ART PICK

Ruben Torres Llorca's installations puzzle, delight

Ruben Torres Llorca's sublimely intellectual installations often revolve around the world of art itself, and they're like puzzles that blend the personal (love, anguish) with the historic and sociological (oppression, disadvantage). In his new show, Manual de carpintería china (Chinese Carpentry Manual), the Miami-based artist tackles the faddish fascination with all things Chinese via a 'red manual' on the mastery of 'enchantment techniques' that supposedly dates back to the...

BEHIND THE SCENES| ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Galleries defy the economy

Despite the gloomy news on the economy, art galleries continue to set up shop in Miami's art districts. Wolfgang Roth & Partners Fine Art opens Saturday in the Miami Design District with the inaugural exhibition The Red Couch by German fine-art photographer Horst Wackerbarth, who will interview prominent Miamians and local characters as part of a video and photography project. Among the participants are University of Miami President Donna Shalala, developer and art collector Craig Robins...

VISUAL ARTS

A modernist whose paintings scratch the heart

The Ecuadorean painter Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919-1999) is the least known of the pioneers of Latin American Modernism. Fortunately for aficionados of Latin American art, an exhibition of his work is on display at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín is the artist's first U.S. retrospective in more than half a century and goes a long way toward familiarizing American museumgoers with his work.

ART PICK

Coral Gables 'First Friday Gallery Night'

Coral Gables' First Friday Gallery Night has been around for more than 20 years -- the region's original art walk. Here are some highlights from Friday's openings:

Fashion is art at Bruk Gallery show

Raccoon-eyed models in snug alpaca coats were standing on platforms at the Kevin Bruk Gallery one recent evening, looking a little restless. Part art expo, part fashion boutique, this was a sartorial coming-out party for designer Silvia Argüello, and it was unusual even by Miami standards.

ART BASEL

Art Basel special section

South Florida galleries and museums planning special exhibits to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach on Dec. 4-7 may submit information about them for The Miami Herald's annual Art Basel special section. E-mails should be sent by Oct. 17 to artbasel@Miami

VISUAL ARTS

Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez are united in life and art

In a quintessential Little Havana house painted mustard yellow and loaded with history, eclectic antiques and luminous large-scale photographs of quizzical landscapes, Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez work, live and love.

ART PICK

`Transformation' debuts Friday

The new Sailboat Bend Artists Lofts debuts, on Friday, Transformation, the second exhibit of the collective of professional and emerging artists living and working in Fort Lauderdale's historic Sailboat Bend neighborhood. Oil and acrylic painting, mixed media drawings, video, animations, photography, sculpture and installation will be shown, including Dana Craft's watercolor on canvas, Last Summer, above. A polyptych of visual pieces, a collaboration by all the artists represented, will...

ART PICK

Emu wear at Wynwood gallery

The talk of the Wynwood Gallery Walk last Saturday was the 'Emu Wear' art of Maria Fernanda Cardoso's show Mimicry at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. Models glided by art patrons wearing hats, undergarments and socks made from emu feathers (and priced at $25,000 for the ensemble). Large-scale Lambda prints of the emu works filled the walls, including Rauna, pictured. Two hypnotic videos titled Stick insects on branch and Stick insects swaying on metal rod by Cardoso and Ross Rudesch Harley rounded...

BOOKS

A journalist takes a long road to fiction

In the fall of 1994, I traveled to Guantánamo for The Miami Herald to report on the tent-city camps erected by the U.S. government to house and detain thousands of Cuban rafters rescued at sea.

ART PICK

Photography: Love, hope, exuberance and desire

''Whether we're born in Buenos Aires, Havana or Madrid, we come into this world with dance in our hearts,'' Isabel Muñoz says.

ART PICK

Sept. gallery walk highlights

Wynwood and Design District art galleries kick off the season Saturday with exhibits opening during Gallery Walk. Among the highlights:

ART PICK

Welcome to Childree's Carnival: Artist brings his sex show to Wynwood

On the sort of sweat-lock afternoon when Miami feels like a junkyard on the hot bottom of the Earth, Clifton Childree -- installation artist, experimental filmmaker and devotee of decay -- is dressed in a paint-splattered T-shirt and running his hands lovingly over the turn-of-the-century Singer sewing machine set to be put to novel use for his DREAM-CUM-TRU exhibition opening Saturday night at Locust Projects in Wynwood.

ART PICK

Luck of the drawing: Sketches offer a window into the Spanish avant-garde

Imagine the Catalonian painter Salvador Dalí in 1932, fingers twirling his famous mustache, then putting pen to paper, obsessed with retooling the shape of the clock of his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory.

ART BOOK

17 Miami artists get display in `exhibition in print'

At a time when contemporary art seems dominated by either technological high-jinks or reinterpretations of found objects, the 2008 southern edition of New American Paintings (Open Studios, $20) is here to remind us that painting is far from dead.

ART PICK

Little Havana brings 'Viernes Cultural'

Little Havana's Cultural Fridays take place the last Friday of the month, and besides art vendors lining the sidewalks, there are plenty of art galleries. So put on your comfortable dancing shoes -- yes, music is inseparable from art here -- and stroll/shimmy the night away. Many of the galleries, like the long-standing Agustín Gainza's and Cremata Fine Art, are owned and run by artists. The latest newcomer is María Sonia Martín Art Gallery, which debuts...

Painter Conni Gordon teaches how to create 5-minute masterpieces

Conni Gordon likes to joke that when she first started painting, her canvas was the wall of a cave. Her self-deprecation is charming, but she is exaggerating.

VISUAL ARTS

The gang of 13: imagination (and luck) distinguish this year's Consortium winners

It would be easy to call these artists the Lucky 13, and that they are. Competition for the attention of art lovers and patrons has never been tougher in South Florida, home to thousands of artists who toil, sometimes in anonymity, at home and in their studios.

ARTS

Filling in the picture of Miami's early arts scene

''It's a freak show, an absolute freak show!'' Helen Kohen chuckles. That's the false portrait of the Miami art scene found in the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, where Kohen has been sifting through almost six decades of locally produced television shows. Miami's TV stations ``weren't interested in the visual arts unless it had an absurd hook. For three Halloweens in a row, [then-CBS affiliate] WTVJ visited the home of a man who placed huge, grotesque sculptures on his front...