Calida Rawles’s first museum solo exhibition, “Away with the Tides,” will open on Thursday, June 27, 2024, and will remain on view until February 23, 2025, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). On June 27, as part of the Scholl Lecture Series, there will be a panel conversation on June 27, at 7:00pm. Before the conversation, view the new exhibition in the galleries and celebrate on the terrace from 5:00-7:00pm with happy hour and live jazz to celebrate the rich musical roots of Overtown (in Miami, Florida). * [RSVP]
[The panel conversation will be held] in celebration of the opening of Calida Rawles’s exhibition, Away with the Tides. Rawles’s work engages with Miami’s water-entwined climate and dives into the history of beauty, oppression, and resilience in PAMM’s neighboring community of Overtown and the waterways of historic Virginia Key Beach.
The panel will open with the screening of a short documentary, “Wade in the Water,” by Cathleen Dean, setting the tone for a discussion around the visual exploration of Black people’s relationship to water and Rawles’s envisioning of water as a space for Black healing. Following the short film, artist Calida Rawles, filmmaker Cathleen Dean, and Overtown community leader and life-long resident Trina Harris, will engage in a lively conversation moderated by Chire “Vanta Black” Regans, a South Florida-based visual artist and community advocate.
Exhibition Description: Calida Rawles envisions water as a space for Black healing and reimagines the African American community beyond the stories we already know as a part of the United States’ collective history. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and the cultural and historical symbolisms of water, Rawles creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright and mysterious bodies of water. The water, itself a sort of character within the paintings, functions as an element that signifies both physical and spiritual healing, as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. For her first museum solo presentation, Rawles creates a bridge between her signature style and a story within Miami’s history that is often ignored and obscured.
Rawles delves into the particular experience of Black people in Overtown*, a Miami neighborhood that went from a thriving cultural and commercial hub for Black people to a subject of gentrification, systemic racism, and mass displacement. The figures in Rawles’s paintings are residents of the Overtown community—from young children to senior citizens. The exhibition’s focus is on the stories and experiences of those who live in this historic, once bustling neighborhood. Rawles takes her practice a step further by photographing some of her subjects in natural waters for the very first time, at the historic Virginia Key Beach, which was once racially segregated. By photographing Black subjects in the ocean for the first time, Rawles is able to probe the Atlantic’s history as the site of the supremely exploitative transatlantic slave trade. The finished work critically engages with Miami’s water-entwined climate and mines the history of beauty, oppression, and resilience in PAMM’s neighboring community of Overtown.
For more information, https://www.pamm.org/en/exhibition/calida-rawles-away-with-the-tides/8
