This solo exhibition on view through November 21, shows her nesting instincts in this immersive site-specific installation and works on canvas that speaks to her journey from a young female, LGBT artist tagging the rough streets of Colombia to her current position as a globally recognized muralist who has created collaborations with Disney.

One of the most prominent artists of the Latin American graffiti scene, Bogota-based Diana Ordonez is known as Ledania. This is a pseudonym she derived from the Greek mythology character Leda who was seduced by Zeus, in combination with her name Diana, the Huntress in Greek mythology.

With vivid palettes, she celebrates color and nature in scenes populated by imaginary creatures who resemble owls or sprites. Her improvised world is magic and mystical, linked to expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

“I love to travel and explore the world so that I can create graffiti with feeling,” says Ledania.

Her characters have no race or gender, there is no political or religious syntax in her work.

“I create places that are pure happiness by changing a structure in the city, intervening in it, adding my perspective, and changing how people who walk by there every day react to the space.”

In the Wynwood show called Private Spaces, she conjures up a cozy bedroom, painting furniture, and walls, and even making stained glass – a medium you rarely see in the graffiti world. A living moss wall and succulents grow at the foot of the bed, as nature is an integral part of the room.

“I am thrilled with the exhibition,” Ledania says “as it perfectly represents the juxtaposition of private versus public spaces, which is always on my mind as a public painter in the streets who mainly leaves her work outside. The tropical colors and native plants serve as a nod to my country and its inhabitants, who are my inspiration every day.”

She even prints her art on the bed’s comforter and pillows, backed by lush midnight blue velvet. There are layers of paintings on the bed headboard, the wall behind the bed, and then a large painting hanging overhead. An armoire contains the photos she took of departed friends.

A vintage music radio player emits the sounds of birds and the metallic rattling of spray cans – the sounds she hears as she paints outdoors. A patterned rug adds yet another layer.

The themes are nature with intertwined trees, shapes that invoke feathers, and woodland creatures.

It’s a room to get lost in, and dream in color, one that intertwines the female urge to nest with her wild hair of creativity.

Her roots loom large in her art.

“For me, Colombia is happiness itself in many aspects. Take Carnival, for example, and the celebration it represents. And also our ancestors and how they explored decorative traditions in their craftsmanship, which also began incorporating European influences following colonization. I too am the product of that melting pot.”

Classically trained, Ledania earned a master’s degree in Visual and Plastic Arts at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. She is a multimedia artist who expresses her creativity through street art, photography, graphic design, advertising, and artistic makeup. She also expresses her creativity in the implementation of her themes and motifs into clothing and accessories.

Ledania’s murals are displayed worldwide across 22 countries, from Colombia to the United States, Spain to Japan. Her art has been featured in several international exhibitions.

More on the artist at www.instagram.com/ledania

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On exhibit through November 21st at The Museum of Graffiti, 276 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127. Online: Instagram @museumofgraffiti

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In a new show at PAMM, yet a new figure emerges from his orbit, the Venezuelan artist Marisol, whose collaborations with Warhol and the Pop crowd are on vivid display.

The show, Marisol and Warhol Take New York, has iconic artworks and ephemera by both artists.

Exploring the artists’ parallel rises to success, and the beginning of their early artistic practices from 1960 to 1968, viewers also come to understand Marisol’s relative obscurity as a woman in the shadow of the male Pop art giants, and the male dominated gallery and museum system that kept her work on the sidelines.

The exhibition features key loans of Marisol’s work from major global collections, along with iconic works and rarely seen films and archival materials from The Warhol’s collection.

Born in Paris to Venezuelan parents, Marisol (María Sol Escobar) held a central position in the New York art scene and American Pop movement. She was written out of the white male-dominated Pop narrative when she left the states for Europe.

Dark and exotic looking, she was in his early films The Kiss (1963) and 13 Most Beautiful Girls (1964), but they never exhibited together. She made sculptures of him in her signature painted wood block, that work is at the entrance to the PAMM show. The films are screened in a large, darkened room here.

Born in Paris in 1930, she mostly lived and worked in New York City. She began drawing early in life, and it earned her artistic prizes at the various schools she attended. Marisol studied art in Paris, then returned to begin studies at the Art Students League of New York. Marisol dropped her family surname of Escobar in order to lose the patrilineal identity and to “stand out from the crowd”.

Pop art culture embraced Marisol, as she worked on three-dimensional portraits, using inspiration found in photographs or gleaned from personal memories. Found objects, such as wood blocks became her Mona Lisa sculpture, and an old couch became The Visit. She used added body parts cast from her hands, feet and face.

There are plenty of Warhol’s here, instantly recognizable prints of the Statue of Liberty, and Brillo boxes, and the Campbell soup and Coca Cola, but the fun is seeing how the two artists play off the same imagery.

One striking collaboration features Warhol’s tragic screens of Jackie Kennedy in her pillbox hats and veils lining the wall behind Marisol’s wood block family portraits of John Kennedy, Jackie in her blue hat, young Caroline in a blond bob, and JFK Jr. as a babe in Jackie’s arms.

While Warhol used newspaper clippings of flowers and car crashes and found commercial objects, Marisol’s practice was more introspective with her own face in most of the works. Her portraits were either people she knew personally or admired as mentors. She demonstrated a dynamic combination of folk art, dada, and surrealism with a deep psychological insight into contemporary life.

One of her best-known works from this period on display here is the stunner called The Party, a life-size group installation of figures. All of the figures, gathered together in various dresses, sport Marisol’s face. Using a floor to ceiling backdrop of Warhol’s neon pink and yellow Cow image as wallpaper, the full Dada effect is in play. A party of one artist in multiple, in front of a wall of repeated bovines.

Using assemblages of plaster casts, wooden blocks, woodcarving, drawings, photography, paint, and pieces of clothing, Marisol creates her own vision of femininity, most commonly determined by the male onlooker, seen as either mother, seductress, or partner.

She was also an archivist. A glass case holds the contents of a year’s worth of ephemera – date books, lists, and photos. She had close to a thousand of them, each labeled by year.

She drifted off to Europe and thus ended her New York Pop tenure. She lived to age 86, far outlasting Warhol but only recently getting her due.

This exhibition seeks to reclaim the importance of her work and place and practice; to reframe the strength, originality, and daring nature of her work; placing her as one of the leading figures of the Pop era.

A publication exploring the relationship between Marisol and Warhol, includes contributions by Jessica Beck, Jeffrey Deitch, Angie Cruz, Eleanor Friedberger and PAMM director Franklin Sirmans. Created from extensive research of reviews, articles and archival documents, the catalogue has a timeline of shared events and the overlap in Marisol and Warhol’s early careers from 1949 to 1968.

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The exhibit goes through September 5^th, 2022 at PAMM at 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, 33132. Online www.pamm.org

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The works on view depicted an obvious love of structure and function all bundled together to generate exquisite floating compositions that appear to gently glide from side to side, like a misty storm in a technicolor theatre of purposeful ambiguity and inherent splendor. Some of the paintings take on a pictorial sense of deep space, where forms appear to drift in a sky charged with soft pastel molecular clouds. However, Herrington’s work basically is non-narrative, and evidence of recognizable motifs (such as extra-terrestrial shapes) are coincidental for a viewer to perceive. The strength of Melissa Herrington’s paintings is not only in her choice of sumptuous colors and tints but in her exuberant configurations that are perfectly balanced with a square.

Herrington’s bold and sensitive canvases seem to perform on many levels through her idiosyncratic, painterly, dreamlike, and handsome surfaces. Occasionally the works are accented with a distinctly single figurative contour outline that could produce a cubist constellation, counterbalancing her saturation of the raw canvas and offering an aesthetic illusion on numerous planes. Those canvases that pay strict attention to the cloud-like silhouettes, which seem effortless in their application, become dreamy and sensual as they magically fill a design with bravado and intuition. The early experimental works of Helen Frankenthaler, the undisputed inventor of the stained canvas, come to mind with some of Herrington’s works on view. She seems to have a knack for piecing together disparate flowing ambulatory shapes without an initial plan of action, preferring to allow her natural sensitivity for abstract compositions spiced with and characteristic color perception that invites the viewer on a short journey of sensations; touch and taste stimulating a keen sense compulsory viewer participation.

These works offered the viewer an enjoyable flight into unknown painterly galaxies of dynamic interplanetary shapes in an imaginative context that is saturated with earthy hues, from deep coffee browns and snippets of Payne’s gray to daps of harmonious blues reminiscent of bodies of water. These layouts are often accented with flicks and drips that tie the artist’s orbiting arrangements together in weightless non-narrative designs patterns that are confident and inherently stunning. Squint your eyes and you can almost imagine a first view of the unexplored universe as seen from the Hubble telescope light-years away and constructed by an accidental hurricane of galaxies whose velocity and effervescent vapors create their own hidden exhibition in the open sky.

As the spring season warms up in South Florida and the tropical plants come into full bloom, Melissa Herrington adds her own innovative vibrant acrylic landscape that is packed with organic colors and forms that seem to break through an invisible barrier as they fall into place like a well-planned garden of visual delights.

Herrington’s work proudly provides a unique and sensitive feminine color examination of the ever-changing nature of the female form that often is incorporated into her canvases. Many of the works have opulent transparency that allows Herrington to layer shapes and add dimension. In “Cerulean sky, a murmur of a love epistle,” the title offers a clue to the painting’s nomadic spirit. “In that twilight, so heavy through her midnight moment’s landscape” depicts Herrington’s offer of a space voyage into thin air, highlighted in shades of purple as if from the aftermath of a tropical storm. In the picture “Unfolding from her center (2),” the artist articulates a drawing that outlines a female profile that has become a familiar hallmark of Herrington’s oeuvre. “Unraveling the night. Sea sprayed shadows holy as pink skies” is a title that hints at the evening sky and beyond, perhaps even light-years away. Another engagingly beautiful painting is “Blooms a starry portal unfurled. the conjurer. the alcove,” where the title beckons to the outer reaches of our universe.

Melissa Herrington continues to take the viewer on a rewarding journey through her personal world of saturated colors and shapes, expanding in all directions as she ‘builds’ each painting. Judging from this enchanting show, her reputation is about to take a quantum leap in critical acclaim and aesthetic recognition.

For more information on the artist, visit melissaherrington.com

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Bruce Helander is an artist who writes on art. He is a former White House Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and is a member of the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. As an artist, his work is in fifty museum collections, including the Whitney, Guggenheim, and The Met.

Melissa Herrington springs into orbit

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Sponsored by the Kcull Life Foundation, the larger-than-life mural aims to improve historic neighborhoods and a costume shop on Calle Ocho donated the wall.

The artwork is by Miami artist Disem.

“Walter, the owner of KCULL Shop on Calle Ocho, called me. He had the initiative of wanting to beautify the area through art,” says Disem. “He mentioned wanting to do a Gloria Estefan mural and asked if I would be interested in painting it, to which I replied I had also been planning to pay tribute to them and that I wished to paint her along with Emilio, to which he eagerly agreed.”

Disem has painted other public figures and knows how he wants to present them. The Estefan image is of the couple at the beginning of their career, with sweet-faced, big-haired Gloria and Emilio in bandleader/husband cool beard and sunglasses. Graffiti circle halos surround their heads in baby blue and fuchsia.

So how did he choose this image of the Estefans?

“As an artist, it’s important for me that the images I paint inspire and motivate,” Disem says. “I figured painting them during this period would be more relatable and inspiring to the younger generations of Latinos rather than painting them at the pinnacle of their careers. Sometimes when celebrities reach these heights, we forget that they too started from scratch and worked their way up. For Emilio and Gloria, as young Latinos in the ’80s, it must have been way more difficult for them to break through and pave the way for us. I’m personally very appreciative of them. Besides, you can’t get any more Miami vibes than Gloria and Emilio in their Miami Sound Machine days.”

The Estefans journey is well known here as they came from Cuba. Emilio used to play the accordion for tips. He met young singer Gloria and fell in love with her beautiful eyes. Then together they built a musical empire.

Disem heard the Miami Sound Machine as a 4-year-old. He says their music and history inspired him as an artist and that their story and example is a beautiful thing.

“Through consistent effort, work, dedication, and determination you can reach your goals and surpass them. You just have to put in the work. Also, those Miami vibes, it was very significant to me that they were reflected in the painting. I love this city and I feel we have a lot of hometown heroes – including Gloria and Emilio – that we have to acknowledge and hold high. They’re pillars to what we have today, not only artistically but as incredibly selfless members of our community.”

Disem says he was born into art. His uncle owned a school of art in Panama where his mother attended and met his father. Both of them are also artists. He says art runs in his blood and that he has been drawing for as long as he can remember. Once he discovered graffiti, it consumed him during his teenage years, but his background made him aware of the fine art aspect of it.

Known for his murals with spray paint, or oil on canvas, he is influenced and inspired by Miami, from its colors to its people. He’s currently working on a series of portraits titled “Miami artist series” which is about artists he feels need a spotlight on them for the work they have put in, and for how they’ve influenced this city. He might also have his first NFT project soon.

“I’m working on with a major Miami sports personality that I’m really excited about and should be dropping it within the next couple of months. I’m also working towards my first solo show along with some pretty interesting group shows. More murals in the works and I want to explore other mediums and fields, from sculpting to fashion.”

Find out more about the artist by visiting his Instagram account @Disem305

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Gloria and Emilio Estefan mural in Miami by Disem

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It’s a real hidden gem, a museum that celebrates the fired arts of ceramics and glass along with some metal art and community connection. Dania used to be known as a small-town stop on the way to Ft. Lauderdale, US 1 loaded with small antique shops. A recent building boom finds hotels, upscale restaurants, and now a revamped museum that features thousands of works from the world’s most renowned ceramic and glass artists.

A vast collection of 19th and 20th-century British pottery and porcelain from Wedgwood and Royal Doulton, the Wiener Museum also displays works by contemporary ceramic artists. A spectacular collection of Dale Chihuly’s work, glowing like sea creatures, is exhibited in the Hot Glass gallery along with other great glass artists in the Art on Fire exhibit, including William Morris and Toots Zynsky.

A new show highlights the four classical elements of EARTH, AIR, FIRE, and WATER that are the fundamental building blocks of nature. EARTH in the form of sand merges with FIRE and AIR in furnaces to create glass art. Dale Chihuly, the well-known pioneer of American studio glass, blew his first bubble of glass in 1965 and tap here, along with giant Ikebana flower arrangements, and his sensational Seaforms, which conjure up WATER. A Macchia garden bursts into bloom. A Persian wall is accompanied by Chihuly’s paintings. Chihuly’s luminous Baskets vie for attention with his flamboyant Venetians. A Chihuly Venetian was once described as a vase that has had an affair with a chandelier.

Chihuly is also fascinated with Native American artifacts, which can be seen in his glass art, together with his love of the Pacific Northwest, where his studio is based. The Baskets, one of his first glass series in 1977, was inspired by the slumped forms of woven native baskets and he incorporated colored threads of glass in patterns derived from the Native wool blankets which he collects. His Seaforms were inspired by his love of the ocean and the colors in his Macchia designs evoke memories of his mother’s flower garden. Arthur Wiener’s impressive Macchia collection was the centerpiece of the Smithsonian National Building Museum in Washington to honor Chihuly when he received the 2016 Visionary Award from the Smithsonian Craft Show.

The largest Chihuly installation at WMODA is a magnificent Persian wall designed originally for Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio restaurant in San Francisco, together with two dramatic paintings.

“Ever since Chihuly’s accidents in the mid-1970s,” says museum director Louise Irvine, “which prevented him from blowing glass himself, painting has been an important form of creative expression and a way to communicate the concepts he wants to explore in glass to his studio assistants. He directs his gaffers and glass blowers, more like a choreographer than a dancer, more like a director than an actor.”

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A new generation of Florida glass artists finds inspiration in the four elements. Rob Stern conveys the power of the wind in his iconic Windstars, symbolizes the earth with his leaves of glass, and represents water with his giant Conch shells and corals in his installation Constellations, is a dazzling display. These starfish/octopus hybrids whirl and glitter in space.

Josh Fradis creates Coral Caverns and surging Waves with crests of seafoam that represent the ebb and flow of the tides. Chelsea Rousso creates wearable glass fashions inspired by the wonders of the deep.

The WMODA exhibition continues through September 30.

On display is a mermaid tail ripe for selfies to represent the 1000 Mermaids Project, a sculpture group that sinks concrete mermaids to restore Florida’s coral reefs with the City of Dania Beach. The museum’s proximity to the sea has inspired several exhibitions over the years, including Splash! and Dive into WMODA.

Over the summer, the Ocean Rescue Alliance and the 1000 Mermaids Project started installing Broward’s first underwater sculpture garden to help restore the coral reef near Dania Beach. Another new mermaid selfie tail is now located near the Quarterdeck restaurant at the Dania Beach Fishing Pier: 1000 Mermaids Artificial Reef Project.

Hollywood artist Lloyd Goradesky, who has a large kinetic weathervane in Boynton Beach, has some of the smaller versions on display and for sale at the Museum. Let Love Guide Your Way is the name of the original functioning weathervane, 16 feet tall, that was made for the International Kinetic Art Exhibit and Symposium in Boynton Beach where art, nature, and technology collided. Since its debut in 2018, Lloyd has expanded Let Love Guide Your Way into a community interactive art project to spread the much-needed message of universal love.

In Lloyd’s words, “A weathervane is a device used to measure wind direction.  A ‘weathervane’ is also a metaphoric expression to describe people who change their views frequently.  In a chaotic world, when faced with a dilemma, let love guide your way.”

His garden sculpture, 4 feet tall, was exhibited at this year’s Art Fair on the Water in Fort Lauderdale. One is at WMODA standing on a heart-shaped granite base.

A new selling exhibition opens on August 28 with a selection of animals created by the glass maestros of Murano. The pop-up show traces the evolution of glass animal sculptures in Venice from the 1930s to the present day with Mid-Century Modern designs alongside contemporary interpretations of the animal kingdom in glass.

The Museum is a worthy stop in Dania, followed up by a visit to top local eateries like Tarks Seafood and Jaxson’s Ice Cream Parlor, then a cruise over to the Dania Beach Pier to watch surfers and sunsets.

https://www.wmoda.com/

Unusual exhibits at hidden gem museum in Dania Beach

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