another Swampy opening

Swampspace Gallery

presents

ADOLFO RENE SANCHEZ
(1957-1990)
an incomplete archive

In Loving Memory of My Dear Brother Who Died of Aids Twenty Years Ago.


Opens May 8th 6-12pm

NYC circa 1984

Before computers, man-made killer viruses and all the "progress" that has transpired, there were happy days when the biggest worry two young Cuban brothers from Miami had was how to pay the $350. rent on a giant four room apartment in the Upper West Side.
Guess what, we paid the rent by selling art. We lived like princes with dirty faces.




Drawing Comes Easy

What is it that drives people to make art?
If it is Beauty, Humor and Social Relevance then they are on the right track to a thorny fulfillment.
Art is the most powerful force on Earth.



Love Made Him Do It

Painting is probably the most challenging of approaches to artistic expression.
There is nothing more intimidating than a blank canvas staring back at you asking to be transformed for some greater good. To tap ones stream of consciousness is to connect with the power and illusion of the spirit world. Adolfo was driven by the passion of an indescribably hungry spirit he possessed. He nourished it like the champion of creativity the that he was.




W.H.O. Knows.

But something (not) funny happened on the way to the forum and all hell broke loose. Where did the Human Immunodeficiency Virus come from? Where did it go? How many more will die from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome?
The World Health Organization may have some answers but who cares.




Self Portrait 1984

Most people live a long incidental life. They seldom take chances. Few will challenge the ancient rituals of creative experssion. They will not go there for their minds fear the awakening of the self to a state of being. Our minds want to be in charge of our every waking moment so that we focus on the past and the future. But it is the being that most honestly understands and reflects what life is about, it's about the Now.

In other words, Less Thinking More Feeling.
This is what Adolfo was about.

Inscription For A Gravestone


I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a man
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.
The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
Of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
And expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That's gone, it is true;
(I never miss it; if the universe does,
How easily replaced!)
But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,
Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.

Robinson Jeffers

*

Reparation - a little something, something.

Over-heard at Versailles: If all the bragging were true, Cuba should be the size of Australia.

Back in 2000, just after eliangate, misguided James Hall wrote:

"So look for something to happen on the embargo front soon, most likely a gradual opening for the exporting of American food and medicine, to be followed by reparation talks on behalf of American business interests. After the November elections, when the Cuban-American lobby's influence wanes, the US Congress may be bold enough to end the longest running US embargo ever, and perhaps write the Cold War's final chapter."

Guess he didn't get the memo about bush v gore. The sub-plot to elian saga was to discredit miami then lift the embargo so, among other things, mid-west big agro ADM - (supermarket to the world) could do business with cuba. But the effort failed and regular "guajiros" got tighter restrictions for travel and remittance.
Cuba Today is a museum of a failed system. The Cuban America is stagflated at an impasse between bull-headed embargo moss-backs and proponents of natural law.
I've just about given up on progress and to be honest it's no big deal. By progress I mean reparations.

You should know that native americans, japanese americans, african americans and jewish americans all have received reparations at some point or another in their struggle for justice. A justice that is over-due. A justice that defies political borders. A gesture that transcends generations.
But for cuban americans reparation is a case of who, what, when and where. Who is entitled? What can they claim? When will it transpire? Where is the outrage?

My estranged relation Roberto Zayas-Bazan has written a new book, El Pez Dorado (golden fish) Zayas-Bazan ( love that name) tells a fictional tale inspired by his recollection of real people back in provincial camaguey just before the revolution. I hear my family is featured prominently.


Here is a photo of my grand-father, Adolfo, the first cuban to graduate from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. It took steel to take the rail-roads into the tropics to take the bounty to market. His house in cuba today is head-quarters for the "sisters of the revolution" whatever that is.

My great grand father, Juaquin, is buried in Brooklyn's Calvary Cementery. The family magna carta is an 85 page, 100 year old, hand-written document of antiquity complete with official stamps and wax seals. It is kept in a super secret safe place. The relic contains an itemized inventory of holdings. It is an investment portfolio from a bygone era in our family history. In no uncertain terms it spells out - land as far a the eye can see, stocks of every kind, utilities, commodities, insurance, and other places for smart money games. Freaks me out to look at the thing and wonder, how did they do it and where did it all go. You know where all that wealth went? It went down the memory hole. All the men are dead and the women folk are a-political.



Yet it is nice to know that my great-uncle Julio was a fishing buddy of Ernest Hemingway, that I am somehow related to Anais Nin, Ignacio Agramonte, Pedro Menendez.... and that someday i
may walk where i belong...




Where have all the big fish gone.

Oppel and Kwok, gallery wok

On view now at Galerie Perrotin miami are two unrelated exhibitions by Martin Oppel and Cary Kwok. As summer night descended on the swamp, the opening reception was a civilized affair with the usual faces of unusual characters partaking in the unparalleled hospitality that only perrotin delivers with utmost european grace and gentility. Conspicuous by their absence were the scores of meteoric 'mink and mignon' jet setters who are no doubt on their way to thee big Basel in old country. There is a truth about miami that newcomers overlook, particularly in business: If you can make it here (through the summer), you can make it anywhere.



Martin is 'on fire' with illuminating landscape paintings and mind-bending sculptures of the mundane. Consistent with previous work, he continues to explore and define a passion for the meticulous, making it all look effortless. But let's not forget it takes hard work and sacrifice to make great art.



Hard at work is Kwok with a seemingly unending detail for the eros of manitalia in blue. Bring you reading glasses to fully appreciate a macro view of his creamy drawings... and leave you inhibitions at home. Cary's work is reminiscent of Tom Finland, Frances Bacon, Raqib Shaw, and Adolfo Sanchez.

cafe con arsenic

painting by adolfo sanchez

Required. Reading new book "Cuba and it's Music" by Ned Sublette. In chapter 19 titled "Marti's Monster" he quotes Winston Churchill 1896:

"Though the Spanish Administration is bad, the Cuban Government would be worse- equally corrupt, more capricious, and far less stable. Under such a Government (US backed) revolutions would be periodic, property insecure, equity unknown. A graver danger represents itself. Two-fifths of the insurgents, and by far the bravest and best disciplined part of the rebel forces, are pure negroes. These men... demand a prominent share of the government of the country. Such a claim would be indignantly resisted by the white section, and a racial war, probably conducted with bitter animosity and ferocious cruelty, would ensue, the result being, after years of fighting, another black republic, or at best a partition of the island, as in San Domingo" (Dominican Republic / Haiti)

Back then it wasn't just confederates in the u.s. who felt that even the whitest of cubans failed their "just one drop" (of black blood) racial yardstick, therby conveniently inferior and conquerable. Today I say "welcome to the mulatto millennium"


Ned writes:
"Almost no one in cuba today can tell you the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but everyone can tell you what the Platt Amendment was. On three occasions in the first two decades of the century the United States invoked the Platt Amendment and sent in troops. Much of the capital and land was in the hands of foreign entities..."

The power structure in Miami may run out of benefits of cuban doubt. Diaz-Ballart and Iliana Lehtinen, Mel Martinez, with microphobes like BabaluBlog n Radio Marti, have been duped by the BFEE for personal benefit. Their drums stop beating as a new chapter is written. CHANGE is always in the wind and it is storm season once again in the swamp. Cuban-Americans today feel a pain that is without tears. We find solace in our music and the spirit of a people that is invincible.

That's just the tip of the cigar, the red-hot end. For the chomped and salacious end, listen to cuban music and read more.

Gracias to Jumel Terrace Books for the signed copy.

UPDATE... to be fair:

#067 Padilla Sues US Officials

Researched by Christina Long and Bill Gibbons

Jose Padilla, a US citizen, arrested on US soil and convicted (under extraordinary circumstances) of being an Al Qadeda operative, is seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for physical and psychological abuse and unconstitutional tactics while being held as an ‘enemy combatant’ in military custody for 43 months. Early in 2007 a civil lawsuit was filed on behalf of Padilla in federal court in South Carolina over abuse he suffered from 2002 to 2006 in the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston Station South Carolina. Serious violations included sleep deprivation, stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation and other extreme interrogation techniques calculated to profoundly disrupt his senses and personality and destroy his ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning. The government held Padilla for two years without any outside contact, including that of his lawyers. When that policy changed, government officials warned Padilla not to reveal any conditions of his confinement to his lawyers, the suit says. Padilla is left severely psychologically damaged.

“Padilla Sues US Officials Over Confinement” Warren Richey, The Christian Science Monitor 8/24/2007
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0824/p03s03-usju.html?page=2

Cinco de Whato?

Update: it was a treat to see people taking to the street on biscayne to celebrate the end of two years of road construction that has been a DOT blight on the community.

If there is anything in miami that is not modern, it is the swamp.
The MiMo Biscayne Association was created to attract new people to the Upper East Side and save what is worth saving of my old neighborhood. Their motto is "progress through preservation".... (aka disneyfication). This weekend their "Cinco de MiMo" Festival got off to a fine start with a crush kick-off party and other events sure to be fun for all. But the name of the festival has a discordant tone that is ironic and symptomatic of our times in the MiamiModernMindset. This well-intended festival has nothing to do with the original "Cinco de Mayo" which btw has nothing to do with mayonnaise but still has a curious history:

...the modern American focus on that day first started in California in the 1860s in response to the resistance to French rule in Mexico.[6] The paper notes that "The holiday, which has been celebrated in California continuously since 1863, is virtually ignored in Mexico."


painting by adolfo

just suppose time

wtf was Time magazine thinking here, that they could juxtapose these two mugshots with a caption "the incredible shrinking democrat" and have anything but a negative read. those two were not separated at birth but either will be better than grandpa. With a "winner take all / we all loose" theme, it's true there cannoli be one... but folks at time got custard filled fried dough for brains on this one.



Here's a collage by adolfo

FYI MLK USA OMG

Think Martin Luther King would have liked this painting called "U.S.A. ToStay" ARS '85
could remind us of the power of collective action, the power of bottom-up organizing, the power of seeing a world where everyone is in it together, where everyone has a stake in one another.

"The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways." mlk 1967

You probably already know John McCain voted against making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday in 1983. FYI today we got an official apology from McSame... he said he made a mistake, i say too little too late.

cuban music

here's two very nice paintings by Adolfo... cuban musician

cachao RIP

Here's a painting by Adolfo of Israel "cachao" Lopez (base) the king of mambo beats and his cuban jam players. he recently passed away at the age of 89, but the music lives on n on.

We're Here, We're Queer, Get Over It.

Viginia Key 1977 ( gay beach ) turn left at Seaquarium (sewage treatment plant) and Jimbo's. The 'black beach' was nearby.

I was Miami in 77 when Anita Bryant (citrus queen) led her shameful crusade with the help of the media (herald). It was also the year my brother came out of the closet. Back then, drive-by hecklings and fag-bashings were regular occurrence at the local gay clubs & drag bars. Anita is known to be the first person to be publicly "pied" (as is pie in the face). Wiki her to read the joke (not funny) her rise and demise. Republicans are know to "eat their own" Also see Katherine Harris ( the other citrus queen), she wears a pie of mascara everyday.


Like Bryant then, John Stemberger, chairmman of FL4Marriage, today leads worst element of the religious fruit-cakes (southern baptists) hate-driven agenda. They got their way on nov 08 ballot by using a tried-n-true mix of religion n politics... by using inflammatory sermonizing at sunday church services to extort signatures needed.

Only the crazies take delight in what is happening. For the rest of us, it is ongoing flabbergast.

The wording is deceptive and open to interpretation:
"Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized."

Interesting is that while the U.S. Constitution has existed for 220 years and has been amended only 27 times,it is shameful that the Florida Constitution most recently was revised in 1968 and since then has been amended a whopping 110 times. But the rules change when it's these folks wanting to take it to the voters.

Anti-gay amendments are just another 'carrot and the stick' of the GOP to get their voters to the polls. Their efforts also energize us, the opposition to push back.

A theatrical production by Michael Yawney at the Arsht Center is very nice IF it gets people out to vote NO in november on this latest 'marriage' amendment ... and send a clear message to Tallahassee/Crist. "we're here, we're queer, get over it"

Props to Campositions and TNFH for their efforts.

a day in the life...

Dear brother, some contrarians ain't so lucky. Here is a lovely painting for your contemplation. Like the current visa card ad campaign says 'life takes'. More on this later.