Calida Rawles

Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction and the cultural and historical symbolisms of water, Los Angeles-based artist Calida Rawles (born 1976) creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright, mysterious bodies of water. The water, itself a sort of character within the paintings, functions as an element that signifies both physical and spiritual healing, as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion.

For her first solo museum show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Rawles creates a bridge between her signature style and a story within Miami's history that is often ignored and obscured. She takes as her subject the residents of Overtown, a once prosperous Miami neighborhood dismantled by systemic racism and gentrification. For the first time, Rawles photographed her subjects submerged in water at the formerly segregated Virginia Key Beach. By taking photographs in situ, Rawles directly engages with the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow-era south and Miami's own ecological history.

Christine Y. Kim has been Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, since 2009. With Michael Govan, she co-organized James Turrell: A Retrospective (2013), which won first place in the International Art Critics Association (AICA-USA) annual exhibition awards in 2014. She has also organized Teresa Margolles (2010), an outdoor sculpture project in collaboration with the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), a non-profit organization for public art that she co-founded in 2009; and Christian Marclay: The Clock (2011). Kim was previously Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized the exhibitions Black Belt (2003), Philosophy of Time Travel (2007), Flow (2008), and Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage; Africa, Lagos‒Dakar (2008), among others. Recently, she has been a guest curator of Art Public 2011 and Art Public 2012 at the Bass Museum for Art, Art Basel Miami Beach, and a curatorial adviser to Prospect.3, New Orleans (2014). In 2010 Kim won the New Leadership Award from ArtTable. She has received curatorial and research grants from the Turkish Cultural Institute (1999), The American Center Foundation (2002), Cultural Services of the French Embassy (2007), the Japan Foundation (2011), and Artis (2013).