The Pérez Art Museum Miami, overlooking Biscayne Bay in the city’s downtown, is just a few miles from Overtown, a historically Black neighborhood once known as the “Harlem of the South.”
Yet many residents of Overtown — which has experienced mass displacement and gentrification over the decades — have never been to the museum nor the nearby Virginia Key Beach on an island in the bay. That beach was once designated for “colored only” and was one of the limited coastal spaces accessible to Black people for swimming and leisure during segregation.
“A lot of us don’t believe water belongs to us because of the residual effects of segregation laws — it goes to the next generations that we don’t belong,” said Calida Rawles. A 48-year-old Los Angeles-based artist, Rawles is known for her paintings of Black people floating, often singly or in pairs, in rippling watery landscapes, at once hyper-realistic and dreamily abstracted. The sparkly element symbolizes a space of both historical trauma — recalling the death and drowning of so many enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage in the Atlantic — and healing.
“I want to paint us with agency in water,” she said.
For both her first solo museum show, “Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides,” on view now through Feb. 2 at the Pérez, and Lehmann Maupin’s presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach, running Friday through Sunday, Rawles painted portraits of Overtown residents based on photo sessions in the water. Working with a range of community members, from a 10-month-old to a 78-year-old, Rawles snapped hundreds of portraits from above and under the water at Virginia Key Beach and Overtown’s local public pool in Theodore Gibson Park.
“A lot of the community members either don’t know how to swim or don’t feel comfortable in the water,” said Maritza Lacayo, an associate curator at the Pérez who organized the exhibition. Lacayo witnessed how Rawles, a team of assistants — including Rawles’s own daughter, who is now 19 — and a swim instructor all got into the water with each subject for hours to encourage, direct and photograph. “It was a process that required a tremendous amount of trust,” Lacayo said. Many of the final paintings “are a result of people kind of dancing in the water and flipping through,” she added.
The portraits are complemented in the exhibition by a meditative three-channel video titled “We Gonna Swim,” Rawles’s first filmed piece, made in collaboration with the director Laura Brownson. Projected on three walls of a gallery, the immersive audio-video installation collages fragments of conversation and footage of her models splashing in the water with archival images of Overtown. Included is an aerial street view of Overtown animated in slow motion to illustrate how the construction of the interstate highway system plowed through the once-thriving cultural hub that hosted Black professionals, entertainers and athletes during segregation.
“They put the highway right in the center, like this cross, where the people lost their businesses and their homes,” Rawles said, noting that this kind of erasure happened nationwide in Black neighborhoods that were targeted by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. “I was thinking about them being sacrificed.”
While Rawles typically has her models wear clothes that billow in the water, making them appear suspended in an otherworldly state in her paintings, she was attracted to the tattoo “Towner 4 Life” that she saw across the torso of Devonn Tillman, a 36-year-old man born and raised in Overtown. She painted him lying shirtless and pensive across a wooden beam over the murky green bay, with light glancing off his hand that trailed into the water.
“The way he had his hair pulled up, it looked like a crown to me and the magic was right at the tip of his fingers,” Rawles said, describing him almost as her Jesus figure. “I was so happy to capture that and let even him see himself.”
In a phone interview, Tillman said that he was often around the Pérez but had never been inside before the exhibition opened. Seeing his portrait on the wall of the museum was overwhelming. “It made me feel so good, like I was a part of something, I was somebody,” he said. “Growing up where I grew up, that picture is my whole life, you know?”
Tillman, a strong swimmer, reappears less recognizably in other works in the Overtown series. At Art Basel Miami Beach, in a canvas exhibited by the gallery that represents Rawles, Lehmann Maupin, Tillman’s silhouette is viewed from underwater and dissolves into a dazzling play of light as he rises and breaks the surface.
The dealer David Maupin sees the Overtown works as both personal and universal. “You don’t necessarily look at the paintings and think of them as being portraits of residents of Miami — they’re just beautiful portraits that have a lot of physicality and poetry,” he said. “But they are also about this community. You walk away with a sense of joy even if the history is painful.”
From solo shows at Lehmann Maupin’s New York space in 2021 and 2023, Rawles’s works were purchased by institutions including the Pérez, SFMOMA and Spelman College — Rawles’s alma mater — as well as high-profile collectors like Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Beth Rudin DeWoody and Komal Shah. All the works from the Pérez exhibition have been placed in public and private collections. Rawles is making new paintings for a solo show at Lehmann Maupin’s London space next fall.
This surge of attention in recent years was a long time coming. Rawles called herself a “late bloomer.”
Rawles was born and raised in Wilmington, Del., in a working-class family, and her mother enrolled her in art classes early on. She remembers always having the ability to paint what she saw with realistic fidelity.
“For many years, I hated that about myself as an artist,” she said. “I wanted to be more free.” During school — at Spelman, where she befriended her peer Amy Sherald in drawing class, and at New York University, where she received her M.F.A. in 2000 — and her early career, Rawles tried out all different styles.
“It was kind of a blind search,” Sherald said by phone, while installing her mid-career survey at SFMOMA last month. “We all find our artistic DNA differently.”
Things clicked for Rawles when she was pregnant with her third daughter, who is now 9, and the artist was learning to swim for the first time (neither her parents nor grandparents had known how). The tranquillity she discovered in the water and the way it abstracted the body moving through it were qualities she realized she could use.
“I could paint dark subject matter in water and it wouldn’t look literal,” she said. “It could be a difficult thing and a glorious thing at the same time.”
Sherald attributes Rawles’s ability to paint water to genetic predisposition. “Calida is very great at capturing detail and complexities and all the many different things that are happening in her paintings with light, reflection, color variation,” she said.
Rawles credits Sherald’s firm advice to “go bigger” with the size of her canvases for her debut solo exhibition in 2020, at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, where Rawles scaled up her figures to larger than life dimensions. The success of that show came on the heels of the 2019 publication of “The Water Dancer,” the first novel by the National Book Award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rawles’s friend since college who had her paint the vivid cover image of a cosmic floating figure.
In Miami, where different communities can be siloed despite close physical proximity, the Pérez is aiming to build bridges with Rawles’s exhibition and “give Miami the opportunity to self-reflect and get to know itself better,” said Lacayo, the curator.
“It’s definitely an outreach to the Overtown community,” Rawles said, “to say, ‘You are seen, you are welcome, you are here, you are recognized.’”
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