Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max or
One Night in Miami on Amazon Prime, venture out into the city safely and see some art.
Through art, you can experience someone else’s emotions, even if only for a brief moment, and imagine how they see the world. These exhibitions are only a small part of a much a larger history of [Black] artistic production that deserves to be studied and shared all year round, says Miami-based curator Marie Vickles, who also serves as education director at Pérez Art Museum Miami. It is from this history, passed down through the generations of Black, brown, and indigenous peoples, that exhibitions like Local Global and the others can be born.
Pérez says he found many similarities to the works produced by Latin American and Caribbean artists: “Among these parallels were questions of political and social oppression, colonialism and identity, all of which were deeply embedded in many of my favorite pieces from Cuba and numerous other Latin regions.”
You can see 100 of his pieces in an exhibition titled, “Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection,” at his year-old private museum, El Espacio 23 in Allapattah.
The art is exceptional and the curator behind “Witness” is, too. Zimbabwean-born Tandazani Dhlakama is assistant curator at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa. Open since 2017, it is the first major contemporary art museum in Africa.