Collector: Peter Menéndez collects the art of fellow Cuban exiles, but Miami is home
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Brett Sokol
MIAMI---Miami’s once sclerotic arts world became roused by many of the newly arrived exiles (1980s) — including the novelist Reinaldo Arenas and the painter Carlos Alfonzo — who brought an energetic avant-garde spirit and an expansive vision. Work by those same Cuban artists fills Mr. Menéndez’s Miami home. Mr. Alfonzo’s haunting “Figurat,” from 1991, with crimson swathes encircling a figure, chronicles the painter’s own physical deterioration as the effects of AIDS ravaged his body. A recent sculpture by Rafael Domenech, who immigrated from Cuba in 2010, takes a less emotional approach, emphasizing its material process — elliptical bands around a hanging Saturn-like structure seem to defy gravity, while diagrams installed nearby trace those same bands’ die-cut origins. [More]
Show Us Your Walls
By Brett Sokol
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| Peter Menéndez at home in Miami with “Untitled (Pleiades no. 2),” a sculpture by Rafael Domenech from 2016. On the wall behind him is another work by Mr. Domenech, “Untitled (Una por Otra) Post Archeology — Complete,” also from 2016; below that is Carlos Alfonzo’s “Largo Three,” from 1984. Credit Moris Moreno for The New York Times |
