Calida Rawles: Away With the Tides
March 19 - September 7, 2025
MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART
1934 Poplar Avenue
Memphis, TN
From brooksmuseum.org:
In her first solo museum presentation, Calida Rawles envisions water as a space for Black healing. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and water's cultural and historical symbolisms, Rawles creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright and mysterious bodies of water. The water, a sort of character within the paintings, is embodied as a vital, organic, multifaceted material and historically charged space that signifies historical trauma and racial exclusion but also physical and spiritual healing.
In this body of work, Rawles depicts members of Miami’s historically Black Overtown, a neighborhood that went from a thriving cultural and commercial hub for Black people to a community dismantled by gentrification, systemic racism, and mass displacement. Rawles partnered with members of this community and worked with them as models. In this series, Rawles takes her practice further by photographing some of her subjects in natural waters for the first time at the historic Virginia Key Beach, which was once racially segregated. By photographing Black subjects in the ocean for the first time, Rawles probes the Atlantic’s history as the site of the supremely exploitative transatlantic slave trade. The finished works critically engage with the water-entwined climate and mine the history of beauty, oppression, and resilience in the Overtown community and the diaspora.
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