photograph by lara stein pardo, 2010

Artists, Aesthetics, and Migrations: Contemporary Visual Arts and Caribbean Diaspora in Miami, Florida is an ethnographic study about Miami-based women visual artists of Caribbean origin, and the relationship between Miami and the Caribbean as it is realized visually. The major questions of this research were: What insight do we gain from studying the aesthetics and politics of contemporary artistic production in relationship to migration and diaspora? How do the art works and life stories of immigrant and diaspora artists help us to understand the changing landscape of art and women’s work in the United States and the Caribbean? How do the artists use their roles as artists and their artistic works to examine the terrains of political and cultural economies within which they work? How do we understand the relationship between Miami and the Caribbean, especially in terms of visual culture and artistic production?

The ethnography focuses on women contemporary artists Miami-based Caribbean diaspora artists with roots in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, including Noelle Théard, Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, Vickie Pierre, and Maria Martinez-Cañas. The artists work in a variety of media from painting to photography to performance. To address my research questions, I utilized ethnographic methods including participant observation, interviews, archival research, and visual analysis. From 2009 – 2011, I conducted in-depth ethnographic fieldwork from in Miami, Florida, an important city for transnational research as it has been shaped by its role as a hub of Latin American and Caribbean migration and trade. While most studies of immigration attend to farm labor, domestic work, and familial relationships, this project turns attention to the field of artistic production. I analyze women’s roles as professional working artists. Through analysis of the artists’ lives, practice, and artwork, I consider the intersections of race, gender, place, migrations, history, and archives, especially as these concepts relate to diasporic culture and history. Gender is at the center of my analysis and the text draws from the lived experiences of the artists in the study, with particular attention to transnational feminist practice, gendered discourses, and gendered ideologies of work. My research revealed that artists are rendered invisible through practices of subjugation based on social location (e.g. race, gender, class), and suppositions about Caribbean women’s art practice including expectations for “craft” artwork, subject matter (e.g. tropical landscapes), and the idea that they are not as “professional” or “serious” as other artists. I argue that artists responded to this subjugation by crafting their art practice and enacting performances in the archive; making visible what is often made to seem invisible thereby creating actions and documents that inform our future archives.

This dissertation makes important contributions to several topical areas of scholarship including art and cultural production, migration, diaspora, and work, with attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the fields of Anthropology, Gender Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Art Practice and History. I have been awarded grants and fellowships to complete this research from institutions including the University of Michigan, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Cuban Heritage Collection.  An essay based on this research, “Contemporary Black Photographic Practice in Miami, Florida: Noelle Théard and Donnalyn Anthony,” will be included in Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Cheryl R. Rodriguez, and Dzodzi Tsikata.

Work in progress. Dissertation will be completed in 2013. PhD will be granted from the University of Michigan in Anthropology.

Writer Nadege Green and I collaborated to produce the print, Tie Your Waist, and Gather Your Strength. Our piece reflects on migration, Haiti, Miami, strength, women, work, and generational legacies. The work includes an original narrative by Green and a mixed media image that includes archival imagery, watercolor, and drawing on paper. This work was part of the Sweat Broadsheet Collaboration and exhibition at the Centre Gallery in Miami Dade College. The exhibition runs from November 1 – December 21, 2012.

Mobile Portrait Studio from lara stein pardo on Vimeo.

Project Statement
The Mobile Portrait Studio considers the role of portraiture, photography, performance, and public spaces in relationship to art-making, memory, and historical narratives. This project draws on traditions of portrait photography combined with contemporary understandings of art in the public sphere and performance. I set up the Mobile Portrait Studio with a camera, a mobile mini printer, and lighting. Then, I ask passersby to participate in the project by having their portrait taken. Participants receive a free print within minutes of sitting (or standing, as the case may be) for the portrait. The portraits are given to participants and also preserved digitally as part of a larger series of photographs. Through the acts of portraiture, narrative, and engagement in public spaces I hope to document our contemporary moment as well as create moments for interaction with the arts and each other.
So far this project has been completed in four locations: during Art Basel/Art Fair Week in Miami outside the Rubell Collection in Wynwood, Florida, and inside the Convention Center in Miami Beach, Florida, as well as in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago along Ariapita Avenue and at Alice Yard, a collective contemporary art space.

Mobile Portrait Studio, locations and events

Port of Spain, Trinidad
January 11, 2011, 4 – 6 PM – Portraits along Ariapita Avenue
January 14, 2011, 7:30 PM – Portraits and Screening at Alice Yard

The Mobile Portrait Studio, Trinidad edition, is a collaboration between Lara Stein Pardo and Rodell Warner, a Trinidadian photographer. Portraits were taken along a busy street in Woodbrook, Ariapita Avenue as well as in the collaborative contemporary art space, Alice Yard. Building on the first iteration of the Mobile Portrait Studio, the location and collaborative efforts shift the meaning of the project from documenting and understanding one locality to creating public and performance-based works in multiple locations that considers people, public spaces, performance, and personal interaction in relation to the role of portraiture, art-making, memory, and historical narratives.

Art Basel/Art Fair Week Edition
Thursday, December 2, 2010

Two Sessions, Two Locations
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM – Wynwood (near the Rubell Collection)
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM – Miami Beach (near the Convention Center)

Lara Stein Pardo invites you to have your portrait taken at the Mobile Portrait Studio. Participants will receive a free print within minutes of sitting for the portrait. The photos will also be preserved digitally and become part of a larger series of photographs documenting Miami and the contemporary art world. This project considers the role of portraiture, photography, performance, and public spaces in relationship to art-making, memory, and historical narratives.

See press on this project:
from the HuffPost
Culture Builds Florida
the305.com 

Website coming soon: http://www.mappingartsproject.org

Find Mapping Miami on Facebook and Twitter!

dreams (sueños) 2008 – 2009 from lara stein pardo on Vimeo.

 
dreams (sueños) – 2008 – 2009

Short Film, Running Time: 00:03:32, Format: NTSC DVD

This short film is a visual poem in three parts. Footage included in the film was shot on-site in Miami, Miami Beach, Ann Arbor, and Havana, Cuba. The soundtrack of the film includes music by Duke Ellington, from the album Black, Brown, and Beige as well as poetry by Langston Hughes read by the author himself. Tying together contemporary visual imagery with historic sound the film draws on disparate ideas of reality and questions ideas about home and belonging. Highlighting the tension that exists around the relationship between the US, particularly Miami, and Cuba, dreams (sueños) also offers a glimpse into the possibility of change.

Miami-Havana – 2008 – 2009

Diptychs, C-Prints on Paper, 16 x 20 each

The photographs depict physical and social landscapes including buildings and natural elements in both cities during moments of transition. Images are paired in diptychs in order to document transitions and tensions as well as visualize similarities and differences in material, shape, form, and color. By picturing the images together they draw attention not only to the forms in the photographs, but also to the social tensions that have been a large part of each city since the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Hair Classification Project, 2006 – 2007
Sculpture, Glass Jars with Hair on Shelf, Dimensions Variable

This sculptural installation features four jars of hair that represent the external features often associated with intrinsic identity. In other words, a way to think about how we interpret peoples’ identities by their outward appearances.  Franz Boas wrote, a person’s “’type’ is formed quite subjectively on the basis of our everyday experience” (1932[2004]:22).  How distinct, then,  are the “types” we associate with race, nationality, sex, gender, and other markers if they are based in experience? What criteria do we use to classify ourselves and others?  What happens when “types” converge? How have our conceptions of race and identity shifted? Have they shifted at all?

sometimes when i close my eyes (2007)

running time: 00:02:17

format: video and sound installation; NTSC DVD

sometimes when i close my eyes (2007), is a video installation which addresses how the body acts and intervenes in the creation of “place.”  In particular, this performance and installation began my intense interest in the divisions between Miami and Havana. The ocean is one of the most powerful symbols of this separation. The video shows me walking toward and away from the ocean in Miami Beach.  During this performance, there are moments when I touch the ocean, though I never submerge myself in the water. The main questions this piece responds to are: What is the body’s role in the creation of place? How do people, and in particular, women negotiate spaces? How do socio-political and natural forces act as bridges, barriers, or other interventions in the creation of place and home? How do memory and emotion factor in to one’s interpretation of these ideas?

Tracked, a performance installation – 2006

Performance Installation, Wood, Paint, and Performance, Dimensions Variable

Installed and performed at the Art Center/South Florida, July 4 – 18, 2006

In Tracked, I examined the movements of our everyday lives, and the way these movements are tracked, traced, taped, and otherwise under surveillance.  I designed and helped to build a large wooden maze, approximately 7’ x 11’, in the second story window of the Art Center/South Florida building on Lincoln Road, a pedestrian mall in Miami Beach, Florida. Twice a week for the performance period, I navigated around the hurdles of the maze and painted my tracks on the window facing the street. Each night, a different color was used, and by the end of the performance a layering of colors marking my nightly tracks was visible from the street below.

a collaboration between grace sanders and lara stein pardo This short film considers the relationship between migrations, the legal system, and everyday life.

today we are leaving (2008) from lara stein pardo on Vimeo.

today we are leaving, DVD, 2008

by grace sanders and lara stein pardo

What does it mean to be safe at home? What does it mean to be safe at all amidst violent negotiations over legal and illegal immigration? What marks a territory or boundary that notions of safety are often built upon? How are people’s movements regulated? What legal strictures regulate values? What are the affects of immigration on peoples’ daily lives? How can this be expressed visually?

The Wet Foot Dry Foot Policy has been in effect since 1995.  It is a revision of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, and states that Cuban immigrants who are caught crossing the waters between Cuba and Florida are granted different legal status based upon where they are caught (if they are caught) by the Coast Guard. Those that reach dry land (dry foot) are able to remain in the US, and after one year and a day can apply for citizenship.  If they are caught while in transit at sea (wet foot), then they are supposed to be sent back to Cuba or to a third country. Some are sent to Guantanamo for a detention period. This immigration policy applies only to Cubans who arrive in the US seeking political asylum. No other immigrant group, of which Miami has many, is able to claim the same legal status even if they too are seeking asylum. This policy leads to unjust dichotomization, criminalization, and racialization of immigrants, who in many cases are seeking an internationally recognized right to asylum. Once in Miami, they are sent to Krome Detention Center where many people have been severely mistreated, resulting in the deaths of people who risk their lives to find safety in our city.

The video piece shows modes of transport including the ocean, cars, trucks, plains, and feet. Feet, in the video, are both literal and metaphorical. They are shown traversing pavement and stepping in and out of a bathtub; negotiating the connection between immigration policy and everyday life. Feet have become the marker of legality for some (wet foot vs. dry foot), and are most peoples’ main mode of transport throughout life. The drying of the feet represents daily actions of self-care and self-preservation; actions which are overlooked when an immigrant becomes a criminalized and racialized subject. The video moves at varying speeds, and includes varying sounds of the ocean, street noise, and silence.  The sometimes-blurred focus and quick transition between scenes or between sound and silence represents the dissonance experienced in moving from place to place, especially from a familiar to unfamiliar place. At one point in the video, there is a rapid fire of press photos, highlighting immigration disputes in Miami including the Elian case, photos of Krome Detention Center, protest rallies and Haitian and Cuban rafters.

It is our hope that this DVD raises awareness about US immigration policy and its affects on people. This is an especially important issue in Miami, and we need to critically assess the role we want our city to play in regulating the country’s borders.