Nereida Garcia-Ferraz in Conversation with Stephanie Seidel, Curator at ICA, Miami
“De Noche, Los Sueños: 1983-2023” marked Nereida Garcia-Ferraz first solo exhibition in Miami, her home of over two decades. Showcasing forty paintings on paper and canvas, the exhibition offered a first overview of the artist’s prolific output of forty years. Through an interplay of bold colors, and intricate layering of images, words, and charged symbols, Garcia-Ferraz explores questions of identity and interiority drawing from her personal experiences as an artist, an educator, a woman, an expatriate.
A prolific storyteller, Garcia-Ferraz’s works weave together memories, histories, intuitions, and spiritual/deep-seated perceptions. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1954, the artist emigrated to Chicago at the age of 16. Here, she graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked for many years in the city, before moving to the Bay Area for a period, and finally to Miami, where she lives today. Throughout these years, Garcia-Ferraz has maintained an enduring connection with her birthplace, which has continued to influence her work and her identity as an artist. A painter, poet, photographer and filmmaker, Garcia-Ferraz work is propelled by a tireless curiosity and the desire to share the depth of emotional and spiritual experience.
Stephanie Seidel: Nereida, many of your works point towards the subconscious. The earliest work in the exhibition, De Noche, Los Sueños (1983) that also gave the title for the exhibition is the first work that greets the visitor right as they enter the space. With its reduced color pallet and sparse linework but also with its surrealist imagery of a weeping moon this piece immediately stood out to me.
Nereida Garcia-Ferraz: This work to me symbolizes of how I wanted to become an artist, peaking through a window of possibility. It reflects the visual language I wanted to use, how I wanted to convey my message to the world. In art school, I had studied experimental film, video, and photography but it I kept feeling such emptiness. Photography alone wasn’t doing it for me. It didn’t reach deep enough to get into my own voice. When I decided to become a painter, it felt like breaking through a wall. I entered a path that I knew was going to be difficult. But I was also lucky––at the same time there was the feminist movement happening around me in Chicago, among my colleagues, at school. It gave me permission to use and defend my voice as a woman.
So, I started with oil stick on paper drawings, because it was cheap and easily available. It felt so empowering and like I was getting close to something that was meaningful to me. This drawing, the notion of sueños [dreams] is part of a whole series of drawings. This was my grito, my scream or call to arms. In this drawing, the night symbolizes all the difficulties that I had becoming an artist. I needed to be brave and strong to defend my work and to climb this proverbial ladder. It was difficult living in Chicago because I was a Spanish speaker, I had an accent, I didn’t have much money. But the night also stands for my fears, the darkness that I was going through after leaving Cuba. The separation, the rupture… walking into the unknown, walking without seeing, without listening. It's beautiful that you noticed the weeping moon, la luna llorana. I was defending my dream, I was looking for my voice. The chair in the work symbolizes the presence of somebody else, someone to talk to. This work was essential for me, while at the same time it is so pared down in its visual language. This piece is the base for all the other work as it reflects how I found my own images.
StS: I noticed that this work as well as many other works in the show contain an image of a boat.
NGF: The boat for me contains many metaphors. It’s a house that can float, it can take you back and forth between places, carry you across the sea––through anything really––as it holds you in its inside. It’s a protecting armor protecting. Drawing and painting these boats felt like saying “I will be able to travel and be free, reaching the other shore, while being protected.”
StS: Is the boat also a reference to Cuba?
NGF: Cuba is an island floating in the water just like a boat. But for me the boat reflects more a home that can move and take you to different places. It’s almost like a magic carpet [laughs]. It’s a generous vessel containing ideas.
StS: You mentioned that you first worked in photography.
NGF: My interest in photography started because of leaving Cuba. We had no images or photo albums of our family, no references to where we came from. So, I wanted to make photographs. It felt like a testimonial, a proof that this reality existed. I think I became a photographer in order to photograph my family that stayed behind in Cuba but also to document the architecture, the place as such. It was a mode of connection between my family here and my family there. I was the only family member that went back. When I started drawing, it was completely different. It was more internal, freer.
StS: That you went back and forth to Cuba seems very unusual. Many people who left never went back to the island.
NGF: Many people in my community perceived me going back and forth as treason. People couldn’t understand it. But I felt I had to go back; that I could not be an artist and could not have my own voice if I did not see the island. People think of it like a canyon: either you’re on one side or the other; either you stay or you leave. But I think is more complex than that. This back and forth for me was form of risk taking, an important reference for me work. I made a choice that many people didn’t like. The painting La Eternidad [1992] reflects this conflict between my homeland and my new home in America. In the painting, there’s a table at the center of the image with the word “La Corresponden” [the correspondent] written above. The table is the link connecting the sky and the earth. There are also eyes in pattern of the snake, representing consciousness, looking inward. Underneath the table, there’s the boat, hiding behind the red curtains. The boat is the safe place. To complete the whole picture, I needed to embrace both places, link them together again in the painting. This painting is a way of healing this rupture and separation that I experienced. It’s like almalgama, a glue putting two things back together. I was of course aware of all the politics around this, from both sides, but I wanted to be an independent voice. Art was my safe zone, the place where I could address this.
StS: In many of your works you include words and writing. They appear as hints or comments on the images, almost like a framing device bringing the human figures, animals, and inanimate objects together.
NGF: A lot of the earlier works have this combination of bold colors and words. The words I’m using are charged, almost symbols in themselves. They are not descriptive but more like a proclamation. They occupy an important place within the composition of each work. I like to imagine that viewers read the paintings like stories, like an open page of a book. The references to language hopefully invite them to read a little deeper. It also reflects my love for words and the power they have. In my drawings and paintings, I reference my own personal relationships but also emotions like anguish or fear. Translating them into something visual was an important outlet –– like a healing power.
StS: As you are an artist trained and working in Chicago, your interest in the subconscious, the use of bold colors as well as your line work seem like connecting point to the Chicago Imagists to me, who also came out of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. What role did their work play for you?
NGF: The were a generation before me. Chicago is the quintessential American city. It’s not New York. The Chicago art scene was more independent, trying to find its own character. The Chicago Imagists had achieved that defining a style unique to Chicago. However, I was coming from a very different place, a young voice from the Latino community. Latino artists were usually painting murals, it was all men. But I didn't want it that label of a Latina community artist. I wanted to make my own work and my own images that I wanted to be accepted for what they were without any constricting labels. I wanted to speak from the center and for the work to be respected.
Right after I finished school, I submitted one of my drawings to this big competition to be included in a large overview exhibition of new artistic voices called “Artists of Chicago and Vicinity” at the Art Institute of Chicago. And I made it in! It was a big deal and an important step, feeling my work was received and heard. That gave me permission to keep working and amplify these images, tell my stories like a diary. It always felt important that the drawings come from a real place, a place of sincerity that could move my viewers to think about the routes and journeys that we take when we embrace the things we love.
StS: You left Chicago in 1997 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
NGF: I felt like I needed to leave Chicago and opened my studio in a new place. I was teaching graduate level painting at the School of the of the San Francisco Art Institute with a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship and got involved with the community there. I always had an aspect of community around my work –– it’s important to me that my students are aware of the power of art, the power of their own voice. I want to share with them what I practice in my own work. I felt like I grew as a painter, too, through teaching.
StS: After your time in California, you moved to Miami in 2001. Not long after your move you made the piece Universe in You (2006), which is also featured in the exhibition. In contrast to the other works, this one has a much darker color palette using mostly grey scales with charcoal, graphite, and wax on paper but also some traces of glitter. It seems to speak more to interiority and spirituality.
NGF: It was strange moving here. I felt like I was leaving the United States and moving to this other planet called Miami. I was ambiguous; I didn't know if I was supposed to love it or not. But the light here was unbelievable and the nature, all the things that surround us in the city are so special. I found this tiny little studio, which–in this sunny city–had no windows. It was like a cave, and I became obsessive in there. I just wanted to work, not even show my work. That’s when I made Universe in You. It was a turn inwards, whereas my work from before felt more related to exterior things, my relationship to Cuba, me being Latina etc. But when I got to Miami, it went right into my guts. So, I started working in black and white, using charcoal, graphite, minerals––it felt like going into a mine.
In a way I left my own professional safe space, exploring new territory, asking “What are we? How strong are we? What is going to happen next? What is left?” It’s about exploring the power of thinking and the power of self that I want to share with my viewers. I feel throughout my whole career, I have been searching for my own truth and my work reflects how to materialize dreams, fears, and existence in general.
StS: Universe in You features large shells and abstract forms similar to star constellations. There are also two opposing figures on the outer edges of the four-panel piece, one a bit smaller on the right, and the other one, on the left, standing appearing almost like an angel.
NGF: The standing figure is also like a professor, an authority figure embodying wisdom and observing everything from afar. I sort of see myself in that other, smaller figure on the right. It looks almost child-like as it bends down to find the next piece, pick up the next shell.
StS: Many of your newer works from 2023 that were included in the exhibition include this motif of garlands or chains as they appear in Universe in You. In Algo Que Se Parece Al Olvido (Something That Looks Like Forgetting) (2023) for instance, there are chains of small shells or braids of hair running across the canvas connecting the different female figures featured in the painting.
NGF: The chains link things together and establish connections. In fact, in Algo Que Se Parece Al Olvido (Something That Looks Like Forgetting) all the different figures you see are one person. The different characters are manifestations of a dream. It all revolves around the central figure with the bird on her shoulder, the other figures represent her fear about how to hold on to her memory. In the end if may end up in the forgetting.
In the exhibition “De Noche, Los Sueños” that Anthony [Spinello] put together I see an arc that he built from the many works we looked at in my studio, from 1983 with De Noche, Los Sueños to 2023 with Algo Que Se Parece Al Olvido (Something That Looks Like Forgetting). The works from across these forty years are so different, yet they're clearly connected in so many ways.