MOCA Celebrates “My Name Is Maryan” During Miami Art Week 2021

Photography by World Red Eye on December 2nd, 2021 in Arts, Lifestyle, Miami Art Week 2021

Miami, FL – December 2, 2021 – The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA) celebrated its newest exhibition, “My Name is Maryan,” on Thursday, Dec. 2 during Miami Art Week. MOCA was packed with art enthusiasts who browsed the exhibition while enjoying live music, cocktails and canapés. Guests had the opportunity to meet and greet with MOCA’s Executive Director Chana Sheldon, “My Name is Maryan” curator Alison M. Gingeras and Noa Rosenberg, Curator of Modern Art and 16th-19th Century European Art Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

“My Name is Maryan” is a monographic presentation of four decades of paintings, sculptures, drawings and film by the iconoclastic, ground-breaking Polish-born artist Maryan. Drawing upon new scholarship and a trove of never-before-exhibited works, the exhibition is the first retrospective to holistically examine all periods of Maryan’s life and work. Throughout the museum, Maryan’s extraordinary biography and prolific oeuvre represent a deeply moving monument to the perseverance of the human spirit and power of art to work through traumatic loss. Credited as being among the first artist-eyewitnesses to directly depict their experiences of the Shoah, Maryan’s unique approach to figurative art strove to solidarity across cultures and generations.

“My Name Is Maryan” inserts this complex oeuvre into a larger narrative of postwar European and American art history. The exhibition takes Maryan’s act of renaming himself as more than a gesture of self-definition; through it, Maryan forges a defiant yet questioning form of humanism that he dubbed “truth-painting” (peinture-vérité). The exhibition restores Maryan’s rightful place in postwar art history—not only chronicling the work of an overlooked artist, but directly linking him to a larger context of his like-minded European and American contemporaries. Throughout the galleries, Maryan’s oeuvre is juxtaposed with works by artists such as Asger Jorn, Constant, Egill Jacobsen, and other members of the Cobra group; as well as American artists such as H.C. Westermann, Leon Golub, and June Leaf. The first holistic exploration of Maryan’s inspiring and defiant life and work, “My Name Is Maryan” seeks to build kinship with Maryan’s story and Miami’s diverse and thriving immigrant community.

“My Name Is Maryan” accompanied by public programming, is on view at MOCA through March 20, 2022. For more information, visit https://mocanomi.org/.