The FIU alumna and renowned “Miami Generation” artist brings her evocative artwork to the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
By Elisa Turner
Your first encounter with María Brito’s show at the Frost Art Museum could be confusing. You may even wonder why it’s there. If so, you’ll please Brito, a rebel at heart who is unafraid of controversy.
A celebrated artist of “The Miami Generation,” the FIU alumna traces her defiant spirit to the long-ago moment when she concealed gold jewelry in her clothes on a Pedro Pan flight from Havana to Miami. Everyone knew doing this risked terrible consequences, but she couldn’t leave the beloved bracelet behind knowing it was a serious financial effort for her parents to buy it for her 12th birthday. Decades later, Brito still cherishes the bracelet.
Her longstanding aversion to doing what’s predictable, as well as considerable talent, has led to “As of 24/03/07,” Brito’s mixed-media installation at the Frost that runs through April 3. A small shrine – dedicated to a mysterious figure and recalling saints’ altars – is an ominous part of the work. The shrine recalls the conservative Cuban Catholic upbringing, especially for girls, of the Cuban community transplanted to Miami in the early 1960s.
In her artwork, Brito endows simple, familiar objects with disturbing symbolism. This installation evokes a modest scientific laboratory where human forms are created in a clandestine manner. “It has to do with social, ethical issues related to the manufacturing of human life,” said Brito, who is intrigued by news reports about biological experimentation.
This will be the first solo exhibit at the Frost Art Museum for the FIU graduate, although her art has been in group shows at the previous museum space. The Frost also holds two Brito sculptures in its permanent collection.
Brito’s art has been shown in every major exhibition of Cuban American artists and in venues around the world: the Second Iberoamerican Biennial of Lima, Peru; the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seoul, South Korea; “Cuba Twentieth Century: Modernism and Syncretism” at the Centre d’Art Santa Monica in Barcelona, Spain; and in “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity” in the 1980s in New York City at various venues including Studio Museum in Harlem. Her art was part of the traveling exhibit, “Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.”
Frost Art Museum director and chief curator Carol Damian has known Brito for more than 20 years. As a professor, Damian includes Brito in her art history courses, especially given her own interest in women artists. Brito is “an artist of great complexity that can be inspirational to my students,” said Damian, “especially in South Florida with all her references to growing up here as a child of exile.
“María has long represented herself and her life experiences in multi-media works that combine ceramics, painting, sculpture, and installation in constructions that embody issues of loss, femininity, women’s roles, and identity,” Damian explains. “She has never waivered from her commitment to create works that are dense with serious personal symbolism and yet can be quite humorous.”
In 2009, FIU art history professor Juan Martínez wrote the book María Brito, published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press of Los Angeles. A year later, at Book Expo America in New York City, his book was awarded “Best Arts Book – English” by Latino Book Awards.
This exquisitely illustrated volume about Brito belongs to the series “A Ver: Revisioning Art History,” which explores contributions Latina and Latino artists have made to American and world art history. It highlights Brito’s signature installations – mixed media interior spaces imbued with symbolism and emotion – as well as her paintings and sculptures.
“As Brito and her art have broken cultural, social and artistic barriers,” Martínez writes, “they have made a notable contribution to the diversity and dynamism of contemporary art.”
His book looks at Brito’s artistic career in the context of recent Miami history, touching on how interest in Latin American culture increased significantly in the 1980s in the United States. This cultural shift, along with growing opportunities for women, coincided with her career.
Brito juggled roles of wife, mother of two sons and art teacher as she built her career. “For me getting married and having a family was what I was supposed to do,” Brito said.
Still, she says, her father emphasized the importance of being educated so that she could support herself. She eventually earned four degrees in education and art from FIU and UM.
“I had my children, but I just kept on going to school,” she said. “Honestly, I never thought I would be creative enough to become an artist.”
Martínez notes how Cuban culture has transformed Miami since the early 1960s, when she came to the city along with thousands of other Cuban exiles. Miami was much smaller, with fewer opportunities for artists than exist today. Early on, Brito gained attention as a member of “The Miami Generation,” several Cuban American artists featured at the Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture in Miami. She was the only woman included. Brito’s breakthrough came in the 1980s, Martínez writes, “in the context of multiculturalism and the growing recognition of women artists.”
Brito and some Cuban American artists of her generation are inspired by Renaissance and Baroque painting, Martínez said. Perhaps this is because Catholic imagery in this art is so familiar to these artists. “They were raised Cuban Catholic in a time that was very intense,” he said. “But notice her relationship to Catholicism is complex. If you look at some of the mixed media that deal with Catholicism, Catholicism is seen as kind of oppressive and overpowering.”
These complex themes are present in Brito’s installation at the Frost Art Museum. But don’t look to Brito for interpretations of her shrine-cum-laboratory. As viewers enter her single-room installation, she says, “I hope to leave them with more questions than answers, which is what I love to do with my work. I want to get people to think.”
Elisa Turner is a freelance art critic and writer in Coral Gables. For many years she wrote about the artd for The Miami Herald. She is the Miami correspondent for the magazine ARTnews and columnist for Art Circuits, a print and online guide to the visual arts in Miami.