CAROLA BRAVO | Bass Art Museum

The Bass is happy to announce Venezuelan American artist, architect and cultural activist Carola Bravo as the 2023 winner of the New Monuments open artist call, a project established in 2020 with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through the museum’s Knight Art Commissions Program. Installed in Collins Park, Bravo will realize a temporary, site-specific monument titled Between Absence and Presence, on view March 2023 until January 2024.

Miami-based artist Carola Bravo’s work includes architectural public art and immersive site-specific video and art installations. Through her practice she explores the geometry of our spaces and how they intersect with history, memory and time, touching on themes such as change, home, exile and hope. Bravo examines the existence of nesting and our sense of belonging through the experience of the geometric ordering of a place. Her interest in landscape, spaces and territories form the basis of her examination of the conceptual and emotional implications of our relationships with space and time.

Between Absence and Presence challenges the traditional commemoration and use of public monuments by honoring the invisibility of the present, asking the viewer “what reflects the notion of the impermanent present better than recognizing invisibility and absence?” The artist highlights society’s inverted values by directing the viewers’ gaze towards themselves, assigning responsibility for the significant omissions and exclusions in public monuments to the public eye while excluding the transitory institutional legitimization lent to monuments from the past. Bravo challenges the conventional authority and memorialization of monuments with a sculpture that is most present when viewers discover it by seeing themselves reflected in the form’s mirror-like surface. Bravo suggests an understanding of the present in terms of geometric space through the psychological significance of recognition and representation.

The Bass is situated in Collins Park, a public park in Miami Beach, where there are presently four monuments that were commissioned by different groups at various times. Sitting atop stone plinths in the south side of the park, these existing monuments pay homage to Cuban epidemiologist Dr. Carlos Finlay, Venezuelan political leader Simón Bolívar, Nicaraguan scientist Dr. Luis Henry Debayle and Cuban writer Jose Martí. Amid an international debate on monuments and their legitimacy, New Monuments seeks to provide artists the opportunity to produce a new, fifth monument in Collins Park.

“The Bass conceived of New Monuments as a way to elevate artistic voices in Miami,” said Silvia Karman Cubiñá, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Bass. “For three years now, we have created a space where Miami artists can engage in the national conversation of redefining monuments and who or what they honor and represent.”

Building upon the question of and engaging in current conversations, Between Absence and Presence is the third work in the New Monuments series initiated by The Bass, inaugurated in 2020 with Najja Moon’s Your Mommas Voice in the Back of Your Head. The second work, Charo Oquet: I am here: Translation of Mystic Symbols in an Age of New Subjectivity, remains on view through January 2023. The five-year initiative invites artists to answer the question “what is a monument” with a work of art that will be on view in Collins Park for approximately 10-12 months each. The next open call will be announced fall 2023.