SUMMIT, NJ — The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey will open “Olas Caribenas/Caribbean Waves,” an interdisciplinary exhibition exploring the visual art and folklife traditions of New Jersey’s Caribbean diaspora, on Monday, January 23. The featured work will be on display until Sunday, June 4.
In the main gallery, Jairo Alfonso: Objectscapes surveys the work of Jairo Alfonso, a Cuban-born artist who has lived and worked in New Jersey since 2014. In the past 10 years, he has produced three substantial works that have to do with the meaning of everyday objects. Alfonso meticulously documents consumer goods, communication devices, and other ubiquitous products in large-scale drawings and paintings, installations, and videos. It reveals the tendency of material culture to have personal as well as collective significance and sheds light on who we are, where we come from and where we belong.
At the same time, in the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery, the traditions of folk life—including dance performances, traditional music, and multimedia storytelling—will be highlighted in public programs and through documentary videos, audio recordings, and photographs. Los Herederos, a non-profit media arts organization, will feature The Sonicycle, a mobile audio-visual unit that engages communities in sharing stories, music and cultural traditions. This interactive digital caravan is fully equipped with a DJ table, speakers, audio player, a projector and recording equipment. Los Herederos will use The Sonicycle to record stories from artists, performers and community members at a public event at the Art Center on Saturday, February 11, from 1 p.m. , local soundscapes and musical performances collected by them and folklorist Naomi Sturm-Wijesinghe. Also on view will be elements of folklore research, including an installation of documentary photographs printed on textiles.
The art center’s Stair-gazing space will feature “Jack & Jill,” by figurative painter Kevin Darmanie. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Darmanie uses photographs of himself and his friends to create his portraiture, referencing elements of his own life and shared experiences to inform pure narrative works that explore complex relationships between image, object, sight and landscape. In Darmanie’s recent work, the function of the mobile phone as a contemporary mechanism for interpersonal communication is evident, informing the composition of the artworks and acting as a de facto device to capture the images depicted.
Alfonso lives and works in Hudson County. He was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1974. He graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte and the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana. He moved to the United States from Spain in 2013.
Alfonso’s work has been featured in more than 10 solo exhibitions worldwide, including Instrumentaciones, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba, 2000; and in more than 60 group shows, including Useless: Machines for Dreaming, Thinking and Seeing, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 2019; “Flow: Economies of the Visual and Creative in Contemporary Art from the Caribbean”, Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center Art Gallery, Washington, DC, 2014; “Cuban America: A State of Mind in Empire,” Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, 2014; “Occupying, Building, Thinking: Poetic and Discursive Perspectives on Contemporary Cuban Video Art, 1990-2010,” University of South Florida Museum of Contemporary Art, Tampa (2013); “Politics: I don’t like it, but I like it”, Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland, 2013; “Killing Time: An Exhibition of Cuban Artists from the 80s to the Present,” Exit Art, New York, 2007; and “Batiscafo/Proyecto Circo,” at the Eighth Annual Mercosul Biennale in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2011.
Alfonso has participated in various artist residencies, including the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, 2019; Marble House Project, Dorset, Vt., 2015; and Guttenberg Arts in Guttenberg, NJ, 2014. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2017. Alfonso’s work appears in private collections as well as the public collections of the Pérez Art Museum in Miami; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; permanent collection of the province of Hainaut, Belgium; and the Havana Galerie Collection, Zurich, among others.
Los Herederos, which translates to “the heirs,” is a non-profit grassroots arts media organization dedicated to cultural heritage in the digital age. The group engages in research-based documentation for public consumption to produce projects, programs and services that address the realities of local culture, developing communities and an increasingly diasporic immigrant experience. Group members believe in the power and complexity of transmedia storytelling to educate and encourage a more culturally aware, equitable and sustainable society. Founded in 2015 by a group of documentarians, media artists and folklorists, Los Herederos has a platform that provides a link between artist, citizen, public, education and history. The group adapts artist-run projects and archives to reflect the transformative nature of community and tradition. Central to the group’s creative strategy is its interdisciplinary approach to ethnography. Her ethnographic practice is both observant of the participants’ environment and reflective of their experiences as New York City natives and immigrant artists. As inheritors of the city, they seek to capture the magic of the everyday to build the infrastructure in our communities and name their stake in our cultural future.
Darmanie currently splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and Newark. He has exhibited at the Paul Robeson Gallery and the Messier Gallery at Express Newark/Rutgers University, Newark; Reginald Ingraham Gallery in Los Angeles; Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery at New Jersey City University; Aferro Gallery in Newark; and the Central Utah Arts Center in Salt Lake City. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Paradice Palace in Brooklyn, NY and Peninsula Art Space in New York City. His work has been featured in both Forbes and Hyperallergic.
Photo courtesy of Jairo Alfonso
