Two artists’ odysseys on display at Frost Art Museum


Artists Carlos Luna and Richard Sexton share their individual journeys through the Caribbean and Latin America this summer at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Modesto A. Maidique Campus. Learn more about their exhibitions below.

Creole World: Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean Sphere

Photographer and author Richard Sexton left his Atlanta home in 1974 in a Datsun station wagon to explore Latin America and the Caribbean.

unnamedMany years later his adventure would manifest into a photographic journey capturing the architectural and urban similarities of Latin Caribbean cities throughout the Creole world: Haiti, Colombia, Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama and New Orleans.

Sexton’s work will be on display at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum through Aug. 23, 2015. The traveling exhibition features 50 photographs and was organized by and premiered at the Historic New Orleans Collection in 2014. The accompanying book includes more than 200 photographs, plus essays by Creole scholar Jay D. Edwards and photography historian John H. Lawrence.

“Richard Sexton’s photography can be called documentary but his photographic explorations push far beyond the realm of recording the world,” says Jordana Pomeroy, director of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. “Creole World became a project of passion, immersion and discovery. Sexton dove into his subject matter and emerged with a body of work that visually ties together Caribbean and South American cultures that share strands of history – some ugly, some beautiful, but always compelling.”

“Miami is a place of great cultural relevancy now,” says Sexton. “So many Miamians come from the Caribbean and Latin America, and this work is an homage to their Creole world – its sensual architecture, its bold tropical colors and foliage, and vibrant street life. Beautiful, seductive, exotic and irresistible.”

Green Machine: The Art of Carlos Luna

One of the foremost contemporary Cuban artists, Carlos Luna is part of a generation of artists who embrace their strong Cuban heritage and traditions but have reinvented themselves along the way.

The Luna exhibition, organized by guest curator Barbaro Martinez Ruiz, showcases Luna’s cross-pollination of influences from living and working in Cuba until 1991, then in Mexico for 13 years, and now in Miami since 2002.

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The exhibition, on display through Sept. 13, spans 5,000 square feet in the museum’s Grand Galleries. It features more than 120 artworks, most shown for the first time and some created in new mediums the artist has been experimenting with during the past four years, including: Jacquard tapestries and works on metal sheets with patina and aluminum leaf, created at Magnolia Editions; Talavera ceramic plates created in Puebla, Mexico;  mixed media on paper/on wood; and his large-scale oil on canvas paintings.

“Carlos Luna tells stories and relates fables that are culturally attuned to shifts in the social and political environments of the three countries where he has lived and created art,” says Pomeroy, “and the humanity that makes these places so vibrant.”

The exhibition title, Green Machine, alludes to the importance of the rainforest known as El Monte, a sacred space in the Afro-Cuban tradition one must enter to find meaning. The machine represents the mechanism that perpetuates life’s continuity. Combined, these ideas represent the artist leaving behind his rural past and his contemplative journey into the present moment.

El Gran Mambo tells the story of my journey through three countries,” says Luna, adding that music passionately fuels his creative process while he’s painting. “The musicality and rhythm of El Gran Mambo are powerful elements of this centerpiece.”  Luna also cites as his artistic influences the musical masters Benny More and Ismael Rivero.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of Bacardi North America, Siempre Viva Art Foundation, and the Israel, Rose, Henry and Robert Wiener Charitable Foundation in Honor of Dr. Carol Damian.

– Frost Art Museum