Global South Movements Tiffany Madera; Retrospective and New Works

Global South Movements Tiffany Madera; Retrospective and New Works

Curated by Tiffany Madera

Produced by Hanan Arts

Green Space Miami

by Green Family Foundation

7200 Biscayne Blvd

Miami, Fl 33138

Dates:

March 16- April 30, 2023 *may vary

Opening reception Thursday March 16, 2023 7pm

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Stories of Becoming: 11 Artists and 8 Mediums

Green Space Miami is proud to present Global South Movements by Hanan Arts. Curated and produced by Miami artist Tiffany Madera, Global South Movements invites you to experience a program of 11 artists and 8 mediums to celebrate the landscape of cultures of Miami, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Global South Movements is Green Space Miami’s 2023 heritage program. Every year Dr. Kimberly Green invites a leading cultural expert to exhibit, discuss, educate, and celebrate the art and traditions of Miami’s diverse communities. In 2023 Tiffany Madera invites you to a vibrant series of events about women, dance, and film.

The exhibition is a celebration of 20 years of Hanan Arts groundbreaking use of traditional middle eastern dance as a tool for social justice, along with an unveiling of new works by globally acclaimed artists Ya La’Ford and Juana Valdes with recent commissions by local artists Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez and Karelle Levy of KREL - alongside other never before seen works. Together the artists’ works discuss resistance, the body, cultural inheritance, fluidity, temporality, identity, and gender. With large format photos, dance, immersive video, photography, textile art, mixed media installations, and multiple activations, Global South Movements will engage the five senses and anchor its themes in the somatic. The visceral experience will transport the viewer into the more mystical and energetic realms prominent in Global South cultural expressions, ignite the intellect, and induce reflection.

Artwork Description:

I wash my hands of it / Me lavo las manos de eso.

‍I wash my hands of it / Me lavo las manos de eso uses the image of an African female sculpture to represent all women. The work hangs as a banner with the image of the sculpture resisting the subjugation of women all over the world. It addresses the violence being perpetrated on women worldwide. The phrase Femicide is used to define a hate crime which is broadly defined as "the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female.” The interpretation differs from country to country, but the impact on women’s life remains the same. On a daily basis, women suffer directly or indirectly from violence perpetrated in a physical, mental, or verbal form that often ends in death. From the front, one sees the image of a strong, regal woman from behind the banner listing feminine words often used to describe women.

Artist Statement

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Juana Valdés’s works range from sculptural installations to photography, video, hand-crafted works in fabric and ceramic. Her work employs an interdisciplinary approach to making art and a conceptual process oriented rigor to her ideas. Her work balances a combination of insistent feminist inquiry and a persistent interest in the semiotics of commercial and mass-produced imagery.  Valdés’s works in photography and installation explore migration and transculturation directly and poetically, recreating both displacement and recollection. They elicit migration as a complex process, constructing history through a continuum involving both the diasporic community’s original sources and the new homeland. The work reflects on the migrant’s search for utopia, questions Latino or “others” representation in mainstream America–what is ascribed, contested, granted, created–and investigates the connection between the constituent multiple cultures and nations. These serve as the raw material for her aesthetic and formal investigation.  Her work circumscribes issues of displacement and personal transmutation via the everyday object as a personal and time-based reference–diachronic in orientation. These artworks bring into consciousness past histories and present-day experiences. 

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Juana Valdés was born in Cuba and lives and works between in Miami, FL, and Amherst, MA. Valdés received her BFA at Parsons School of Design (1991) and MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1993). She is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1995). She combines printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, and ceramics to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, and class in the transoceanic Afro-Latinx diaspora and colonial networks of trade and labor.

Selected solo exhibitions include “Rest Ashore” (2020), Locust Projects, Miami, Florida; “Terrestrial Bodies” (2019-20), Miami Dade College Special Collection, Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami, Florida; and “Terrestrial Bodies: Roteiro” (2019), Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas. Selected group exhibitions include “El Pasado Mío/My Own Past” (2022), The Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; “#Fail” (2022), Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; and “In the Mind’s Eye: Landscapes of Cuba” (2022), Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami, Florida. Valdés has received awards from the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (the Mellon / Ford Foundation) (2022), Anonymous Was A Woman (2020), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2018), Oolite Arts (2018), and NALAC (2016). Valdés’s work is held by the Smithsonian, Oolite Arts, Pérez Art Museum, Newark Museum, and the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection.

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