The new Perez Art Museum Miami is an unlikely prism.
Perez Art Museum Miami, north facade. Photo: Iwan Baan
From its seat on the banks of Biscayne Bay, this $130-million building encourages you to look through its world-class exhibits, but also to look at the building itself — to marvel that it was ever built, at all — and to look out at the Miami it represents.
Coming upon it, the differing elevations and right angles making up the PAMM (a catchy nickname by those who hate seeing a private name on public trust) are framed against a backdrop of searing blue skies and matching waters, of colorful cruise ships and towering skyscrapers.
Open to the public on Dec. 4 after nearly three years of construction, it is the latest addition to a Miami skyline sculpted in the last decade by high-rise developer Jorge Perez, who has, in effect, signed his name to his work.
"For Those in Peril on the Sea," by Hew Locke. Photo: Daniel Azoulay
The PAMM is less a gallery than an environment, a edifice that puts you in a state of mind with its towers of hanging gardens over slatted concrete floors, of rustic beams and polished wood, of floor-to-ceiling windows that let in Miami’s maritime sunlit openness and uses it to highlight exhibits.
After all, as beautiful as the building is, you are here for the art. And for its inauguration, the PAMM debuts a combination of exhibits and selections from its permanent collection to express Miami’s place in the art world.
First out, and then in, the PAMM encourages you to look. Here are some areas on which to focus your attention:
From the moment you step inside and witness the first exhibit by artist Hew Locke, it’s clear the PAMM has a specifically Miami point of view.
Ai Weiwei: "According to What?" Photo: Daniel Azoulay photograph
Locke’s “For Those in Peril on the Sea” is an installation of different kinds of boats suspended in midair. The exhibit by the British artist of Guyanese descent echoes Miami’s roots of immigration by sea, of its mélange of cultures. We walk beneath the exhibit, and this history literally hangs over our heads as we look out onto Miami skyline made anew.
A full half of the two-story building’s second floor was given over to stunning works from dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Given Miami’s history of dissident immigrants, Ai Weiwei’s work resonates. Some are grand in scale: one entire wall is given over the names of the 5,196 victimes of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, whose names, read aloud over speakers, take 3 hours 41 minutes to read. Others are smaller but just at gut-wrenching: the beautifully crafted and polished Chinese jade used to make working handcuffs.
The work oscillates between overtly and subtly political, but all of it is unforgettable.
"Woman With Fish," by Amelia Peláez. Photo: Sid Hoeltzell
A grande dameof Cuban art, Amelia Peláez finally gets a prominent display in South Florida. The late, Havana-born artist used everything from traditional painting to crafted objects to bring European modernism to Cuban culture.
Her family was intimately involved in helping select artwork for the exhibit on the second floor, and it shows her versatility and eye. She was expressive, experimental, yet mixed that forward thinking with Cuba’s colonial roots. The exhibit is a tour of her most important pieces and places them — with personal photographs and artifacts — in historical context.
Americana is the name of the exhibit, made up of many dozens of artists, which will be on display through 2015. And those many artists use their art to explore the many definitions of that word.
The fixed installations by New York artist Polly Apfelbaum need only a viewer to portend motion. The spiral of dyed fabric swatches she uses in the second-floor “Mojo Jojo” (named after a super villain from the cartoon “The Powerpuff Girls”) seems to spin as the viewer walks around the room.
It can have a bewildering, vertiginous effect, that shows Apfelbaum’s gift of creating motion where there is none.
The focus on immigrant experiences continues with Bouchra Khalili’s “Speeches, Chapter 3: Living Labour” uses recorded interviews to examine different Americans’ immigrant experience. The work, produced through interviews with immigrants living in New York City, is an audio-visual immersive experiment.
Khalili often uses film and video to explore the experiences of identity and immigration. This is the last chapter in the series. The previous two addressed language through reinterpreting political texts and issues of citizenship.