Black History Month Celebration “Wifredo Lam & the Black Spirit” at Gary Nader Art Centre

Photography by Ashley Canario on February 27th, 2020 in Lifestyle

Miami, FL -February 27, 2020 – Guests gathered for the opening of the exhibition Wifredo Lam and the Black Spirit as we celebrate Black History Month at Gary Nader Art Centre, Wynwood Arts District, Miami. Presenting masterworks from throughout the career of one of Cuba’s most celebrated artists. A highlight among those showcased in this exhibition is the monumental painting Le Guerrier, an example of the artist hybrid identity, an abstracted, geometric hallucinating angular figure with a robust suggestion to tribal sculpture. Hermès Trismégiste is another outstanding work where the energy and mystery of the bursting figures depict a synthesis of animal-human-vegetal creatures surging from a blurry, almost idyllic background. In Figure – Femme Cheval, Lam metaphorically embodies Afro-Cuban spirituality in the figure of the horse-headed woman. Valerie Fletcher notes that “in Santeria symbology, a horse signifies the possession or empowerment of a devotee by an orisha; when a practitioner becomes possessed, that person is described as being ridden by that spirit.” “I have tried to relocate black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world. My painting is an act of decolonization, not in a physical sense but in a mental one,” Lam declared.