Retrospective by Amber Robles-Gordon

Healing Forward: Rituals of Self-Repair, Cultivation of Community, and Collective Activation

Retrospective by Amber Robles-Gordon.

Exhibition Dates: February 9 - April 30, 2026

Location: Community Folk Art Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Artist Talk: March 20, 2026 at 6:30 pm

Talking Stick Workshop: March 21, 2026. Register here.

Healing Forward: Rituals of Self-Repair, Cultivation of Community, and Collective Activation, is a retrospective exhibition that traces the throughline of healing—personal, communal, spiritual, and ecological—across the artistic career of Amber Robles-Gordon. Bringing together installations, quilts, assemblages, and collages created over more than a decade, the exhibition reveals how healing has functioned not only as a thematic concern, but as a methodology and ethical framework within the artist’s practice.

Robles-Gordon’s work has long been rooted in self-awareness, reflection, and repair—of the self, of collective memory, and of the environments we inhabit. Drawing from Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, decolonial histories, feminist thought, and ecological consciousness, her artworks operate as sites of reckoning and renewal. They ask viewers to confront inherited systems of harm while offering space for breath, ritual, protection, and transformation. The exhibition is organized into three interrelated sections, each articulating a distinct yet overlapping mode of healing and awareness.

As a focal aspect of this exhibition Robles-Gordon creates installations that build upon history, personal and ancestral memory and Afro-futurism to establish bird and totemic like data transference structures. Her installation formula is grounded in visual and/or asymmetrical balance. Each installation centralizes a large quilt. Which represents the body of the bird. The remaining medium to smaller artworks are arranged in pairs. One for the left side and its pair on the right side to create the wings. Ultimately, manifesting transference mechanisms in an asymmetrical arrayment of aesthetic and didactic messaging.

I. Reflections of Universal and Societal Healing

This section foregrounds Robles-Gordon’s engagement with collective trauma, historical rupture, and the interdependence of liberation struggles. Works such as Sacred CoEvolution: Undoing the Enchainment of Being(s) and Successions: Traversing U.S. Colonialism examine how colonial violence, racialized power structures, and ecological exploitation remain embedded in contemporary life. Through layered materials, symbolic forms, and spiritual cosmologies, these works insist that healing must be collective, relational, and accountable. Revolution: Is Dawning Because Our Liberation Will Always Be Bound Together further emphasizes solidarity, resistance, and the necessity of communal repair.

II. Healing Through Objects and the Environment

Here, healing emerges through material intimacy and spatial intervention. Installations such as Casting and Protection Work, Place of Breath and Birth, and In Tribute to Love, Nature, and Friendship activate objects, textiles, and natural elements as carriers of memory, care, and protection. These works reflect the artist’s belief that environments—both built and natural—hold emotional and spiritual residue, and that art can recalibrate these spaces toward balance, safety, and restoration. Viewers are invited to move through, around, and within these works, encountering healing as a physical and sensory experience.

III. Healing Through Belief, Practice, and Activation

The final section centers ritual, spirituality, and embodied action as tools for survival and transformation. At the Altar: Dance of the Serpents and Above All You Must Not Play at God draw directly from ceremonial structures, ancestral knowledge, and sacred symbolism. These works operate as altars, thresholds, and invitations—asking viewers to consider belief not as abstraction, but as an active practice capable of generating protection, empowerment, and agency.

Collectively, Healing Forward positions Amber Robles-Gordon’s practice as an evolving archive of healing strategies—one that moves from introspection to communal activation. The retrospective affirms that healing is neither linear nor passive, but a continual process of reflection, confrontation, and collective care. In doing so, the exhibition invites audiences to consider their own roles within systems of harm and repair, and to imagine healing not only as recovery, but as a radical, forward-moving force.

Downtown Fairfax Art Walk

As part of the Spotlight on the Arts closing day celebrations, May 3rd, the Fairfax  Commission on the Arts is teaming up to create a vibrant Art Walk throughout downtown Fairfax!

Artists, performers, dancers, painters, poets, fashionistas — all art forms and mediums are invited to participate. This is a community-wide art social, networking, and connection event designed to bring together our local businesses and creative tribes for an unforgettable day of artful energy.

Keep it simple or go big — bring a sketchbook and picnic blanket, set up a table, pop up an easel — it’s all welcome!

A limited number of tent spaces are available, along with flexible sidewalk space throughout the downtown area. They"re partnering with local businesses, boutiques, and shops to create a vibrant, walkable experience that encourages visitors to explore and support the entire community. 

The Call for entry form is a preliminary information gathering system. More information will be sent out to participating members who enter by 3-15-26. Get the form from Cheryl Neway, Commissioner for COA, Designer, Artist and owner of Perfect Mistakes ®️

Wanna go to an opening this Sunday? Todd Gardner

Todd Gardner opens with a reception this Sunday, March 1st, 12:45 - 2P at the Blanche Ames Gallery, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, 4880 Elmer Derr Road, Frederick, MD 21703.

Come hear 23 very short stories, a little poetry and a short 10 minute film made with Todd's iPhone. He will be also giving a short artist talk / presentation.  Refreshments will be served.

A woman considering her next move upon a Jackson Pollock landscape

"A woman considering her next move upon a Jackson Pollock landscape." 22x32 inches, 2026 mixed media painting on 600 pound paper. Will be at the next Affordable Art Fair in New York City next month!

Artists & Makers Studios 11th Anniversary!

Congratulations to Artists & Makers Studios in Rockville, Maryland on its 11th anniversary, which in gallery years is like 100 years.  The unique model for this amazing space, under the guiding hand of its hardworking owner and Executive Director, Judith Olivia HeartSong, had grown into other spaces in Oro Valley, Arizona, and in San Gabriel and North Hollywood in California.

We are delighted to be celebrating our 11th anniversary in March at our First Friday Gallery Opening! On March 6th from 5-8pm enjoy exhibits, open studios, food and drink, along with drawings for prizes. Come and join us and celebrate this ever-growing community now thriving in Arizona and California too! Please find embedded below and attached our press release, an image for your use, and a link to the same on our website to peruse. If there is anything we can do to provide more images or information – just ask.

https://artistsandmakersstudios.com/march-2026-11th-anniversary-in-the-galleries-with-rick-ruggles/

“Focus Pocus: Macrophotography” with Rick Ruggles

Mini-Solo for Patricia de Poel Wilberg

Artists & Makers Studios is pleased to host Rick Ruggles for the month of March and A&M’s 11th anniversary celebration. The exhibit will run from March 4th through March 25th, with a First Friday opening on March 6th from 5-8pm. Aiming his eye at the small details in everyday life, Rick explores the sometimes magical, often mysterious beauty in his field of view. 

The subject matter is not always obvious, and often mysterious. The simplest frequently pedestrian textures & colors and shadows & patterns, are captured by smartphone, capable of yielding surprising depth and clarity, with the potential for larger scale presentation than viewers might expect. 

Rick is captivated by the remarkable mundane in daily life. Rust, corrosion, failing paint, street structure, botanicals- all seem to seek Rick’s eye. He captures images in ways that are abstract, sometimes surreal, usually challenging the viewer to identify the subjects. His love of wordplay guides his offbeat choices for titles, doubling his delight, and hopefully that of viewers as well. 

Patricia de Poel Wilberg will hang a mini-solo exhibit in the Lounge Gallery. 

Enjoy the sculptural work of Francis Maduka Uduh in studio 11, along with nineteen Gallery 209 Member Artists exhibiting their latest work. 

Open Studios building-wide will welcome visitors to visit and learn. Shop and support local working artists, makers, and professionals. Light fare generously sponsored each month by The Chesapeake Framing Company.

• Rick Ruggles “Focus Pocus: Macrophotography
• Mini-Solo for Patricia de Poel Wilberg
• The 19 Member Artists of Gallery 209
• The Sculptural Work of Francis Maduka Uduh

February Reception

5:00pm – 8:00pm, Friday, March 6th, 2026

Artists & Makers Studios

11810 Parklawn Drive, Suite 210

Rockville, MD 20852

Meet the Artist Saturday, March 21st, 12:00pm-3:00pm

2026 Wherewithal Grants

From the WPA:

We're pleased to announce the 10 grant recipients for the 2026 funding cycle of Wherewithal Grants, providing financial support and peer mentorship for DC-area artists in areas of research and project presentations. Six artists and collectives have been awarded with research grants of $5,000 each, and four artists and collectives have been awarded with project & presentation grants of $7,500 each, for a total disbursement of $60,000 this cycle.

Research grantees: Gia Harewood, Jackie Hoysted, Brooke Jay & Chrystal Seawood, Christopher Kardambikis, Adriana Monsalve, and Kat Thompson.

Project & Presentation grantees: abdu ali mongo & Maleke Glee, Sobia Ahmad & Benny Shaffer, Ama BE, and Shariq Shah.

Over the next year, artists from this cohort will organize projects including: a multi-genre publication inspired by the Black queer body in motion; a three-day symposium bringing together a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and poets whose work probes land and film as reciprocal sites of encounter; a performance dinner; and an intergenerational cooking workshop. Others will conduct research around fascinating topics such as: soil memory, mycology, diasporic memories and language, and the history of DIY publishing in the 21st century.

Throughout the yearlong grant cycle, grantees will produce their work independently and in dialogue with one another, convening regularly as a group facilitated by Nathalie von Veh, Wherewithal Regrants Manager.

An independent panel of four artists and curators reviewed 113 applications and are awarding 10 grants. The adjudication panel consisted of: Jenna Crowder, Writer and Editor (Washington, DC); Krista Green, Grit Fund Program Manager, The Peale (Baltimore, MD); Rex Delafkaran, Artist and Wherewithal Alum (Chicago, IL); and Sara O’Keeffe, Senior Curator, Art Omi (Ghent, NY). They evaluated each proposal based on the criteria of Artistic Impact, Context/Audience, Collaboration, Feasibility, and Budget.

Critical Ground: Art and Environmental Justice

WASHINGTON SCULPTORS GROUP

Critical Ground: Art and Environmental Justice

Presented by the Washington Sculptors Group and Glen Echo Park Partnership for the Arts

February 21 - March 22, 2026

Opening Reception:

Saturday, February 21, 2026, 6-8pm

FEATURED ARTISTS

Esperanza Alzona, Joanathan Bessaci, Nizette Brennan, Leonardo Bruno, Sally Canzoneri, Chris Combs, Dianne Crosby, Nicholas Femia, Billy Friebele, McCleary Gallagher, Tom Greaves, Xiang Gu, Raina Hatcher, Kankel Jadon, Jean Kim, Joan Konkel, Heidi Lippman, Cat Lukens, Jon Lundak, Jacqueline Maggi, Samuel Miller, Davide Prete, Radhakund Ramnarine, Jim Roberts, Ira Tattelman, David Whitmore, Janet Wittenberg, Marcie Wolf-Hubbard

Juried by Tomora Wright Swann

JUROR & ARTIST TALK

Saturday, March 7, 2026, 1pm

Meet thirteen of the artists in Critical Ground in conversation with Tomora Wright Swann. Join us for a talk in the classroom on the third floor above the Popcorn Gallery.

More Information here.

What Passes Between Solo Exhibit by Clare Winslow

Everything that Rises, screenprint and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48

March 5 - 29, 2026 Opening Reception – Saturday, March 7, 2-4 pm Artist Talk/demo – Sunday March 29, 2-4 pm

Washington Printmakers Gallery is pleased to present What Passes Between, a solo exhibition by Clare Winslow, opening March 7. What Passes Between brings together works in screenprint and acrylic that explore threshold, suspension, and the space between states. Soft, mottled grounds laid down in acrylic create atmosphere and depth; screen-printing builds across them with precise, repeated detail — mesh, lace, grid. Ribbons, chains, orbs, and sweeping forms move through these layered surfaces, suspended between weight and weightlessness, clarity and dissolution.



Large canvases let these tensions breathe across expansive fields, while small panels distill them into concentrated moments. In the street-facing window, Through, an installation of repurposed transparencies from two decades of printmaking, offers a visual archive that traces a passage from documentation to abstraction.

Join them for the opening reception on Saturday, March 7, 2-4 PM to experience this distinctive body of work.

See the work here. The gallery is located at 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Washington DC 20007.

About the Artist:

Clare Winslow is a Washington, DC-based artist whose work investigates the shifting nature of time, perception, and memory through painting and printmaking. Working primarily in screenprint and acrylic, she creates layered abstractions that emerge through slow accumulation, tonal variation, and a deliberate interplay of surface and depth.

Winslow earned a degree in Fine Arts from The Catholic University of America and studied printmaking at the Corcoran College of Art. Her practice often incorporates experimental screenprinting techniques (including ribbon exposures, water disruptions, and overprinting without registration) alongside nontraditional materials such as polypropylene and wood. Rooted in sustained observation of the natural world, her work emphasizes transitions in light, texture, and rhythm, inviting reflection and attentiveness.

She is a four-time recipient of the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County's Artists & Scholars Project Grant (2016, 2019, 2022, 2025). She has completed residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and in Orquevaux, France. Her work has been exhibited widely in the Washington, DC region and beyond, and is held in private collections across the United States. Winslow works at her studio in Kensington and at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville.

Asshole of the year: Jezabel Dabouis

If you watched the scam jurying at the Olympics,  it brought back memories of when the Soviet block judges used to screw all other athletes...

Jezabel Dabouis: fuck you!

The strange menagerie of sculptor Joan Danziger

It is behind its firewall, but the Washington Post has a spectacular three page spread on DMV legend Joan Danzinger.

It's a very good piece, and the kind of work that we wished the WaPo would do for area artists, maybe once every couple of years or so...

Read it here.

Woman sitting on a Mondrian Landscape

 This new painting will be at the next Affordable Art Fair in NYC this coming March!

Woman Sitting on a Piet Mondrian Landscape by F. Lennox Campello
32x40 inches - mixed media on paper

Sieglinde Huntscha and the Flounder

This new Bisque piece, done as an homage to Günter Grass will be at the Affordable Art Fair in New York City next March!

Sieglinde Huntscha and the Flounder by F. Lennox Campello 

Dialogues in Layers  Harriet Lesser & Sue Bikoff

Dialogues in Layers: Harriet Lesser & Sue Bikoff

Curated by Adah Rose Bitterbaum

February 6th - February 21st, 2026

Studio Gallery

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 14th from 4-6 pm

This exhibition presents the collaborative woodcarvings by Sue Bikoff and Harriet Lesser, merging traditions of printmaking and painting in richly layered reliefs. Imagery develops from photographs and preparatory drawings of tropical vegetation.

The wood, carved by Bikoff, who focuses on fine detail and texture. Lesser continues with layers of acrylic glazes, alcohol inks, and colored pencils. Mixed media photo transfers are frequently integrated into the relief.

Their process is free-associative and improvisational, each stage of carving and painting informing the next. The resulting works blur the boundaries between sculpture and painting, realism and abstraction, handcraft and conceptual art. The artists’ distinct styles—Bikoff’s structural intricacy and Lesser’s painterly depth—intertwine in works that evoke imagined ecologies and tactile atmospheres. 

Rooted in collaboration, their practice reflects the interdependence found in natural systems, artistic traditions, and human relationships. The journey itself becomes the medium, transforming process into a dynamic visual language.

See the show online here.

Receptions:

Opening reception: Saturday, February 14th, 2026 4-6 pm

Closing reception: Saturday, February 21st, 2026, 4-6 pm

Call for Artists - Show in Hazleton, PA!

Call for Artists: Marily Mojica, who is a power force in the DMV, is curating an exhibition at the Art League in Hazleton, Pennsylvania!

The exhibition will be in March, and the setup will take place at the end of February. Contact her ASAP at mojika60@yahoo.com

This morning at Art Clinic Online!

 

National Portrait Gallery Announces Winners of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition

 National Portrait Gallery Announces Winners of the Seventh Outwin

Boochever Portrait Competition and Opening of

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today”

Kameron Neal Receives $25,000 and New Commission 

as First-Prize Winner of the National Triennial

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced Brooklyn-based artist Kameron Neal as the first-prize winner of the seventh national Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Neal’s two-channel video installation “Down the Barrel (of a Lens)” (2023) draws upon his time as a public artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Records, and it places the audience between two screens of declassified New York Police Department surveillance footage filmed between 1960 and 1980. As the first-prize winner, Neal will receive $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the museum’s permanent collection. “Down the Barrel (of a Lens)” will be on view as part of “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” exhibition, co-curated by the competition’s director Taína Caragol, the Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, and Charlotte Ickes, the Portrait Gallery’s curator of time-based media art and special projects.

Held every three years, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is dedicated to supporting the next wave of contemporary portraiture in the U.S. “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” will be on view at the museum Jan. 24 through Aug. 30, 2026. From the exhibition’s opening through April 5, 2026, visitors—in person and online—can vote for their favorite artwork to receive the People’s Choice Award.

Previous first-prize winners of the national competition include David Lenz (2006), Dave Woody (2009), Bo Gehring (2013), Amy Sherald (2016), Hugo Crosthwaite (2019) and Alison Elizabeth Taylor (2022).

Second prize for the 2025 competition was awarded to Jared Soares of Washington, D.C., for his photograph “Misidentified by Artificial Intelligence: Alonzo and Carronne” (2023), a portrait of a Maryland resident who was falsely accused of a crime and arrested based on facial recognition software. Third prize was awarded to David Antonio Cruz of New York City for his painting “isaiditoncebefore,butnowIfeelitevenmore_feelin’pretty,pretty,pretty” (2023). Part of the artist’s “chosenfamilies” series, the painting shows the artist with Archel, one of his lifelong friends. Soares and Cruz will receive $10,000 and $7,500, respectively.

“As the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition rounds the corner on two decades since its founding in 2006, it continues to highlight contemporary artists working in portraiture who push to expand preconceived notions of the centuries-old genre,” Caragol said. “The 2025 competition-based triennial invites visitors to explore how artists are engaging with portraiture, sometimes embracing its tradition and other times redrawing the boundaries of the genre, with the intent of examining what it means to be human.”    

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” includes 34 portraits (by 35 artists) in mediums ranging from painting, photography and sculpture to immersive, time-based media installations. The artworks were chosen from more than 3,300 submissions to an anonymous open call, which was juried by experts in the fields of portraiture and contemporary art. The finalists include portraits by artists based in 12 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

Jurors for the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition were Carla Acevedo-Yates, curator, writer and member of the artistic team for documenta 16; Huey Copeland, the Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh; LaToya Ruby Frazier, artist; and Daniel Lind-Ramos, artist. “The Outwin 2025” co-curators Caragol and Ickes also served on the jury with Rhea L. Combs, the Portrait Gallery’s former director of curatorial affairs. The full list of exhibiting artists is below.

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog available at the museum’s store or online.  

The competition and exhibition are made possible by the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Endowment, which was established by Virginia Outwin Boochever, a longtime docent at the National Portrait Gallery. The endowment is sustained by her family.

Nude Running Across a Rothko Landscape

 New painting which will be at the Spring Affordable Art Fair in NYC!

Nude Running Across a Rothko Landscape
22x 32, mixed media on paper
Florencio Lennox Campello, c. 2026

This comiing Saturday on Art Clinic Online

 

28th Bethesda Row Arts Festival

A great opportunity for artists!

Artist Application now Open for the 28th Bethesda Row Arts Festival, September 12-13, 2026 --- Apply here.

The application for our 28th Fine Arts Festival is now open! The festival takes place on five blocks of Bethesda Row, located in Bethesda, Maryland (Woodmont, Ave., Bethesda Ave., and Elm St.). “Art Fair Sourcebook” has recognized the Bethesda Row Arts Festival (BRAF) as one of the top 30 Fine Art Shows in the United States.

Every September, over 30,000 affluent art enthusiasts from the Washington, DC Metro Area and its surrounding suburbs, including Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and the Upper Northwest, converge upon the Bethesda Row Arts Festival. The three-mile radius surrounding the Festival boasts an average household income of $196,910, positioning the event as one of the nation’s most affluent and educated art marketplaces.

Renowned for its exceptional quality, the Bethesda Row Arts Festival is highly esteemed by artists and is frequently recognized as one of the country’s premier events. The competition is fierce, and the caliber of art presented demands the utmost creativity and skill — all in pursuit of cash prizes up to $2,000.

Our integrated marketing strategy promotes the event through a diverse mix of mediums, including a broad social media and internet campaign, traditional print ads, and radio promotion. Collaborating with the local chamber of commerce and urban district, our PR firm actively engages the community and targets new audiences.

Last year, we appeared on our NBC and FOX affiliates, and were featured on WTOP (news radio) and WAMU (public radio) radio. 

Another oak fell eleven years ago today

 Eleven years ago my father died on this day... here's my eulogy from that date:

"Hoy se ha caido otro roble en la selva del amargo exilio" is how I always thought that my father's eulogy would begin once he died.

"Today another oak falls in the jungle of bitter exile," began the eulogy for the man whose bloodlines my children and I carry on.

Florencio Campello Alonso died today at age 90 in Miami, the heart of the bitter Cuban Diaspora. Like many Cubans of his generation, he was the son of European immigrants to Cuba. His Galician parents left the scraggy mountains of northern Spain's ancient Celtic kingdom and in the first decade of the 1900s migrated to the new nation of Cuba upon its liberation from Spain.

Galicians have always been uneasy subjects of the Spanish crown, stubbornly hanging on to their ancient Gaelic traditions, to their own language and to their bagpipes, so it is no historical surprise that they left their mountain homelands en masse and headed to the new tropical paradise of Cuba, free from the heavy hand of the Spanish monarchy.

“Galicia se vació en Cuba” (Galicia emptied itself into Cuba) once noted an old Gallego when I visited the region decades ago and commented about my grandparents migrating to Cuba. 

And thus it was never a surprise to me that my father was both a fighter against heavy-handed rulers, a lover of freedom, and one who was never afraid to re-start a life for the better, even if it involved discarding the old. 

My father could have been one of the privileged few who currently rule  atop the food chain of Cuba's brutal Socialist Workers' Paradise. But instead of accepting the benefits of oppression, this most valiant of men chose the harsh path of right over wrong.

And he paid for it dearly (he spent years in concentration camps), but when he died, his soul was clean.

In his youth, my dad worked the harsh hours of the son of an immigrant who was slowly building a small land empire in eastern Cuba. My father was pulled from school as soon as he learned to read and write, and like his two other brothers and eight sisters, he was expected to work and contribute to building a familial empire.

And he did, as my mother relates the stories of my father's childhood in the fields of eastern Cuba, a blond creole in a land of jingoist natives... he trying to out-Cuban the "real Cubans"... how he organized a labor union of the exploited Haitians who worked almost as slaves at the Los Caños Sugar Mill, how he joined a group of bearded rebels in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra in the fight against a tyrant, how he ran for the leadership of the Sugar Workers' Union and beat the Communists to the post, and how he spent years in a Castro Concentration Camp, jailed for the crime of refusing to join the Party, because he believed in Democracy and not in Communism. 

And because of that stubbornness, in the 1960s he was offered the bitter pill of exile, and this brave man decided to choose family... and left his birth place, and thus became another immigrant within two familial generations and brought his wife and child to another new land.

And it is to him that I owe the greatest gift that a father can give a son: the opportunity to grow in freedom in the greatest nation in the history of this planet.

It is because of my father's courage that I was raised in this country and not in a land bloodied by Communist brutality and oppression.

It is because of my father's teachings that I was raised with the conviction that freedom is not free and never to be taken for granted; after all, he fought for freedom and then Castro, the man who inspired  the fight, ended up being a worse dictator, eventually destroying all notions of freedom for all of his people.

It is because of my father that I was taught that every citizen owes his  nation some form of service, and that's the main reason that I signed (at age 17) to serve in the US Navy.

It is because of my father that I despise anyone who hides behind the mask of victimism to excuse failures and shortcomings.

When our family arrived in New York in the 1960s, my father began to work in a factory three days after he landed at the airport; my mother (who came from a privileged Cuban family and had never worked a day in her life) found a job as a seamstress five days later. That pattern was repeated for decades as they worked their way in a new nation.

"We thought we'd be back within a few years," was the answer given to me when I once asked the question about leaving their birthplace. When that didn't materialize, they became fierce Americans in the "United States of Americans" sense... these were the "America None Better!" set of immigrants, and in my Dad's case, you better be ready to fight if you dissed the USA.

"Americans"!

Always a fighter he was... and always for the right reasons.

Cubans are archaic immigrants... we love this great nation because we  recognize its singular and unique greatness; perhaps it is because our forebears had the same chance at greatness and blew it.

And my Dad loved this nation perhaps even more than he once loved Cuba... perhaps it is the genetic disposition of the serial immigrant. After all, his father had left his own ancient Celtic lands and kin for a new land... which he learned to love dearly.

My father always wanted to make sure that I knew that I was an "Americano" and not another forced-on label.

"Labels," he'd say, "are just a way to separate people."

By labels he meant "Hispanic" or "Latino" or anything with a "-" between two ethnic words.

I also remember as a kid in Brooklyn, when he bought a huge Hi-Fi record player-color-TV console... that thing was gigantic. He bought it "take home lay-away" and he'd pay $10 a week to the store and him and I would walk all the way from our house on Sackman Street to the store on Pitkin Avenue to make the payments every Saturday - he never missed a single payment, and that taught me a lesson.

It was soon playing my Dad's favorite music, which oddly enough was Mexican music (Cuban music was a close second)... and he knew all the words to every charro song.

Guadalajara en un llano, Mejico en una laguna... 

Guadalajara en un llano, Mejico en una laguna...Me he de comer esa tuna 

Me he de comer esa tuna.... aunque me espine la mano.

That Jorge Negrete song... being shouted often on weekends at the top of his lungs from our apartment in an Italian neighborhood in East New York in Brooklyn must have raised some eyebrows.

My dad and I watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon on that TV set... we also watched loads of Mets games... and in 1969 and 1972 went to Shea Stadium to see the Mets win in '69 and lose in '72. He really loved baseball and he really loved those Mets!

When I joined the Navy at age 17, my first duty station was USS SARATOGA, which at the time was stationed in Mayport in Florida, so my Dad decided to migrate south to Florida and moved to Miami... just to be close to me.

He and my mother spent the next 40 years in the same apartment while I was stationed all over the world.

When I visited him today in Miami, he looked good and freshly shaven... this is a good thing, as my father was a freak about hygiene... and that's a common "creole" trait.

The hospice nurse almost teared up when I told her that my parents have been married for 60 years.

I looked at this old "gallego"... his skin as white as paper, his eyes as blue as the sky, and his head (once full of blond hair) as bald and shiny as the old Cuban sing song ("Mira la Luna, mira al Sol... mira la calva de ese.....") and I saw the generations of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Gallego Homo Sapiens that led to my bloodlines... the generations of fighters, of strugglers, and of tough guys who didn't take no for an answer and who made a better place for others. 

And I felt at peace and grateful.

And as my father died tonight, after an extubation,  all that I can think  to say to him is "Thank you for your courage... from me, and from my children... and soon from their children. You opened a whole new world for them."

I love you Dad... Un Abrazo Fuerte! Thank you for your gifts to me and my children and it is no coincidence that you died on El Dia de Los Reyes.