2004: National Museum of Women in the Arts Exhibition
2004 was an important year for me as far as creating and exhibiting larger-scale Florida-based works and being acknowledged as a significant Florida artist. An example and highlight of this was being included in the exhibition Transitory Patters: Florida Women Artists that opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. in 2004 and then traveled to several museums across the state of Florida including the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz was the guest curator for the exhibition and she also contributed an essay for the catalog titled: Calm and Cacophony.Jurors/curators for the exhibition were Bonnie Clearwater, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Lori Mertes, curator at the Miami Art Museum; Margaret Miller, director of the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum; Rena Minar, former director of the Mary Brogan Museum of Art & Science; and Sue Scott, adjunct curator at the Orlando Museum of Art.Out of the over 700 submissions, the 19 artists selected to be included in the exhibition were: Teresita Fernández, Naomi Fisher, Victoria Gitman, Mernet Larson, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Francie Bishop Good, Carol Brown, Natalia Benedetti, Julie Davidow, Maria Martinez-Cañas, Beatriz Monteavaro, Dara Friedman, Suzanne McClelland, Aida Ruilova, Jennifer Morgan, Vickie Pierre, Marisa Tellería-Díez, and Wendy Wischer.Below is a link to the press release about the exhibitionTransitoryPatternsFloridaWomenArtists at NMWA
This catalog can be purchased from Amazon.com
2004: A Mysterious Clarity
A Mysterious Clarity is the title to a show that featured three FSU painters (Ray Burggraf, Mark Messersmith & me) who all use landscape as their point of departure for their distinct, yet strangely strongly related works. This show opened at 621 Gallery in Tallahassee in 2004 and was so popular and successful that it traveled to numerous other museums and galley venues in FL, GA & TX. This year 621 invited us back to have an updated decade show...what are we doing now...called A Mysterious Clarity 2.0.
2004: Sight on Site
In November of 2004 I had my fourth solo show at Valley House Gallery in Dallas, TX. This exhibit titled Sight on Site featured some of my first works from the foothills of the Cascades Mountains in western Washington, northeast of Seattle. Although I had been to Seattle several times before for short family visits, I did not realize that I could actually try to spend extended time there until the summer 2003. That year my in-laws purchased a very small cabin in the woods and when they took us up to see it, I thought that it was visually compelling that I instantly felt a deep desire, or rather NEED, to paint there even though I had no supplies or strategy to get the works back if I did manage to paint. Luckily my family is sympathetic to my artistic temperament so I was able to basically abandoned my them for the rest of the visit. I immediately drove into the city and went to Daniel Smith Art Supply store where I purchased eight 24" x 18" canvases, brushes, paints, etc. and then drove back up to the cabin where I painted non-stop until the day before our flight back to Tallahassee.That brief but wonderful time in the Cascades Mountains left me determined to figure out how I could manage to spend the entire summer painting there. Luckily I was awarded a 2004 (COFRS) summer research grant from FSU which provided the means for me to do just that. The works I created over that summer proved to be the foundation for an ever growing series of larger Washington works: works that ultimately lead to several large-scale painting installations and shows.
2004: Rouge Nations
"Rogue Nations": Cuban & Chinese Artists was an exhibition curated by Antonio Eligio Fernandez (Tonel), Anjee Helstrup and David Spalding that examined conceptual approaches and links between contemporary artists that had a global perspective on art and politics outside of their respective communist home nations. I had four of my Post-Post Cuba Diaries print works included in the exhibition. In this series I used imagery and symbols inspired by multiple conflicted relationships with Cuba as a point of departure. The prints in this exhibit were produce in the Kala Print Studios in Berkeley, CA after my 1999 trip to Havana where I was a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba.The exhibition featured works by Juan Carlos Alom, Felipe Dulzaides, Kattia Garcia Fayat, Nereida Garcia-Ferraz, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Manuel Pina, Juan Carlos Quintana, Song Dong, Tang Hui, Jose Toriac, Wang Qingsong, Yang Shaobin, Yang Zhenzhong, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhan Wang and Zhou Tiehai.The exhibition was held at the Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana Gallery in San Jose, CA from, July 28-September 4, 2004Catalog with curatorial essay and biographies-Length 12 pages, published by MACLA, Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, 2004
2004: Featured Hispanic Artist for the State of Florida
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month in September, the governor of the state of Florida selects an artist each year to exhibit artwork in the State Capital Plaza Gallery. In 2004 I was invited to be the Feature Artist during the month-long celebrations and activities. Apart from showing some of my most recent on-sight Florida landscape paintings, I decided to respond to the month's Hispanic-centric theme by also exhibiting a series works on paper that were clearly about specific Latino-themed motifs and imagery. The Translation Trance series was based on iconic, high art images from the “Old World”-Spain (Velazquez) and the “New World”-Latin America, but more specifically, by various images of Meso-American stylized figurative sculptures. Most of these Translation Trance works were produced in Austin, Texas as a visiting artist at Strike Editions and at Coronado Studio’s Serie Project.
Note that many of the Translation Trance works are reproduced and explained in the publication Reflexciones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, Neil Foley issue editor; published by CMAS UT Press 1997, cover image and p.71-76.
Work from this series is also included in a book titled Triumph of our Communities published by Bilingual Review/Press Hispanic Research Center, Arizona State University, 1995. Both can be ordered on Amazon.comIn addition, my print Translation Trance: La Infant Teotihuacana (from Serie II-1995) can be seen at serieproject.org