, 2014, 8pm-midnight

By invitation only – PAMM Sustaining and above level members, and Art Basel Miami Beach, DesignMiami/ and Art Miami VIP cardholders.

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) marks its one year anniversary in the new, and now iconic waterfront building with an immersive evening of music and visuals featuring the first U.S. performance by Future Brown with live vocalists. Taking the spotlight at one of the most anticipated events on the Art Basel Miami Beach VIP calendar will be Future Brown, the internationally acclaimed DJ collective comprised of artist and composer Fatima Al Qadiri; Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda of Nguzunguzu; and J-Cush of Lit City Trax.  A ccompanied with vocals for the first time in the U.S., Future Brown will be joined by guests from their forthcoming album on Warp Records slated for release this winter. The night will open with solo performances by Kelela and Fade To Mind artist Total Freedom with guest appearances by Ian Isiah and Maluca, all of who have garnered a strong following of music industry contemporaries and critics. Future Brown and vocalists will perform on a custom stage with a vibrant light and video production by THV Entertainment to the backdrop of a dynamic water sports event involving a flyboarding performance in Biscayne Bay choreographed by DIS Magazine. The museum’s façade will be used to project the premiere of the PAMM-commissioned music video from Future Brown’s debut album.

PAMM Presents Future Brown Featuring Kelela is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami. It is presented by Citi. In-kind support is provided by Tui Lifestyle. A music video commissioned by PAMM in conjunction with the event is made possible with in-kind support from Milkmade studios.

Exhibitions on view:

Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot

August 7, 2014 – January 25, 2015

Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot is the first museum survey of work by Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier (b. 1975, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) and traces the artist’s interest in urban history and social activism through a selection of 15 years of work.  Featuring photographs, prints, videos and mixed-media installations alongside a new, architectural intervention, the exhibition explores Guerrier’s use and reinterpretation of cultural symbols, images and texts ripe with social and political meaning. Guerrier documents moments—real and imagined—in metropolitan areas, including his homecity of Miami, which he frequently uses as a vehicle to explore 20th-century U.S. history. His work at once emphasizes the specificity of Miami’s neighborhoods and architecture, and the inherent anonymity and indistinctness of the cityscape. Taking on the role of the flâneur, or urban wanderer, Guerrier explores how economic, political and social upheavals manifest in the physicality of a place. Drawing on concepts and tools from across art history, architecture, cinema and literature, he creates visual narratives that evoke a sense of intimacy and temporality.   A catalogue of the exhibition features essays by Pérez Art Museum Miami Associate Curator Diana Nawi and Huey Copeland, Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, and an interview with the artist by Rebecca Zorach, Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.

Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Associate Curator Diana Nawi with support provided by Macy’s and Funding Arts Network, Inc.

Project Gallery: Leonor Antunes

August 21, 2014 – January 18, 2015

Berlin-based artist Leonor Antunes (b. 1972, Lisbon, Portugal) will produce a new, large-scale installation for one of Pérez Art Museum Miami’s project galleries, which feature focused investigations of a single artist’s work. Antunes’ practice frequently references the legacies of modernism, geometric forms and the patterns and structures of lesser known architects and designers from the early 20th century. Her investigations have previously been inspired by the furniture and buildings of Irish architect Eileen Moray Gray as well as those of the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. She is particularly attentive to the elegance of the handmade and her signature materials include cork, leather, brass ropes and nets. Mathematics, measurement and the beauty of scale and proportion inform her practice and her works often respond to the spaces in which they are placed, frequently mirroring elements in the room. 

Project Gallery: Leonor Antunes is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander.

Beyond the Limited Life of Painting: Prints and Multiples from the Holding Capital Group Collection

September 10, 2014 – March 1, 2015

The exhibition will explore the evolution of fine printmaking in the United States after the 1960s and feature several important prints and multiples gifted to Pérez Art Museum Miami from Holding Capital Group Inc., including works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist. These works will be augmented by additional prints and objects loaned from the Holding Capital Group collection, which has been carefully assembled over the last 30 years and illuminates the significance of printmaking within the contemporary art context. Beyond the Limited Life of Painting will examine more than 50 years of printmaking, tracing its historic importance to public debate in the 1930s and 1940s to its emergence as a valued artistic medium in the Pop art movement of the 1950s and 1960s and through to its role in today’s creative production. The exhibition focuses in particular on the generation of artists in the postwar period, who rejected Abstract Expressionism and actively returned to representation. Artists in the exhibition include Ellsworth Kelly, Jane Hammond, Sol LeWitt, Elizabeth Murray, Isamu Noguchi, Kiki Smith and Andy Warhol, among numerous others.

Beyond the Limited Life of Painting: Prints and Multiples from the Holding Capital Group Collection is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Curatorial Assistant María Elena Ortiz.

Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico

September 19, 2014 – January 11, 2015

The first major U.S. survey of works by Brazilian abstract artist Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro), the exhibition will feature over 40 large-scale paintings, collages and screenprints from the past 25 years of her career. The exhibition will, for the first time, trace the development of her distinct painting style, which is characterized by her use of bold colors, the layering of geometric and decorative forms and motifs drawn from a broad range of art historical movements, including colonial baroque, European modernism, and North American Pop art. Jardim Botânico will feature works never before seen in the United States, as well as three new paintings made specifically for PAMM’s presentation. The exhibition highlights Milhazes’ one-of-a-kind artistic process in which she collages with paint to explore movement and materiality. The exhibition’s title references both the neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, home to her studio, and the dichotomy in Milhazes’ work between structure and rational order and sensuality, expression and emotion.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Pérez Art Museum Miami Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander and art critic and curator Agnaldo Farias, as well as an interview with the artist by Tanya Barson, curator of international art at Tate Modern, London.

Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander and presented by Itaú. Support is provided by Graff, and in-kind support is provided by Consulate General of Brazil in Miami.

Geoffrey Farmer: Let’s Make the Water Turn Black

October 9, 2014 – March 1, 2015

Let’s Make the Water Turn Black is a new, large-scale, multi-media installation by the Vancouver-based artist Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver, British Columbia). This ambitious work dialogues with the life and work of Frank Zappa, an experimental musician, composer and artist who spent his early childhood in Florida. The title of Farmer’s project is taken from a song on Zappa’s 1968 album Mothers of Invention. Farmer’s installation uses sound, lighting sequences, found and sculpted objects to create a mysterious “sculpture play” that loosely weaves together various narratives related to the iconic figure. Farmer is best known for his extensive work in collage that references modernist traditions in this genre, such as those produced by Dada and Surrealist artists in the early 20th century. The artist has also created numerous theatrical installations with unexpected combinations of found objects that he uses to create puppet-like figures. His recent sculptures and installations have included kinetic elements, often choreographed with stage lighting and sound. Creating mysterious and, at times, sinister environments, the artist’s work responds dynamically to the architectural and cultural contexts in which it is produced.

Let’s Make the Water Turn Black is a co-production of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Nottingham Contemporary and Kunstverein Hamburg. The Miami presentation is organized by PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander.

Project Gallery: Nicole Cherubini - 500
October 9, 2014 – April 5, 2015

For Pérez Art Museum Miami's Project Gallery series, Nicole Cherubini (b. 1970, Boston) is creating a new body of interrelated free-standing and wall-based works. Comprised of a diversity of objects, this exhibition will respond to the architecture of the space and expand on the artist’s previous bodies of work. The installation will incorporate new shapes into the artist’s lexicon and new materials, combining clay and wooden support panels that allow for a renewed consideration of scale. Cherubini mines the history and formal possibilities of clay to create works that range from spare, tense minimalism to exuberant and brash decadence. This material has been her primary vehicle for 20 years and she employs a specific constellation of forms and techniques that recur throughout her practice and which have come to constitute her unique vocabulary. These forms are variously reinterpreted, conjoined, stretched, embellished, and combined with other materials to create discrete works that suggest an investigative and experimental approach to sculpture. Cherubini's work is indebted to an abiding engagement with clay itself and the core of her project resides in her ability to bring the medium's particular materiality, forms, and history to bear on the ongoing dialogue of painting and sculpture.

Project Gallery: Nicole Cherubini is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Associate Curator Diana Nawi.

Project Gallery: Gary Simmons
November 14, 2014 – October 4, 2015
Pérez Art Museum Miami has commissioned Gary Simmons (b. 1964, New York) to create an ambitious new work for the museum’s stunning double-height project gallery. The New York-based artist will create a large, ephemeral mural painting directly on the gallery’s back wall, which measures 30 feet high by 29 feet wide. Simmons is best known for his enigmatic compositions that consist of deceptively simple motifs rendered atop broad fields of monochromatic pigment. He extracts these motifs from a variety of archival and pop culture sources, arriving at each selection through an intensive research process. A single work by Simmons is capable of evoking a multiplicity of meanings, referencing a buried episode in the painful history of race relations in the United States, for example, at the same time that it draws from the artist’s childhood memories. Simmons is known for his use of an eerie erasure effect, which he achieves by blurring his drawings with his hands. Recalling the look of chalk on blackboards, the effect reinforces the mysterious quality of Simmons’ imagery while suggesting movement, the fleetingness of time, the pliability of history and the inevitable fading of both cultural and personal memory.

Project Gallery: Gary Simmons is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Curator René Morales.

Project Gallery: Mario Garcia Torres – R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics  
December 2, 2014 – April 19, 2015

The Mexico City-based artist Mario Garcia Torres (b.1975, Moclova, Mexico) is currently working on a new project commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami for one its first floor project galleries. Garcia Torres has long been interested in exploring historiography by addressing unusual parallels or little-know fragments of stories within recent art history. Simultaneously, the artist examines the specific qualities and contexts that provoke creation and invention. As part of his initial investigation, the artist is considering notions of Southern Florida as a site for withdrawal from society for the purposes of artistic creation. This research is intended to produce a number of gestures, including photographic documentation, a potential film and display of objects, which will be exhibited, successively, beginning on December 2, 2014.

Project Gallery: Mario Garcia Torres is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander.

Global Positioning Systems
Through August 15, 2015

Global Positioning Systems is the second iteration of Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Overview Galleries, in which selections from PAMM’s permanent collection are displayed alongside loans from important private collections. Consisting of six interrelated parts (titled History Painting, Visual Memory, The Uses of History, Urban Imaginaries, The Contested Present, and Forms of Commemoration), this thematic group presentation explores the intersection between globalization and history. Since the late 1980s, the political and economic forces unleashed at the close of the Cold War have combined with dramatic advances in transportation and digital communications to create an unprecedented degree of interdependency among the nations of the world. As the networks of individuals, institutions, and markets that constitute the international system of art-making and distribution have expanded to include voices from disparate regions and contexts, the field has become a mirror for the cultural effects of this heightened state of global integration. One of the most important of these cultural effects has been the destabilization of any singular understandings of time and world history. The idea that the past may bear different meanings depending on one's geographic and cultural standpoint has never seemed more incontrovertible. Global Positioning Systems explores this issue by bringing together the productions of an international and intergenerational array of artists who engage diverse histories while raising questions about how the past is recorded and remembered.