West Encounters East® (WEE) is the brainchild of savvy Miami based art collector and museum trustee Stella Holmes. Stella is a successful entrepreneur, business owner and globe trotting supporter of the arts. Dressed to the nines, one day you may find her in a Brazilian favela interviewing an artist and the next week you may bump into her in Basel, Switzerland wearing sneaks and a Gucci dress at the Art Basel Fair. She is one of Miami’s most elegant dressed benefactors. She is a driven woman with a mission and vision for discovering, promoting and documenting artists whose work expresses the immigration path of established Latin American artists of Asian heritage. The artistic result when you merge traditional Asian with our vibrant Latin American culture is an exotic melange that is fresh, bold and powerful.
Stella came across this astounding discovery during her many cross Atlantic travels. She noticed a subtle recurring ethnic thread as she happened upon the art work of second generation Japanese immigrants living in Brazil and Argentina. A subject that captivated her attention and peaked her curiosity from a scholarly standpoint. She decided to embark on a quest to study the migration paths of Japanese artists and to discover the impact living in Latin America had on the evolution and transformation of their art. The merging of these two cultures forged a new strain of innovative vision and artistic vocabularies that has served to connect cultural divides in today’s globalized age.
The “West Encounters East: Light and Shadows” exhibition will be on view at the upcoming ArteAmericas Fair. For a sneak peek beforehand, the Lowe Art Museum Director, Brian Dursum and Stella M. Holmes, President of The Brickellian, Inc., will host a preview at the museum on Thursday, February 9, 2012 from 7:00 pm until 10:00 pm. Guest speakers will be writer Anna Kazumi Stahl, Ph.D. and Denise Mattar, Curator of the West Encounters East (WEE) exhibition and former Director of São Paulo Modern Art Museum and the Rio de Janeiro Modern Art Museum. Stahl will speak on “The Japanese Beauty of Shadows” which addresses Japanese cultural aesthetic as it relates to light and dark and Mattar will speak about Japanese immigration to Brazil and will also introduce the works of seven Latin American artists with Asian heritage: Cristina Sá, Takashi Fukushima, Yutaka Toyota, Kazuo Okubo, Megumi Yuasa, Valeria Yamamoto and Guillermo Ueno.
I am looking forward to this intriguing show and the well anticipated PBS documentary that will follow in the near future of 2012. Be on the look out for a book titled “West Encounters East®” which is also slated for release this year.
By Tina Cornely
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds very appealing .I am an artist myself and anytime I hear of anything to do with art, specially with Latin American artist, it excites me because we carry lots of creative weight when it comes to the arts, due to are rich culture and diversity. which somehow has yet to be discover, but I believe we are on the right road to it. As a women artist and being a latin-American myself, I am always excited to see our world in the arts finally noticed.
Thank you,
Lidia Tohar
Studio101/Gallery
Lidia, thank you for your comment. Agreed! Latin American artists have not been given their due. The first time this paradigm started to change was back in 2003 when Julian Zugazagoitia, then Director of El Museo del Barrio in New York exhibited “Retratos: Last 2000 Years of Latin American Art”. The exhibition and catalog were simply breathtaking. Aztec, Mayan and Incan art created a stir shorlty thereafter. And now finally latin artists are a force to contend with in the contemporary art world. Brazil and Argentina are at the forefront. Sadly, there still are some countries in Latin America that frown upon contemporary art (even of their own countrymen). We are fortunate to have guardian angels like Lesley Pantin and Emilio Calleja, founders of Arte Americas. They recognize the amazing and talented contemporary art that is coming out of Latin America. To help springboard them into the limelight, they have dedicated a section at Arte Americas to New Works emerging from different Latin countries. Hopefully, more fair directors will follow suit.