Monday, June 20, 2011

Another one closing?

I hear that another Bethesda gallery is closing... let me confirm it from them.

Sandra Ramos at the NGA

Please join the NGA's Michelle Bird on Tuesday, June 21, for the next program in the “Works in Progress” series “More Than 90 Miles Away” where her guest will be Sandra Ramos. The program will take place at 12:10 and 1:10 in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art Small Auditorium.

Like all the artists in the series, Sandra Ramos lives and works in Havana. Primarily a printmaker, she uses a variety of media to explore issues related to the recovery of both an individual and collective memory. Blending memorabilia from past events, real and imagined, personal and historical, the artist creates a phantasmagorical new world from the "ruins of a utopia." In this world, forbidden topics such as migration, marginalization, and the political manipulation of history become the quotidian subjects of her art. The main protagonist, a character that fuses her own self-image with that of a print of a 19th–century Dutch princess, navigates her way through the complexities of life on the island like a postmodern Alice in Wonderland. Floating somewhere between the foreground and background, the figure is not fully integrated into her surroundings, but exists in the intervening space of her environment and circumstance. As a result, Ramos' art is not solely autobiographical, but bears the weight and vulnerability of the island and its people.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Fathers' Day

Florencio Campello Alonso at Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba, 1950s
See that big, hulking, smiling, blond man sitting in the driver's seat in the Jeep? That's my dad at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, sometimes in 1946.

Feliz Dia de los Padres
, Dad!