Sugar 'n Spice
Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens tomorrow at The Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami.Arte Latino highlights more than 200 years of Latino art from across the United States. These paintings, sculptures, and photographs represent many different cultural traditions developed by mostly Spanish-speaking artists who have settled in America.
The show includes these two portraits by Vik Muniz. The prints in Muniz's "Sugar Children" series are based on photographs he took of black children on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. To create these images, Muniz used granulated sugar to draw copies of the photographs on pieces of black paper. After each was completed he photographed the image and cleared the paper to start over again. This technique reflects his thoughts about the children themselves. The sugar represents "the sweetest group of human beings" he had ever met; the process of erasing and starting anew emphasizes their probable future of unrelenting, repetitive work on island sugar plantations.
Pictured top: Vik Muniz, born Brazil 1961, Valicia Bathes in Sunday Clothes, from the "Sugar Children" series, 1996, gelatin silver print on paper, 14 x 11 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.
Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).
Pictured bottom: Vik Muniz, Big James Sweats Buckets, from the "Sugar Children" series, 1996, gelatin silver print on paper, 14 x 11 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.