OF/BY/FOR

OF/BY/FOR
^{The American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, Miami, FL}

Eight Preeminent Cuban-American Artists Create Site Specific Installations at The Cuban for Miami Art Week

The new American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, known affecionately as The Cuban, is back with another special exhibition for Miami Art Week 2017. This year, The Cuban has flung open the doors of the creative process, inviting the public to witness eight world-renowned artists engaged in a full-scale takeover of its galleries and public spaces. The show, titled OF/BY/FOR, opened to the public on Friday, December 1st, and will unveil the completed installations at its official opening on Sunday, December 10th.

Through these works, visitors will drift through the clouds on playground swings dangling from the rafters, stumble upon a fleet of children’s toys transformed into metaphors for transition and displacement, investigate a mysterious garden shed with a dark secret lurking inside, and ponder the curious connection between a house in Havana and an efficiency in Hialeah. 

The exhibition’s title, OF/BY/FOR, invokes Abraham Lincoln’s famous description of American government as a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and succinctly sums up what The Cuban is all about. 

With installations by Luis Cruz Azaceta, José Bedia, María Brito, Florencio Gelabert, Jillian Mayer, Ernesto Oroza, César Trasobares, and Juana Valdes, OF/BY/FOR is bound to be a standout offering on this year’s jam-packed slate. Public hours are 12 PM - 8 PM, Monday through Saturday, and 12 PM - 4 PM on Sundays, from December 1st - December 10th. The completed exhibition opens on December 10th, and will remain on view weekends only until March 11th, 2018.

Over the past ten years Valdés has examined the history of trade, its links to our colonial past and how its influences carry over into our current global markets. This examination of using bone china as a material, a European resource whose history is appropriated from Asia and exported to the Americas as a commodity for trade, forms the foundations for the East–West in Reversed photographs series which include Single Drawn Line/Drummer, Imperil China and Untitled_(made by Unknown). These works encompass a series of photographs juxtaposing fine bone china housewares along with wooden, brass or copper hand crafted works. The images weave narratives of cultural hybridity, modes of production, and one’s role in multiple cultures. I use the work as a medium to identify my multi-ethnic identity and as a means to subvert the modern conception of value in High Art and/or Fine Art in the Visual Arts. Using mass-produced ceramic ornaments from all over the world as ethnic and religious identification signs that carry the aesthetic value of the social class collecting them, these images construct narratives of colonization intertwined with social and historical periods, art movements, and modes of production. These artworks question how aesthetic value is ascribed, modes of power are sustained, how the value of the labor is assigned along race lines and resources are exploited to produce commercial goods.

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The installation within OF/BY/FOR incorporates three bodies of work that interrelated Juana Valdés' research on the China Trade, the development of globalization and world markets spur by the eighteenth-century trade conducted by the Dutch (VOC) and the British (The East India Company) from China, Japan, Africa and trade with the Colonies in the Americas.  The work examines the colonial legacy inherently in the dynamic of trade which is still apparent in the housewares, decorative objects, and chinaware being produced today.