An exhibition at Vero’s newest gallery, Raw Space at Edgewood, is devoted this month to the paintings of Nereida Garcia Ferraz. In addition, a small gallery accessible through the space (formerly known as Project Space 1785) features “Six Men, Two Women, Eight Views on Photography.” Co-curated by Garcia Ferraz and photographer William Riera, the exhibition includes works by artists who trace their family histories and personal identities to Cuba.
A notable voice in Cuban-American art, Garcia Ferraz has received many of this country’s prestigious art awards. They include two visual arts painting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ford Foundation grant in media arts, a MacArthur Foundation media grant, and a Richard Diebenkorn teaching fellowship.
Born in Havana, Garcia Ferraz came to the United States with her family in 1970, when she was 14. Her father had played piano professionally in Havana, both in nightclubs and for the ballet. Hoping to settle in Miami, her father found he couldn’t make a living with his music there. So the family moved to Chicago.
It took a while for Garcia Ferraz to adjust to her new home. Chicago in the early 1970s was more than twice the size of Miami, and much, much colder. There was also a language barrier; it took Garcia Ferraz “two years to get enough English to go to school.”
A childhood love of art led her to attend the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where she received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1981. She took classes in painting, photography and videography, media in which she continues to work today.
During her school years and for some time afterward, Garcia Ferraz was “highly influenced by Chicago art and Cuban art and literature,” she says.
Her photography classes were taught by three of Chicago’s best known contemporary photographers: Frank Barsotti, Barbara Crane and Alex Sweetman.
In the painting department, Osaka-born Michiko Itatani was influential in the development of Garcia Ferraz’s style. At that time Itatani’s “Writing” series featured delicately inscribed and painted geometric forms that sometimes spilled off their shaped canvases onto the walls around them.
Perhaps more important to Garcia Ferraz than Itatani’s visual style was her status as an immigrant – one for whom idiomatic American English was a hard-earned second language. Itatani’s philosophy that “painting is a special language of communication,” as she was once quoted in an interview, rings true for Garcia Ferraz as well.
There are three large paintings in the Raw Space show from Garcia Ferraz’s Chicago career.
One of them, “El Caballero de Bastos (The Knight of Clubs)” from 1997, takes its name from a face card in an old-fashioned playing deck called the Spanish Tarot.
The painting is divided into three horizontal sections. The top section shows a figure in silhouette piloting a red canoe on a yellow river. In the central section, the canoe is superimposed over a steamship; oil derricks point to the sky in the background. Beneath lies a watery expanse where a sad-looking whale floats on its side. The whale serves as a platform for the white-painted outline of a mounted knight.
Armed with a huge club, the figure of the caballero overlays whale, ship and canoe, dominating them like a ghostly presence. The bottom section displays a banner with the legend “Y todo fue para llegar,” which Garcia Ferraz translates as “Everything was just to get there.” She explains that the painting addresses the historic European greed for oil (both animal and mineral), and land (somebody else’s).
It was in Chicago that Garcia Ferraz received many of her notable national awards. She had gallery representation and a healthy schedule of exhibitions. In her role as a video-maker, she co-produced and directed a lauded documentary on the life and art of the prominent feminist Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, whose 1985 death at age 36, in a fall from a Greenwich Village high-rise, remains controversial today. Garcia Ferraz’s 1987 film is in the collection of prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and Yale University.
Garcia Ferraz had arrived. Chicago proudly proclaimed her one of its own. And then she left.
Perhaps it is the conquistador in Garcia Ferraz that made her want to claim new artistic territory, but in 1997 she packed up and moved to San Francisco, where she lived and made art until 2001.
A painting titled “Redescubriendo (Rediscovering)” is an artifact of her sojourn there. In it, an American Indian wends his way through a flurry of orange and red dots toward a sketchily distant Golden Gate Bridge.
The bombing of the World Trade Center in New York made the artist reconsider what was important in her life. With her aging mother living in Miami, Garcia Ferraz moved there to be near her. She has made the city her home since then.
Garcia Ferraz’s studio is located in the Little Havana neighborhood, where on the main thoroughfare – Calle Ocho, or Southwest 8th Street – shops sell everything from cigars to religious items from both Catholic and Santeria traditions.
Spirituality is central to Garcia Ferraz’s art.
“I was raised Catholic, but now I’m a little bit Buddhist, a little bit Santeria. Very little. Un poquito,” she laughs.
Although the three, long banner-like figural abstractions in the window of the Vero gallery have the blood red and white colors that one commentator on the artist’s work, Alexander Lamazares, associates with the hyper-masculine Santeria deity Shango, the spiritualism in most of the paintings in the show is of a kinder, gentler sort.
“In the Forest” is one; it shows the silhouette of a woman wearing a long, flared skirt. The figure, enlivened by a starfish-shaped array of white dots, is centrally placed on the canvas, which is washed with layers of yellow and brown and peppered with orange, yellow and dark blue dots.
Animals were once painted amidst the tree trunks that poke – just barely – into the picture from its top edge. Although the animals were painted out during the creative process, they can be seen at certain angles as pale ghosts that represent – depending on how you look at it – a benediction on, or menace to, the figure below them.
“The forest is a place of spirits,” Garcia Ferraz says.
And so is Raw Space at Edgewood, through April. The gallery, at 1795 Old Dixie Highway, is open by appointment; call 305-213-9411.
