For this artist from Richmond Heights, first solo exhibit in Miami is a homecoming
Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo still remembers the name of her first grade art teacher.
Hank Bell.
In fact, she will never forget his name because that teacher at Frank C. Martin school in the Richmond Heights neighborhood in southwest Miami-Dade County is the reason she decided to become an artist.
“I can see him so clearly, even right now,” she told the Miami Herald. “The experience he shared with us as students about art and what art is – for me, I never forgot it. Just the idea of something so magical, and with the visual expression, that everyone could connect to and be excited about. It was just something right away I wanted to be a part of. I never forgot that experience.”
Now, in her late 60s and decades after being mesmerized by Mr. Bell’s art class, the Miami native will present her first solo art show during Art Week at Miami-Dade College’s Padrón Campus Art Gallery in conjunction with the Women Artists Archive Miami and the Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design.
Bowens-Saffo has a lengthy resume: She studied at Howard University and Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She also studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, while working as a master printer with Robert Blackburn at the Printmaking Workshop and has also done a residency at Salem2Salem in Germany.
Bowens-Saffo has also taught at universities across the state including, Florida Memorial University, Florida State University, and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. She also taught at the New World School of Arts.
She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the late ‘80s and the New York Foundation for the Arts in the 1990s. Locally, she’s been involved with the Miami Black Arts Workshop and was an educator at the Barnyard Community Center in Coconut Grove.
The exhibit, titled “Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo: From the Heights,” will showcase Bowens-Saffo’s work from the late 1970s and her art legacy in the South Florida community. The work focuses on Bowens-Saffo’s artistic contributions to the Richmond Height’s neighborhood, where she grew up, and Coconut Grove, where she spent her time as an educator at the Barnyard Community Center in West Coconut Grove.
Museum of Art and Design Executive Director Amy Galpin said she first learned of Bowens-Saffo’s work through a project researching the Miami Black Arts Workshop, where Bowens-Saffo was a member.
“I was really interested in how, for her, she creates art in service of the community,” Galpin said, noting her work at the Barnyard which includes creating a mural and teaching. “I think Kabuya is really worthy of broader recognition in our community,” she said. “Her mixed media works are certainly deserve more documentation and consideration.
Leaving home
Bowens-Saffo’s foray through the art world has taken her myriad places, which is represented in one piece, “The Migration,” which depicts an image of a woman with a home in the background. The piece is one of WAAM founder Anita Sharma’s favorite’s from the exhibit and she said it is reminiscent of Bowens-Saffo’s travel from South Florida to Howard. Sharma said as an immigrant, the piece resonated with her.
“Migration is about her leaving home. It’s about the security of a home,” Sharma said of the artwork. “We talked about that work a lot, and she’s very excited to show it because she really felt like because of her upbringing and her childhood in Miami, she was ready to kind of leave home in search of other homes.”
Another featured work is a poster Bowens-Saffo designed for the 1986 Goombay Festival, which celebrates Bahamian heritage, in Coconut Grove depicting the city’s streetscape. Bowens-Saffo described being the “select artist” for the festival as a “wonderful experience.”
“It was just all over the city,” she said, adding she did the T-shirt design as well. The exhibit will also include her most recent work, a series called Heart and Soul, which was an ode to Bowens-Saffo’s late mom.
Bowens-Saffo’s medium is printmaking using a technique called intaglio, a process that involves cutting a design into a surface often using metal, copper or zinc.
“When you’re drawing and scribing into that material, you usually need a laboratory of acid mass and water, or a ferric chloride to bite the image into that metal,” she said. “And then, once the image is bitten into the metal surface, the metal surface is filled with ink, and then that ink surface is transferred to a paper, or to a fabric, where you can see the actual image transferred.”
‘A well made community’
Bowens-Saffo’s story starts in Richmond Heights.
“It was a community that was a walking community of proud Black folks,” she said of the neighborhood, located in the southwest part of the county near 152nd Street and 107th Avenue, which she recalled was once named one of the best communities for Black people by Life Magazine.
“You could walk to church, you could walk to school. You could walk to the park. We had a community park that had a pool. We had physicians, we had ice cream parlors, restaurants, bookstores. We had our own post office. It was really amazing.”
Bowens-Saffo described the neighborhood she grew up in as a thriving Black community. Founded in the early 1950s by white veteran World War II pilot Frank C. Martin, the community was established for the purpose of providing affordable housing to Black veterans during a time of racial segregation.
“It was just a well made community of proud Black folks that worked hard,” she said. “You had families realizing the American dream.”
Bowens-Saffo feels like some of her work offers a look back into a Miami that exists only in her memories. “In these works, you’re seeing things historically that are not even in the community anymore.”
Ask her about the Goombay posters and she steers the conversation from her art to a brief history lesson on the Coconut Grove community, which was built by Black Bahamians, and the changes it’s been through. “A lot of those places don’t even exist anymore,” she said before rattling off a time capsule of what was once there, including Gil’s Spot and The Tikki Club.
Bowens-Saffo lives in Tallahassee, but her family still owns their home in Richmond Heights. For her, the exhibit is a homecoming of sorts.
“You see what home is like, how home has changed, how people have changed – and that’s good and sometimes not so good – but it’s always self-evaluation.”
If you go:
WHAT: Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo: From the Heights
WHEN: Dec. 2 - March 15
WHERE: Miami Dade College’s Padrón Campus Art Gallery, Building 3, Room 3113, 627 SW 27th Ave., Miami
PRICE: Free
This story was originally published December 2, 2024 at 4:30 AM.
