Heike Dempster is an art writer, advisor, curator and artist advocate.

A group exhibition with new works by Susan Kim Alvarez, Diana Eusebio, Emiliana Henriquez, Cici McMonigle, Cornelius Tulloch

Emiliana Henriquez

The exhibition “Oh for Goodness Snake!” at Latitude Gallery brings together works by two Miami-based painters Susan Kim Alvarez and Cici McMonigle to coincide with the Lunar New Year that celebrates the year of the snake. Embracing themes of transformation, renewal and interconnectedness, the exhibition resonates closely with the symbolism of the snake in the Chinese zodiac. The works highlight intuition and movement in their painterly approach as well as conceptually, and additionally play with definitions of wisdom and consider the uncanny. Derived from a multitude of fables, tales, life, family and personal experiences, the artists create a fantastical, colorful and vibrant world that’s defined by a shared sense of humor, emotional depth and a merging of reality with the imaginary. As we enter the world of Alvarez and McMonigle, we meet friends, lions, dogs, snakes, cowboys, and many imaginary creatures that invite us to come together in community in an exhibition defined by the artists’ lifelong friendship and deep connection. “Oh for Goodness Snake!” invites you to celebrate the Lunar new year and Chinese heritage while immersing yourself in fantasy listening to country music and slithering across the dancefloor.

The exhibition “Meet Me Here Tomorrow (Again)” places individual ontological consideration by artists Lauren Baccus, Nuveen Barwari, William Bigby, Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias, Sophia Mainka, Ian O’Hara, Diana Sinclair and Malaika Temba into a space of contemporary dialogue that transcends personal experiences to discuss the coexistence of artifact and the artificial, the Anthropocene, postcoloniality and extended interpretations of magical realism.

Using textile, mixed media and photography, the artists present works that carry tradition and cultural heritage into a potential future that allows for a dismantling and reconstruction of existing ideologies and create a counter-narrative.

Installation view with works by Nuveen Barwari and Sophia Mainka

The group exhibition On the Way Home brings together works by artists Havîn Al-Sîndy, Priscilla Aleman, Catherine Camargo, Isis Davis-Marks, Charles Mason III, Sheherazade Thenard and Cornelius Tulloch. Drawing personal points of connection between diverse landscapes, Diasporas and cultural identities, the artists aim to create visibility that extends beyond immediacy through iconography, conceptual considerations and storytelling. As they share practices grounded in anthropology, archeology, architecture, philosophy, and history, their research finds common ground between ritual, spirituality and science. We find the personal by accessing emotional and cultural commonalities that link ideas of home in its endless interpretations. As we encounter plants, flowers, seeds, bodies of water, and the people who inhabit the places, landscapes and spaces – whether we can connect through figurative elements or hints to their presence – we become part of the passing on of knowledge and heritage, and hear an echo from ancestral realms, calling us to actively accept a responsibility to create visibility, be present, and define what it means to be home anew.

Priscilla Aleman, Beyond Portrait (Self Portrait), 2024, rain water, foam, soccer ball, basketball net, palm fibers, milk crates, Mexican milagros, fruit net, pigments, plaster, 70” x 15” x 15”

With the works in the exhibition “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues,” New York-based textile artist Malaika Temba considers emotions, the embracing of emotions as power, the interplay between strengths and weaknesses, as well as the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Temba’s textile art is a radical act of self-expression and resistance in tactile form. Borrowing conceptually from the musical genre of plunderphonics – the construction of tracks by sampling recognizable musical works – her works weave together emotional fragments, ontological references, thoughts, past moments, and glimpses at the future into abstract representations of a shared human experience through the lens of a new and open definition of femininity.

Malaika Temba, Fragment 18, 2023, Cotton, rayon and acrylic yarn handwoven on a Macomber floor loom, wood pulp from ficus esaxsperata, 12″ x 16″

Exploring ancestral realms and engaging in the process of rewriting histories/herstories, “Sound, Stories” moves across the oceans that connect the African Diaspora. The exhibition poses the questions: What is contained in the language of the people, What are the narratives, sounds and identities inhabiting the landscape? This series of videos engages in layers of epistemological considerations and renegotiate perspectives of relation between cultural identities and space—moving from the Jamaican countryside to the waters of North Carolina and the contemporary gallery space—where we meet to contemplate the power of narrative and heritage and addressing power structures and celebrating community.

Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Still from Deep Waters, made in collaboration with Logan Lynette, Heather Lee, and SpiritHouse Inc.; Helina Metaferia, Still from A Seat;  Ania Freer, Still from Riva Maid.

With the works in the exhibition “Rhythmic Landscapes, Patterns of Identity,” Miami-based interdisciplinary artist Cornelius Tulloch presents transatlantic Black narratives exploring connections between landscape and cultural identity through collage, photography and sound installation. Specifically focusing on South Florida and Jamaica as Caribbean and African Diasporic spaces, Tulloch captures and contextualizes anthropological interpretations of space, as well as flora, human interactions with the environment and the sounds and movements associated with connectivity to landscape.

Courtesy of the artist.

For Soho Beach House, Priscilla Aleman creates a contemporary water shrine, to translate the divine into a new material. The project titled “The Ocean Within” is a new instantiation of how the body is enshrined and elevated.

South Florida has been a city of immigrants from across the globe. Miami specifically, has also been a place of cross-cultural communities from the Americas, Caribbean, Africa, and Asia over the centuries. The way the city has developed is highly influenced by who is living there and what resources are available. Aleman intentionally focuses on materials used during turbulent times to build emergency shelters, feed the community, sustain life and bring hope. Coconuts, citronella candles, blue plastic tarps, rope, clay, water, palm leaves, miniature pueblos and cowrie shells surround and shelter a water deity. Drawing from Afro-Cuban sculptures and ancient symbolism Aleman creates a contemporary water goddess to offer a reflecting point for members to visit and engage with.

In the pool visitors encounter a temporary shrine composed of tropical plants, seeds and ceramic relics. Each member is given a coconut as an offering to the water shrine, where they symbolically plant a thought, a wish, a grievance, or an intention and then place it within the shrine to release to the water deity.

Courtesy of the artist.

Leyla Yenirce: Anthropology of Responsibility
Whitewall
December 24, 2024

With a practice spanning film, sound and music, installation, painting, mixed media and performance, Yenirce’s individual works, as well as the entire body of work, serve as archives and are presented like collages of thoughts and physical expressions, that are inhabited by central female protagonists.


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Leyla Yenirce, “Gold,” 2024, Photo by Gunter Lepkowski, Berlin, Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York

“Finding the Core: A Survey of 2023’s Resident Artists”

The Yearbook: 2023 | An Annual Survey of Fountainhead Residency Artists

With critical essays by some of the nation’s most compelling visual arts critics and scholars including Ayanna Dozier, Monica Uszerowicz, Wendy Vogel and Claire Voon, and incisive images by acclaimed Miami-based photographers like Rose Marie Cromwell, Zachary Balber and Cornelius Tulloch, The Yearbook: 2023 celebrates the canonical and personal contributions of the artists who have called Fountainhead their home.

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Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias, hyperMaterialities
Role: Editor

“hyperMaterialities” is Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias‘ first artist catalog that shows a large part of her body of work. The accompanying text by Lorena Harauzek and Camilla Langnicke examines the medium of textile from various contemporary perspectives. 


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“Afia Prempeh”
The New African Portraiture: Shariat Collections
August 8, 2023 (book forthcoming)

Afria Prempeh (b. 1986 in Kumasi, Ghana) creates portraits of personalities, layered into complex painterly narratives. Each character forms the focus of and occupies a setting reminiscent of a still life painting: a rich and nuanced cultural context of artifacts, photographs, clothing, accessories, occupational references, color schemes, or designed interiors. 

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“Beyond Texture — Intellectual Materiality in the Work of Alexandre Diop”
Whitewall
December 22, 2022

The works of Alexandre Diop present a multitude of cultural, socio-political, and art-historical references that draw us deeply into the artist’s mind. Considering the musical and literary references, his use of symbolism and metaphor takes us beyond the immediate texture that defines the aesthetics of his work that's created with discarded, damaged, and forgotten materials. His references allude to the deep intellectual space that is an integral layer of his practice and constitutes an essential part of the works’ materiality—conceptually and based on ontological explorations. 

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“Asif Hoque Taps Into Ancestral Energy”
Whitewall
August 26, 2021

Guided Asif Hoque’s "The American Loverboy" is currently on view at Taymour Grahne Projects in London through September 9. The artist's mythologies are inhabited by gods and creatures that bring narratives and identities to life through creolized sagas that speak of the artist’s own experiences, and simultaneously create an authentic depiction of experiences that resonate with many. His epistemologies merge ontological fragments of Bangladeshi heritage with the cultural context of life in Italy and the USA. As Hoque intuitively taps into an ancestral heritage and energy that accompanies him and instinctively guides him, his artistic practice brings forth conceptually textured multi-dimensional and powerful representations.

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Asif Hoque, photo by Garey Quinn, courtesy of the artist.

“Ambrose Murray: Veiling/Unveiling the Ancestral Realm”
Whitewall
June 8, 2021

Guided by the violet flame, the new works by artist Ambrose Murray share mythical narratives and connect realms to offer a path to an exchange of souls. Partially disjointed figures make an appearance in front of the viewer’s gaze while shimmering layers in shades of purple, violet, blues, and turquoise hide and simultaneously reveal an ephemeral landscape surrounding the bodies that become the site for us to meet.

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Ambrose Murray, "Violet unction," 2021, hand-dyed silk organza, acrylic on muslin, watercolor marker, burnout velvet, digital print on velvet, embellished lace and various textiles, 96 x 72 inches, courtesy of the artist.

“Sheena Rose: Dramatically Removing the Landscape”
Whitewall
November 16, 2020

Contemporary artist Sheena Rose was born in 1985 in Bridgetown, Barbados, where she also currently lives and works. A Fulbright Scholar who holds a BFA from Barbados Community College and MFA from the University of North Carolina, Rose’s work is equally rooted in her Caribbean heritage as it is in her efforts to challenge any preconceived notions and definitions of said heritage.

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Courtesy of Sheena Rose.

“Stephen Arboite. Dreamscapes: The Metaphor Has Shifted to Healing”
Art Districts
April 2020

With “Dreamscapes: The Metaphor Has Shifted to Healing,” artist Stephen Arboite presents a series of soulful and spiritual works focusing on a metamorphosic journey, inviting viewers along on an emotional and introspective path to self-discovery and healing.

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Stephen Arboite, Untitled, 2020, coffee, charcoal, mixed media collage on paper 41” x 47 ½.” All images are courtesy of N'Namdi Contemporary, Miami.

“Doris Salcedo: Three Decades”
Art Districts 
April 2016

With “Doris Salcedo,“ Pérez Art Museum Miami presents three decades of the artist’s sculptures and installations. The first retrospective of the work of the renowned Colombian artist is organized by the MCA Chicago and covers the artist’s penchant for fusing post-minimalist forms with cultural concerns. Deeply rooted in Colombia’s social and political landscape, including its long history of civil conflicts, Salcedo’s work examines trauma, violence, loss, social injustice and marginalization with sophistication, intimate understanding of the victims as well as a poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects.

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