Spinello Projects announces the 40 year survey exhibition and Miami debut solo show by Cuban-American artist Nereida Garcia-Ferraz
Spinello Projects presents De Noche, Los Sueños: 1983-2023, the Miami debut solo exhibition by Cuban-American multidisciplinary artist Nereida Garcia-Ferraz (b. 1954, Havana, Cuba). Spanning forty years, the survey exhibition features forty paintings on paper and canvas, sprawling throughout two floors of the gallery.
Garcia-Ferraz’s work has always deconstructed who she is, where she is from, and the energies and elements of what connects all three: love, history, spirituality, and memory. Her works envelop her personage and charts the modes of expression she has used over the years to define her interiority. The work is quintessentially Caribbean but idiosyncratically, Nereida: queer, curious, questioning, mystical—connected to the oneness of all beings. Garcia-Ferraz deals in desire and seduction to draw in others and communicate what knowledge she inherently feels. Over and over again we see expressions of her love, as well as her investigation and synthesis of Cuban spirituality and identity.
The exhibition is marked by three major periods of Garcia-Ferraz’s life: Chicago years, San Francisco and early Miami years, and her most recent work over the last three years. Her years spent living in Chicago, from when she first immigrated from Cuba as a teenager till her early forties, Garcia-Ferraz grew into a prolific artist, cementing herself in the Chicago art scene of the eighties and nineties. She mostly painted oil on large sheets of paper, creating colorful surrealist scenes reminiscent of carnivals and dreams. Text, boats, animals, and household objects often come into play in these paintings that gently guide your mind through time, space, and spiritual realms. During this period she began to travel consistently back to Cuba which became influential on her work into the present. In the late nineties and mid-2000’s throughout her time in San Francisco and Miami, her work evolved to feature more human figures and architecture, and carry more spiritual weight, which has led her to her current body of work. Today she paints to allow the viewer to enter the visual narratives and symbolism from infinite openings. In these openings the paintings speak to the viewer, allowing for multiple interpretations. Thematically, the paintings reference spiritual and animal archetypes, women, and generational knowledge and wisdom, and learning and sharing. At the heart of it all she aims to break consciousness open with her current paintings, allowing her subconscious to merge with the viewers and unseen, but felt spiritual forces in the ether.
Nereida Garcia-Ferraz invites us into the river, where the waters of her art merge with the river of our own experiences, creating a shared and profound connection that transcends time and consciousness.
About the Artist
Nereida Garcia-Ferraz (b.1954) is a Cuban-born artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, video, sculpture, and social art projects exploring identity and feminist themes, nature, beauty, and the physical world. Her work has been exhibited by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Mexico City , The Illinois State Museum, MOMA P.S.1, Miami Dade Museum of Art and Design, The Lowe Art Museum, El Espacio 23, among others.
She co-produced and directed the award-winning video documentary “Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra.” The film is in the collection of MOMA, Guggenheim Museum, Yale University, San Francisco Art Institute and many other Museums and Universities around the world. Some notable recent group exhibitions include Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS. 1 and Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from The 1980s at the Lowe Museum of Art at the University of Miami.
Garcia-Ferraz has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been awarded grants from organizations including National Endowment for the Arts, The Mac Arthur Foundation Media Grant, and The Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute. Here in Miami, she co-founded 801 Projects at the Jose Marti Building and has been dedicated to working with education programs such as Women on the Rise at MOCA of North Miami and Brick by Brick, the award-winning outreach education art program at Pérez Art Museum Miami. In 2022 she was awarded with the South Florida Visual Arts Consortium Fellowship.
Spinello Projects is a Miami-based contemporary art program founded in 2005. It is a gallery, creative space, and an innovative platform for nomadic site-specific and curatorial projects.
