FIU News
2013
Cortada selected as Cintas finalist, exhibits “Endangered World” at Freedom Tower
The Cintas Foundation Finalists exhibit at MDC Museum of Art + Design Freedom Tower will be the first venue in Florida to display Xavier Cortada’s 180 Endangered World: Eastern Hemisphere drawings. The CINTAS Foundation awards fellowships annually to creative artists of Cuban lineage who live outside of Cuba.
The work depicts endangered animals originally featured in the artist’s 2008 North Pole installation. Cortada’s “Endangered World” project has also addressed global biodiversity loss through art installations at the South Pole (2007), Holland (2009) and Biscayne National Park (2010) and through online participatory art projects. See here
The Cintas Foundation was established with funds from the estate of the late Oscar B. Cintas, a former Cuban ambassador to the United States and a prominent industrialist and patron of the arts. Cintas fellowships acknowledge creative accomplishments and encourage the development of creative artists in architecture, literature, music composition and the visual arts.
An exhibition of the visual arts finalists’ works will open October 11 at the MDC Museum of Art + Design at the Freedom Tower. The art work will remain on exhibit through Dec. 14, free and open to the public, during gallery hours.
The 2012 CINTAS Fellowship finalists are:
José Luis Alonso Mateo, Ray Azcuy, Ramon Bofill, Xavier Cortada, Nereida García-Ferraz, Patricia Margarita Hernandez, Gabriel Martinez, Jillian Mayer, Shie Moreno and Primitivo Suarez Wolfe.
The jury:
Jennifer Basile, artist and associate senior professor of painting and drawing at MDC, Christopher Cook, Executive Director of LegalArt, a non-profit contemporary arts space in downtown Miami, George Kinghorn, Director & Curator of the University of Maine Museum of Art, Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum in Atlanta and Jane Simon, Curator at University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum.