Manny Lopez typically tries to keep his job on the down-low. As soon as people find out he's the director of parking and transportation at the University of South Florida, they usually want to harangue him about tickets, permits or traffic on the Tampa campus, which tops 1,700 acres and serves nearly 39,000 students. "I'm the guy everyone loves to hate," he says with a laugh.
In his off hours, though, Lopez has another identity, one that wins him considerably more affection. For about a decade, he and his wife Rosemary have immersed themselves in Tampa's community of artists of Latin American and Caribbean descent. In addition to collecting their paintings and sculptures, the couple has befriended many artists and even sponsored a few, moving beyond the role of occasional collectors to become full-fledged patrons.
For several years, Lopez has toyed with the idea of organizing a show to make some of his favorite artists better known to the Bay area — and now he's done it. This weekend, Identity In Progress — a group exhibition of 18 local artists with roots in Cuba, Colombia, Puerto Rico and elsewhere — opens at Flight 19 just in time for Arte 2007, a regional celebration of Latin American and Caribbean arts and culture. (Arte officially runs Nov. 2-17, but many Bay area museums and galleries have already debuted their offerings. Look for more coverage on Arte 2007's performances, parties and exhibits in next week's Creative Loafing.)
The premise of the exhibit is simple: Latin American identity is complex. Though linked by a common thread, the 18 artists present highly personalized visions that touch, to varying degrees, on the culture of their homelands. (For the hell of it, the show even includes a couple of artists who claim a different sort of heritage: Mark Cannariato, a USF grad student who describes his background as Sicilian and French Cajun, and László Horváth, a photographer with Hungarian roots.) At Lopez's urging, many of the artists have created new or experimental works for the show.
The result is a voyage of delightful discovery. Some of the area's Spanish-speaking art stars try out unexpected subjects and techniques. Edgar Sanchez-Cumbas, a Savannah College of Art and Design grad who was the focus of a well-deserved solo show at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art last year, ventures into pure abstraction, leaving behind the mysterious figures that ordinarily appear in his work. Likewise Guillermo Portieles, the winner of this year's Gasparilla Festival of the Arts' Best in Show award, departs radically from his symbolic figurative paintings about Cuba with a pointed conceptual piece: a reworking of the dollar bill with a horned George Bush devil in Washington's place. Alex Espalter-Torres, well known for his vibrant abstract paintings, revisits his roots in figurative drawing with a striking graphite rendition of a beheaded sacrificial lamb.
Other surprises stem from artists who aren't in the limelight as often — but should be. Maria Emilia, executive director of Florida Craftsmen Gallery, rarely exhibits her own work (a 2005 Arts Center show was the most recent occasion); her evocative print, based on a collage of photo negatives, offers plenty of reason to bemoan that fact. In the image, Emilia appears as a 3-year-old girl, standing as a caryatid beneath the dome of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. (Emilia says she identifies strongly with Saint Peter's human tendency toward error.) Tampa resident Giovanni Bosch, an under-recognized Cuban painter, showcases a talent for creating mysterious, metaphysical spaces with skillfully rendered symbols.
Three-dimensional works include Carlos Camargo Vilardy's terracotta and wood homage to the Crucifixion, and Cannariato's burlap goat, reminiscent of Rauschenberg's notorious taxidermy goat piece but inspired by Caribbean found-object art and mystic traditions. (Listen for the sculpture to emit mysterious groans and clicks recorded by the artist.)
Lopez deserves credit for marshaling a formidable exhibition and proving himself an able, if infrequent, curator. Other artists include Carlos Manuel Soto, Monica Eastman, Pilar Perez, Arnolkis Turro, Erich Padilla, Alejandro Mendoza, Cosme Herrera and Tomas Marais. The exhibit's intriguing premise may get you through the door, but the artists' rich and engaging bodies of work will convince you to linger.
Sketchbook
Also opening this week, Homing Devices (Oct. 26-Dec. 15) at USF's Contemporary Art Museum showcases creations by 20 Latin American and Caribbean artists who riff and ruminate on the idea of "home." While Identity In Progress at Flight 19 focuses on local discoveries, USF CAM (as is virtually always the case) takes a more globetrotting approach, plucking contemporary practitioners from around the world for exhibition in its gem of a space.
Take Los Carpinteros, the Cuban duo fresh off a residency in France, where they produced "Cama," a pair of specially fabricated beds intertwined in a figure-8-like shape. Or Betsabée Romero, a Mexican artist whose votive paintings on found car hoods tell of the trials and tribulations of Mexican immigrants' passage to and from the United States. Brazilian artist Iran do Espírito Santo offers one of the subtler commentaries in the show: Pieces like his perfectly wrought stainless steel lightbulb cross-reference domesticity with traditions of abstraction and minimalism in his home country.
Even the curatorial efforts surrounding Homing Devices are international: USF's Noel Smith paired with Corina Matamoros, curator of contemporary Cuban art at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, to organize the show. "It's important for people to understand that artists address real-life, important issues in the real world" like globalization and cultural migration, Smith says. At a symposium on Friday, Dec. 16, from 10 a.m. to noon, she and Matamoros will join artists Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Edouard Duval-Carrié for a discussion of the exhibit; an evening reception follows from 7-9 p.m. For more information, go to usfcam.usf.edu.
