VISUAL ARTS

What you see is seldom what you get

BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO

fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

PATRICK FARRELL / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

Quisqueya Henriquez stands underneath her Arco Lamp sculpture, which references the style of mops used in the Caribbean and Cuban Miami.

• Gallery | Quisqueya Henríquez: Images from 'The World Outside'

IF YOU GO

What: Quisqueya Henríquez: The World Outside, A Survey Exhibition 1991-2007

Where: Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday; until 8:30 p.m. on third Thursdays; noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday through July 20

Cost: $8 adults; $4 seniors; students with valid ID and children under 12 free. Free every second Saturday.

Info: 305-375-3000 or www.miamiart museum.org

For the opening of her exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, Quisqueya Henríquez produced at a Wynwood factory bucketfuls of ice cream -- seawater ice cream -- that was served to guests in thimble-sized cups.

The main ingredient, two gallons of salt water from the Caribbean, was shipped to Miami via FedEx from Santo Domingo, where the Cuban-born Quisqueya lives.

This edible art -- titled Helado de agua de mar Caribe (Caribbean Seawater Ice Cream, 2002) -- was a lush, creamy blue-green.

Yep, it was salty, and not everyone was up for the taste test.

''Honestly,'' says MAM director Terry Riley, ``I watched. I just couldn't imagine the salt water.''

''No, I didn't taste it,'' reports Cuban-American art collector Peter Menéndez. ``I wasn't feeling too well.''

Quisqueya isn't miffed.

Her conceptual art is supposed to evoke visceral reactions, whether you're viewing it, sitting on it or tasting it. Quisqueya also made the ice cream for shows in Chicago and New York, and it is part of the traveling Quisqueya Henríquez: The World Outside, A Survey Exhibition, 1991-2007, which has come to MAM from The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

''The public completes the work of art,'' Quisqueya says of her ice-cream project, which for Miami -- her home from 1993 to 1997 -- she tried (unsuccessfully) to sweeten by adding coconut flavoring and loads of cream and sugar.

''People are expecting ice cream to be sweet,'' she explains, ``but this one's salty, and so the work is about stereotypes and what people expect that we, in the Caribbean, ought to be like. Everyone expects us to be good dancers, to be partiers, and they think of the Caribbean as the setting for waterfront properties for fun and sun.''

Quisqueya's artistic view is, like life, more complex -- and stark.

Using light, color, geometry, movement, sound and even temperature as tools, Quisqueya invites meditation on perceptions and on how the body responds, emotionally and physically, to the various situations and visual stimuli her works present.

The basis of her style is rooted in the uniqueness of her background.

DUAL ROOTS

The 41-year-old was born in Havana in 1966 into a family with historical and political roots in two Caribbean islands.

Her mother was a Cuban social worker and her father a Dominican intellectual from a prominent family that fought the Trujillo dictatorship. Independence hero and writer Jose Martí dedicated his political testament to Quisqueya's great-grandfather.

From birth, the artist was marked by the distinctiveness of her first name, which is the popular nickname for the Dominican Republic.

''The idea came from my mother's obstetrician,'' Quisqueya says.

The family moved to Santo Domingo when Quisqueya was a child, but she returned to Havana in the late 1980s to train at ISA, Instituto Superior del Arte, where she became part of the ''Cuban Renaissance'' generation that began to produce critical conceptual art.

''I always felt a little strange,'' Quisqueya says, ``not altogether Cuban, not altogether Dominican. I've always had problems with definition. Dominicans have always felt distrust because I was born in Cuba, and I would never be able to, say, represent Santo Domingo in a biennial. Impossible, even though there are people who love me and think I should. And to Cubans, I'm not Cuban. It's very strange.''

But she has found a way to channel this sense of otherness in the universal way she presents her work.

Quisqueya works within the realm of modernism, her installation pieces, sculptures, collages, videos and photography reaching deeply into the reservoir of art history for references.

The paper sculpture Stereography of memory, for example, evokes the minimalist geometry of New York artist Carl Andre. Intertexualidad (Intertextuality, 2005), the digital video of a rooster fighting a car for the right to cross the road, the same Pop palate of Andy Warhol's screen prints.

Her references to art history are not gimmickry. There's a powerful motivation: Quisqueya wants her Caribbean-made art to break through the confines of ethnicity and geography and speak to mainstream audiences.

Artists who live in ''peripheral'' cities instead of in cultural centers are often ghettoized, MAM curator René Morales says, and so Quisqueya seeks to bridge the perceptions of what art made in the Caribbean should be.

Humor plays an important role in how she conveys her messages. So does the trend among contemporary artists to re-invent ordinary objects -- in Quisqueya's case, those associated with Cuban and Dominican way of life: baseballs, seaweed, colorful cloth -- and give them artful purpose.

''Here she is a woman and a Dominican artist participating in international contemporary art, and she's confronted by a wall of a heady kind of discourse,'' Morales says. ``How do you enter that? Humor is a key way that she manages to insert herself into this conversation.''

Watch at the MAM show as museum patrons sit (or chose not to sit) on a set of stools topped by Inkjet prints on canvas of a woman's hairy navel, El centro puede estar en todas partes (The Center Can Be Everywhere, 2001-2007). Most don't know what to make of the odd seating.

Is it art, or is it a place to sit through a lecture about the show? Can it be both art and stool?

And what about the giggles provoked by the navels and their oversized, blond hairs? By the commentary on the aesthetic of the belly buttons?

Quisqueya loves such irreverence.

She could have set up the stools as a Do-Not-Touch, formal installation. But, instead, she wanted the stools scattered in the area where the exhibition begins.

Again, the artwork is not complete until people sit on it, experience it, react to it.

At the same time, there's pain and poverty depicted in Quisqueya's work, particularly in her photographic studies of life in Santo Domingo.

One of the show's most powerful pieces, Untitled (Metastais, 1996), dates back to the years when Quisqueya lived in Miami and collaborated with exiled Cuban artist Consuelo Castañeda, with whom she studied at ISA. The light installation of round fixtures on the floor refers to the rapid multiplication of cancer cells. The minimalist aesthetic of the work was borrowed from the descriptions of philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and it's difficult to observe the work and not be moved by its force.

''She's an artist who is able to make a political and social statement, but you never mistake her work for rhetoric,'' Riley says. ``It always looks like something only an artist was able to produce. At the same time, it's so tactile and visual.''

HORSE AND CARS

Take the mural Quisqueya re-created at MAM from vinyls of horses and cars, also titled Intertextualidad (Intertextuality, 2005). Sometimes horse and machine seem to be in competition, and sometimes the horse appears to be way ahead; at times the two merge into a funny hybrid.

''I wanted to show how the rural and urbane coincide in the social space of a city,'' Quisqueya says. ``In the Dominican Republic, the economic contrasts are pronounced. It's not unusual to be at a red light and see a Mercedes Benz next to a horse-drawn cart.''

The piece also speaks to the distance between reality and ''the political discourse.'' When politicians speak of Santo Domingo's having become ''a little Miami, a little New York, that is the language of false progress,'' she notes.

What she sees every day is a different story.

''Here you are in your car, and there's a donkey that doesn't let you move ahead,'' Quisqueya says. ``My work is nurtured by those contrasts. For me, my daily reality is rich.''

And as for the saltwater ice cream, Quisqueya seldom expects anyone to come back for seconds. But she does want people to taste it, and she wants to assure everyone that it's perfectly safe.

''I make sure I get my ocean water from a clean spot far, far away,'' she says, laughing.