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By Jon Letman
The beauty of blue is the lifeblood that flows through a new art exhibition now on display at The Kampong of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. Entitled The Blue in Our Veins, the exhibition features the abstract works of four Miami-based artists, incorporating a rich diversity of artistic styles, techniques, and media, all connected by shades of blue in works that evoke the sea, the sky, and shadows of cool forests and serene gardens.
The exhibition’s curator, Isabel Infante, says she was inspired to plan and execute this exhibition by her love of nature and admiration for her three fellow artists: Veronica Buitron, Gracia Echenique, and Megan James. Isabel and Gracia are both Chilean, Veronica is from Ecuador, and Megan is from Miami, but the works of each transcend national boundaries, evoking images from across our cerulean planet.
Works by Megan James and Isabel Infante
Each of the artists brings her own style and passion to the show. Isabel, who specializes in creating cyanotypes, is displaying half a dozen four by six-foot pieces on fabric depicting captivating tropical leaf patterns. The cyanotype is a 19th century printing process based on exposing light-sensitive chemicals to sunlight to create striking silhouettes against a blue background.
Gracia’s chromatic wheels capture the color and light of a sun-soaked coastline, a splash by the seashore, and the dynamic interplay between the color spectrum she finds in sunlight and sand, rays of turquoise and sapphire, and glinting bands of dazzling gold. Like a vibrant mandala of tropical days and equatorial nights, her studies are at once dynamic and subtle in their exploration of color.
Megan, a Miami-born abstract painter, works with finely ground minerals and shells, rainwater, charcoal, and indigo, to render the fluid dynamics of South Florida’s marine environments. Drawn on canvas, her works are seascape vignettes, haunting and rhythmic.
In hand-dyed textile works created by Veronica, the deep indigo comes from Indigofera tinctoria, a member of the Fabaceae (legume family) which Veronica grows at home. Like the traditional indigo arts of West Africa and Asia, Veronica uses the crushed indigo leaves to make dyes that color her fabric pieces.
Works by Gracia Echenique and Veronica Buitron
The Blue in Our Veins exhibition is displayed in two rooms in the historic Fairchild-Sweeney house at the heart of The Kampong. Large windows allow natural light to stream into the rooms, illuminating the cyanotypes, color wheels, photo-realistic wave images, and natural pigment dyed tapestries that rustle slightly in the breeze.
The second part of the exhibition offers viewers a chance to read, watch, and directly engage with the processes employed by each artist. In a dining room with a table holding elements of the artists’ works, visitors will find square boards marked off in a grid pattern with gold and blue, indigo shadows that reveal fan palm fronds, heart-shaped aroid leaves, and botanical patterns running the length of a stem. Other objects used to create the works — blue stained sponge applicators, bottles, bowls, and brushes are on display with explanations of how the works were created.
Although each artist has her own distinctive style, together they create an exhibition that is calming and balanced, organic but organized, geometric and botanic, with textures that are soft alongside crisp lines defined by shadow and light, shades of color that unify as a theme with a hue that is calm, a mood that is blue.
With the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
