Permanent Collection
Art of the Americas
The art of North and south America and the Caribbean Basin comprises a growing collection, presently numbering some 3,000 works. These include paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, by luminaries such as Allston, Rembrandt Peale, Sully, Bierstadt, Cropsey, Inness, Marsh, Gottlieb , Sloan, Lichtenstein, Botero, Nevelson, Warhol, Butterfield. Given its location in south Florida, the Gateway to the Americas, the Lowe boasts a growing collection of art from Cuban and Haiti.
Carlos Alfonzo, United States (born Cuba), 1950-1991
Lifetime [Curso de la Vida], 1988
oil on linen, 84 x 96"
Gift of Friends of Art in honor of Ira Licht's 10th Anniversary at the Lowe Art Museum, 88.0004
As its title indicates, Lifetime is autobiographical. Its stream-of-consciousness imagery records the artist’s thoughts, impressions, and experiences, his joys and anxieties, and the kaleidoscopic variety of his everyday life. Carlos Alfonzo came to the United States via the Mariel boat lift in 1980 and settled in Miami.
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Fernando Botero (Colombia)
Las Frutas, 1964
oil on canvas, 49 1/2 x 50 1/4"
Gift of Esso Inter-America, Inc., 70.024.030
Painted in New York City in conscious rejection of American color-field painting, which was then in favor, Las Frutas is a bloated still life that reiterates Botero’s belief in the paramount importance of volumetric, objective form. Botero takes imagery derived from the academic tradition and parodies the ideal through gross plasticity and massive scale. Here, golden, swollen fruit of heroic size pays tribute to the sensuality of shape and form.
Rebuffing the post-war trend toward the deconstruction of the object, and ignoring abstraction and conceptualism, Botero prefers that viewers absorb the sheer physicality of his forms rather than struggle with their meaning. Alternately called a Surrealist and a naive realist, Botero, has created an art that resists stylistic and cultural classification. |
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José Bedia (United States)
Nkunia, Gajo o Rama
[twig, cutting or branch], 1995
acrylic, tempera, charcoal and collage on paper, 50 x 38"
Donation from the Cuban Museum of the Americas, Gift of the Artist, 99.0009.097
José Bedia, a member of Miami’s Cuban-American exile community, references the Afro-Hispanic-Amerindian cultural identity of his Cuban heritage, in both personal and universal terms.
He is particularly interested in the merging of African ancestral spirits with his own. He was initiated into the African Regla de Congo religion in Cuba, where he received his artistic training.
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