Nereida García Ferraz
Nereida García Ferraz (b. 1954, Havana, Cuba) is a visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, video, sculpture, and social art projects exploring identity and feminist themes, nature, beauty, and the physical world. Her work has been exhibited or is in collections of El Espacio 23, MOCA, North Miami, The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and the Miami-Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design, among many others.
She co-produced and directed the award-winning documentary Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra, which is included in the permanent collections of renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Guggenheim Museum, Yale University, and the San Francisco Art Institute, among many other museums and universities worldwide. Recent notable group exhibitions featuring her work include Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, and Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Her most recent solo exhibition, held at Spinello Projects in Miami in 2023, was a comprehensive survey of her 40-year career.
García Ferraz earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received numerous prestigious grants, including support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation Media Grant, and the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute. In Miami, she co-founded 801 Projects at the Jose Marti Building and has been actively involved in educational initiatives such as Women on the Rise at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami and Brick by Brick, the award-winning outreach art program at Pérez Art Museum Miami. In 2022, she was honored with the South Florida Visual Arts Consortium Fellowship.
Website: https://nereydagarciaferraz.com/
Instagram: @nerigf
Photo courtesy of the artist.
García-Ferraz has worked with various forms of photography. Departing from Cuba as an adolescent in 1971, she came to the United States with few possessions. When she returned to the island for the first time in the 1980s, she spent time with relatives and began to accumulate old family photographs and documents. Eventually, she decided to use these materials as the subject matter for photographic works. For García-Ferraz, the creative reuse of personal artifacts became a way not only to memorialize emotionally burdened family histories but to symbolically link people separated over time and space. “These photographs”, she wrote, “helped me rebuild my life, to place pieces of the puzzle, searching always for that bigger image that will help me understand what paths everyone took to get to the places they are today.” She has also presented old family photographs and street scenes made in Havana in sepia tones and partially out of focus, transforming such photographs from an index of reality into a site of pure memory.
Source: Latinx Photography in the United States. A Visual Story. Elizabeth Ferrer. University of Washington Press, 2020
