Pérez Art Museum Miami Inaugural Exhibition Schedule
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) announces the inaugural exhibition lineup for its new building, opening in Museum Park in December 2013. The wide-ranging roster of exhibitions examines the interpretation and appropriation of cultural and political identities, economic structures, and commodities generated by Miami’s diverse population and its position as a cross-cultural hub. The selection and presentation of artists, collections, and commissioned projects for PAMM is guided by the Museum’s mission to create dialogues across and through local, regional, and international contexts and to emphasize artists and projects that engage with traditions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The curatorial program is also particularly attuned to the work of local artists and designers.
From focused exhibitions on the work of Cuban painter Amelia Peláez and Haitian born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié to thematic presentations of the Museum’s permanent collection to major retrospectives on artists Ai Weiwei and Beatriz Milhazes and group exhibitions on the exchange of ideas between the Caribbean basin, Europe, and North Africa, PAMM’s upcoming projects serve as critical frames through which larger dialogues about recent history, migration, new cultural formations, and diverse ideologies can be structured.
Advance Exhibitions Schedule, 2013-2014:
Overview Galleries: AMERICANA
December 2013 – May 2015
The Museum’s permanent collection will be displayed thematically within six Overview Galleries that are positioned throughout the first two floors of the building. Collectively titled AMERICANA, these six galleries will present artwork produced by artists working in North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean. The bi-lingual title of this presentation evokes North American vernacular collecting traditions, as well as a hemispheric perspective that looks across national and regional borders. This focus on the Americas serves to highlight the strengths of the collection, while at the same time reflecting the diverse audiences of the Museum―the majority of who have cultural ties to these areas of the world.
The six galleries that make up AMERICANA are arranged thematically, each space developed in the form of a short essay offering a focused view on a particular issue or set of preoccupations that have engaged artists from the Americas since the mid-20th century. Among the issues to be explored are relations between contemporary painting and craft traditions, legacies of constructivism and minimalism, and the connections between politics and violence. The spaces combine artworks produced at various historical moments over the last eight decades. The specific pieces and themes explored in AMERICANA will change over the course of 18 months, as these galleries are periodically re-configured.
Special emphasis has been placed on the presentation of artworks by artists currently living in Miami, as a way of highlighting the growing position of this city as an important site of art production internationally. AMERICANA additionally augments PAMM´s young collection with artworks borrowed from outstanding local collections, an organizing strategy that seeks to recognize these collections as resources for the constituents of Miami and South Florida.
Special Exhibition Galleries: Ai Weiwei: According to What?
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Ai Weiwei: According to What? is the first major international survey of this artist’s multifaceted artistic oeuvre. The exhibition reveals the interrogative nature of Ai’s practice, and its role as an ever-questioning dialogue with the social, political, and cultural positions of his native China and the world at large. Featuring work from the last 20 years, the exhibition includes his early photographic works—images taken when he was a young artist living in New York and traveling throughout the U.S.—and the large-scale sculptures for which he is best known. These sculptures, often made from modified found objects, suggest the irreverent style of Ai’s work and reconfigure materials in new and evocative ways. With a broad formal range, Ai has continuously challenged possible meanings and modes of art making, most recently employing the Internet and its global reach as a platform for activism and expression. His provocative works are an exploration of the transformative potential of contemporary art, which he has said is “not a form but a philosophy of society.” PAMM’s presentation of this exhibition, originally organized by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, will feature new work, including a large-scale, site-specific installation. The exhibition design was also specially conceived by the artist and Herzog & de Meuron to be in dialogue with the new building architecture.
Focus Gallery: Photography from the Collection
December 2013 – July 27, 2014
This exhibition presents a varied selection of photographs drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, with a particular emphasis on the Cowles Collection, a gift of more than one hundred iconic works of the 20th century including photographs by Edward Steichen, Andy Warhol, and Rineke Dijkstra. Relying on contemporary strategies for organizing and understanding information, the exhibition will incorporate sequential and salon-style hangs in its installation. Within this format, new modes of visual literacy— created by the ever-growing influence of digital media and the way in which images circulate and are indexed through the Internet and by a continued interest in the form of the archive—are brought to bear on the museum’s strong and expanding collection of photographs. Allowing the viewer to see the works through visual cues and historical connections, looking at the image within the photograph as well as relationships between photographs, this exhibition seeks to engender new ‘ways of looking.’
This show will employ digital didactic labels and text on iPads as part of PAMM’S growing engagement with technology and new platforms for education in the galleries.
Focus Gallery: A Human Document: Selections from the Collection of Ruth and Marvin Sackner
December 2013 – May 25, 2014
Pérez Art Museum Miami will present an extensive selection of works from the Miami-based collection of Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Founded in 1979, this "archive of archives" initially focused on concrete and visual poetry—including rare manuscripts and published works by international luminaries such as Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Oyvind Fahlström, and Eugen Gomringer. The collection subsequently grew to encompass a broader array of historic and contemporary works that synthesize word and image. Rooted in the early to mid-20th-century European avant-garde, the collection provides a unique lens through which to examine the foundational movements of modernism, including Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, and Lettrisme, among others. The Sackners’ contemporary holdings are also expansive, with special strengths in artists' books and "assemblings" (limited-edition groupings of materials by numerous contributors), as well as various subgenres such as typewriter art, performance poetry, and micrography (abstract or representational designs comprised of minuscule lettering). The installation begins with a rare, 1897 publication of "Un Coup de des" (A Throw of the Dice), by Stéphane Mallarmé, which is considered one of the first true examples of concrete poetry, and include hundreds of objects spanning more than a century of creative expression.
Focus Gallery: Amelia Peláez
December 2013 – February 23, 2014
PAMM will present a focused selection of works by Amelia Peláez del Casal (1896 – 1968), one of the most important Cuban painters of the modernist era. Alongside artists such as Carlos Enríquez, Wifredo Lam, Victor Manuel, and Fidelio Ponce de León, Peláez personifies the primera vanguardia—the first wave of Cuban artists who traveled to Europe before World War II, where they were exposed to Cubism, Surrealism, and other contemporaneous styles. When these artists subsequently returned to the island nation, they introduced the artistic innovations they had adopted abroad and then transformed them by incorporating aspects of their native cultural and national identities.
Peláez is best known for brightly colored, quasi-abstract compositions that feature decorative objects and ornamental architectural motifs, evoking the traditional domestic interiors of Havana. This exhibition will take a socio-historical approach and examine Peláez’s work in the context of early 20th century Havana’s changing material culture and urban landscape.
Project Gallery: Hew Locke
December 2013 – May 25, 2014
For Those in Peril on the Sea, 2011, is an installation by Hew Locke (b. 1959), a British artist of Guyanese descent. It consists of dozens of scaled-down replicas of ships suspended from the ceiling, creating the impression of a massive exodus taking place throughout the architectural space above viewers’ heads. It features a broad range of vessel types, from cigarette boats, catamarans, and cruise liners to ragged fishing skiffs and timeworn cargo ships. In light of Miami’s history as the site for numerous waves of immigration—particularly from the Caribbean, and specifically by sea—For Those in Peril on the Sea will have a particular resonance for the Museum’s audiences. With its significant links to the South Florida community, this installation, part of PAMM’s permanent collection, promises a powerful initial experience for visitors to the new building.
Project Gallery: Monika Sosnowska
December 2013 – September 28, 2014
Born in Ryki, Poland, Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972) is one of the most celebrated Eastern European artists of her generation. Focusing on urban and architectural space, her work involves surreal, tableau-like installations as well as large objects made of industrial materials that engage the walls, floors, and ceilings of the exhibition space. This commissioned project will be located in PAMM’s double-height Anchor Gallery, one of four spaces in the new building that will be dedicated to installations by single artists. The artists selected for these galleries are each invited to make multiple trips to Miami to share their process with PAMM’s audiences through public lectures, workshops, and other special programs.
Project Gallery: Yael Bartana
December 2013 – April 20, 2014
Born in Israel, Yael Bartana (b. 1970) has been commissioned to create a new work for PAMM in conjunction with the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. Among the most celebrated artists of her generation, Bartana lives between Tel-Aviv and Berlin. Her early video work, both documentary and staged, explores social phenomena that illuminate the complexity of contemporary life, particularly within Israel. More recently, Bartana has embarked on a long term, multi-platform work …and Europe will be stunned, a video trilogy and body of related works, with which she represented Poland in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Critically acclaimed, this work has demonstrated Bartana’s acuity as both a filmmaker and as an artist deeply attuned to the most pressing political issues of our time. For her project at PAMM Bartana is researching and producing a work in Sao Paulo focused on the rise of Pentecostalism.
Project Gallery: Bouchra Khalili
December 2013 – February 23, 2014
Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975) was born in Casablanca and currently lives and works in Paris. Her works, which take the form of single- and multi-channel videos and films as well as photographs, employ a mode of poetic documentation to investigate the experiences of identity, immigration, and transience. Reflecting the nomadic and often transnational state of existence that defines life for many people throughout the world, Khalili illuminates the realities, emotional, intellectual, and tangible, of an increasingly mobilized world. Using language and an understated visual sensibility, Khalili’s videos offer a moving account of the personal and subjective within larger political and economic spheres. Khalili has been invited to create a new video work based on research undertaken in New York for PAMM’s anchor galleries.
Focus Gallery: Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes
March 13, 2014 – August 31, 2014
Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes is an exhibition project involving a series of new works generated over the past year by the Haitian-born, Miami-based artist (Born Port-of-Prince, 1954). Known for his innovative adaptions of traditional Haitian iconography, which he engages in order to address contemporary social and political conditions, Duval-Carrié is presenting a series of large-scale paintings and sculptures. Contrasting his signature use of strident colors, this project presents works executed entirely in black and silver glitter. Involving extensive research, Imagined Landscapes presents lush tropical scenes that reference specific nineteenth-century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. These paintings, by artists such as William Heade and Frederick Church, were commissioned as part of Colonialist interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. The artists used pictorial effects, imagination and fictions to present the Caribbean as the “New Eden,” a fertile land of possibility. Duval-Carrié’s works translate these historical images into his own contemporary aesthetic language, in order to address the manner in which the tropics of the Caribbean and Florida continue to be sold as tropical paradises, in ways that often obscure traditional economic and social disparities that continue to be perpetuated in these contexts.
Special Exhibition Galleries: Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
April 18, 2014 – August 17, 2014
VIP Opening: Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Members Opening: Thursday, April 17, 2014
Featuring over 400 objects, the exhibition examines the exchange of people, goods, ideas, and information between the Caribbean basin, Europe, and North America. Caribbean: Crossroads of the World will highlight over two centuries of rarely seen works—from paintings and sculptures to prints, books, photographs, films, videos, and historical artifacts—dating from the Haitian Revolution (c. 1804) to the present. The project employs an inter-disciplinary approach to advance our understanding of the Caribbean and its artistic heritage, and combines classic works by figures such as Paul Gauguin, Winslow Homer, Wifredo Lam, and Armando Reverón with works by contemporary artists including Allora & Calzadilla, Janine Antoni, José Bedia, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Nari Ward, among many others.
The exhibition was organized jointly by El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Focus Gallery: Adler Guerrierwhitneyinstallation2008L.jpg)
June 19, 2014 – January 18, 2015
Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier (b. 1975) works in a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, prints, and collaged works on paper. Guerrier’s practice investigates of the mutability of text and image and the variability of meaning. He is as interested in politics as he is in poetics, and his work explores the rich territory between them. Often using Miami as a physical site and an embodiment of realized (and unrealized) moments in American political and social history, Guerrier examines, repurposes, and sometimes fictionalizes the city through his work. Guerrier’s oeuvre is expansive in its engagement with the urban environment, art history, and materials and this exhibition will bring together a selection of work from the last decade of his career alongside new work produced for this presentation.
Project Gallery: Geoffrey Farmer
June 19, 2014 – January 18, 2015
PAMM is commissioning a new, large-scale installation by Vancouver-based artist, Geoffrey Farmer (b.1967). Farmer is best known for his work with collage and his references to the genre’s modernist traditions, such as those produced by Dada artists at the beginning of the 20th century. The artist has also created numerous theatrical installations involving odd combinations of found objects which he transforms into awkward, puppet-like figures. His recent sculptures and installations have included kinetic elements that are often choreographed with sound. These pieces become theater plays or small operas with uncanny objects as their main performers. Creating mysterious and, at times, sinister environments, the artist’s work responds dynamically to the architectural and cultural contexts in which it is produced.
Special Exhibition Galleries: Beatriz Milhazes. Jardim botânico
September 19, 2014 – January 11, 2015
VIP Opening: Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Members Opening: Thursday, September 18, 2014
The first major U.S. retrospective on Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960), the exhibition will feature the artist’s large-scale abstract paintings inspired by Brazilian and European Modernism, Baroque forms, popular culture, and the decorations of Carnival. During the early 1990s, the artist developed an unusual painting technique, in which she adhered separate images executed in acrylic paint—such as flowers, arabesques, lace patterns or peace-signs—onto canvases in a style that references collage, graffiti, and plastic decals. This practice results in richly textured surfaces that appear prematurely aged. The exhibition will include works produced over the last 25 years of the artist’s career and examine their evolution from softer, more decorative forms to harder-edged abstraction.
Focus Gallery: Christo –Surrounded Islands
August 14, 2014 – January 25, 2015
This Focus Gallery exhibition celebrates Surrounded Islands, Christo (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude’s (1935 –2009) epic project from 1980-83. Working closely with the local governments and a small army of volunteers, the artists encircled 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with a total of 6.5 million square feet of pink, woven, polypropylene fabric. The result was a luminous, floating artwork that harmonized the bright hue of the fabric with the complex colors of the uninhabited, verdant islands, the shallow waters of the bay, and the light of the Miami sky. The exhibition will feature documentation of the project as well as a selection of the large-scale drawings that the artists created to support this expansive undertaking.
Focus Gallery: Jasper Johns Prints
October 2, 2014 – February 2015
Best known for his radical take on painting beginning in the late-1950s, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has consistently pursued printmaking alongside his painting practice. This exhibition will bring together a rich selection of works representing Johns’ print oeuvre. Exploring motifs that have reappeared throughout his career, Jasper Johns Prints offers insight into his ongoing investigations of seriality, repetition, and indexing as well as his formal sensibility.
IMAGES: 1. Ai Weiwei, He Xie (detail), 2010–. Collection of the artist. Installation view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, 2012. Photo: Cathy Carver. ● 2. Hew Locke, For Those in Peril on the Sea, 2011. Model boats and mixed media. Collection Miami Art Museum, museum purchase with funds from the Helena Rubinstein Foundation Challenge Grant. Reproduced with the permission of the artist. ● 3. Monika Sosnowska, Untitled, 2006. 1 mm steel and enamel paint approx. 9'10" x 9' 2". Installation view, Andrea Zittel, Monika Sosnowska. 1:1, Schaulager Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2008. Courtesy of the artist, Foksal Gallery Foundation, The Modern Institute, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Kurimanzutto, Hauser & Wirth. ● 4. Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares), 2007, 1st part of trilogy ...and Europe will be stunned (2007-2011). One channel super 16mm film transferred to video. Duration: 10’50”. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam. ● 5. Bouchra Khalili, Speeches: Malcolm X. From the Speeches series (video installation, 5 single channels), 2012. Video, 6'. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris. ● 6. Adler Guerrier, Untitled (BLCK – We Wear the Mask), 2008. Installation of drawings, photography, sculpture and video at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
*Exhibition details subject to change. Visit pammiami.org for updated information.
