Uploaded September 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
In this lecture, Pérez explores depictions of the Yorùbá-inspired Afro-Cuban deities called orishas in the contemporary artworks of such luminaries as multimedia artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons and painter Harmonia Rosales. She will discuss these artists’ innovations in representing the orishas’ Blackness and creatively subverting traditional conventions for their portrayal that derive in part from the iconography of Roman Catholic chromolithographs. Pérez then turns to the explosion of AI-generated pictures of the orishas in cyberspace and argues that, while digital image generators have given practitioners unprecedented license to render (and racialize) the orishas, they also threaten to reinscribe stereotypes that Black and Afro-Cuban artists have labored to dismantle.
The Knight Foundation Art + Research Center (A+RC) is ICA Miami's research department and graduate-level initiative dedicated to fostering a more robust and critical dialogue in the South Florida region and beyond.
Plan your visit: icamia.org/visit
Watch more on ICA Channel: icamia.org/channel
Membership means more at ICA Miami. Join today for expanded access to a world of innovative art and ideas: icamia.org/support
#icamiami
In this lecture, Pérez explores depictions of the Yorùbá-inspired Afro-Cuban deities called orishas in the contemporary artworks of such luminaries as multimedia artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons and painter Harmonia Rosales. She will discuss these artists’ innovations in representing the orishas’ Blackness and creatively subverting traditional conventions for their portrayal that derive in part from the iconography of Roman Catholic chromolithographs. Pérez then turns to the explosion of AI-generated pictures of the orishas in cyberspace and argues that, while digital image generators have given practitioners unprecedented license to render (and racialize) the orishas, they also threaten to reinscribe stereotypes that Black and Afro-Cuban artists have labored to dismantle.
The Knight Foundation Art + Research Center (A+RC) is ICA Miami's research department and graduate-level initiative dedicated to fostering a more robust and critical dialogue in the South Florida region and beyond.
Plan your visit: icamia.org/visit
Watch more on ICA Channel: icamia.org/channel
Membership means more at ICA Miami. Join today for expanded access to a world of innovative art and ideas: icamia.org/support
#icamiami
