Arts and Humanities People and Community

December guide to arts at the U

Interested in the arts? Check out this comprehensive preview of arts-related events happening on campus this month.
Art Basel, Lowe Art Museum, The U Creates

Artist Carlos Estévez pictured next to his artwork on display at the Lowe Art Museum. Photo: TJ Lievonen/University of Miami

The Lowe Art Museum’s latest exhibit is taking people around the world through art. The most recent project of renowned Cuban-American artist Carlos Estévez, “Cities of the Mind,” features nine large-format paintings that reference the artist's fascination with city plans.

“The story behind the work is an emotional memory of my relationship with cities. Every city has a different identity, and that is compelling to me,” Estévez said.

The works were inspired by the Havana of his youth, the medieval European cities to which he has traveled extensively as an adult, and his abiding interest in symbolic cosmology and origin stories.

“The inspiration began when I started traveling around Europe. I realized that cities represent different human interactions and the complexity of the human mind,” he said.

Estévez is thankful to the University of Miami for allowing his artwork to be displayed to such a broad audience.

“This is probably the best time to exhibit because there is international exposure in South Florida during Art Basel,” said Estévez. “The University of Miami has exhibited my work in a beautiful way. It was a lot of brilliant minds working together on this final product.”

He hopes everyone who experiences his art feels an impact.

“Once an artwork is done, it is an independent entity. You can put as much effort into one piece of art, but once it is done, it has his own life. That is the power of art. It communicates differently to a wide variety of people, and everyone sees something different.”

The exhibit is on display through May 2020.

For more information, visit https://www.lowe.miami.edu/exhibitions/carlos-estevez/index.html

Lowe Art Museum

Through Jan. 19, 2020

Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present

A leading member of the new Afro-Cuban cultural movement, visual artist Juan Roberto Diago has produced a body of work that offers a revisionist history of the Cuban nation. His “history,” a term that he frequently inserts in his works using the visual language of graffiti, contradicts the official narrative of a racially harmonious nation created through the selfless efforts of generous white patriots. Diago’s Cuba is a nation built on pain, rape, greed, and the enslavement of millions of displaced Africans, a nation still grappling with the long-term effects of slavery and colonialism. To him, slavery is not the past, but a daily experience of racism and discrimination. Africa is not a root, but a wellspring of cultural and personal affirmation, the ancestors that sustain him in his journey. This exhibit examines Diago’s creative work over the course of his entire career. It traces his singular efforts to construct new pasts, the pasts required to explain the racial tensions of contemporary Cuba, the pasts of this Afro-Cuban present. Guest curated by Dr. Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, professor of African and African American Studies, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for Africa and African American Research, and chair of the Cuba Studies Program at Harvard University.

Through March 2020

ArtLab at the Lowe: Russia Unframed

Russia Unframed seeks to highlight the impact of Russia's immense cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity on the arts, both within its borders and throughout the diaspora. Now in its tenth year, ArtLab @ the Lowe is an annual student-curated exhibition that provides University of Miami students with hands-on experience in the curatorial and museum fields.

Through March 22, 2020

Claudia DeMonte & Ed McGowin: Binomial

With her deep-seated interests in globalism, identity politics, feminism, and social responsibility, Claudia DeMonte mines her auto-biography as well as the stories of the countless women she has met in her extensive travels to inform her creative process. DeMonte’s artistic output reflects not only her cosmopolitan view of the world but also her sense of place within it. She is equally attuned to the plight of the overlooked, the forgotten, and the oppressed; themes that resonate in her oeuvre. Ed McGowin, with whom DeMonte has shared her travels and her life for more than four decades, is equally interested in notions of the self and interpersonal dynamics, including manipulation, corruption, exploitation, and greed. He explored these intertwined threads in his famed Name Change project (1970 and later), in which McGowin legally changed his name—and his aesthetic modality—twelve separate times. He has continued to create works under these different personas for the past fifty years.

Thursday, Dec. 5, 7 to 9 p.m.

Lowe After Hours (Special Art Basel Edition)

Enjoy all of the Lowe’s galleries and exhibitions together with food, fun, and entertainment. Free and open to the public.

Sunday, Dec. 8

Bubbles & Brunch

10 a.m – 12 noon at Lowe Art Museum

Lecture & book signing: 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. at the Donna E. Shalala Student Center

Join the Lowe for their Art Week 2019 marquee event featuring renowned artist Ursula von Rydingsvard. Best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculptures from cedar beams, von Rydingsvard is represented in the permanent collections of over 30 museums. She has received numerous accolades, including the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award.  

Maurice Gusman Concert Hall

Monday, Dec. 2 at 7:30 p.m.

Stephen Guerra’s Big Band Holiday Concert
Stephen Guerra, director

The third annual holiday concert returns with new arrangements of holiday classics, including a sing-along for the first time. Selections showcase music representing Christmas traditions from around the world.

Tuesday, Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m.

The 3B’s and 3 Ballets
Santiago Rodriguez, piano

Frost Faculty artist, Santiago Rodriguez, hailed as a “phenomenal pianist” (The New York Times) and “one of the finest pianists in the world” (The Baltimore Sun), presents a program of major works by the great trinity of classical masters: J.S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms. The concert also includes ballet music by Manuel de Falla, Aram Khachaturian, and Igor Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka, in the composer’s arrangement for solo piano, originally written from Arthur Rubinstein

For more information, visit: https://frost-music-live.miami.edu/

Cosford Cinema

Showings this month include “Future My Love,” “By the Grace of God,” “Little Joe” and “Frankie”

For showtimes and tickets, visit http://www.cosfordcinema.com/