CINTAS FOUNDATION
2015-2016
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| Jeremy Mikolajczak, Rafael Domenech, Hortensia Sampedro, Bahia Ramos and Carlos Alberto Fleitas at the Cintas Fellowship awards at the Museum of Arts + Design Freedom Tower on Saturday 10. Alexia Special Fodere / El Nuevo Herald |
The iconic Freedom Tower was the ideal site for awards that annually awards the Cintas Foundation and exhibition organized by the Museum of Art & Design at Miami Dade College, with the works of the finalists in a category, visual arts. Since 2011, the MDC manages the scholarship and is the executor of the collection of the foundation. The president of the institution, Hortensia E. Sampedro, announced the names of the winners on the night of Saturday 10, the date of historical significance for Cubans, since it marked the beginning of the war of independence in 1868.
The 51 Scholarship delivery quotes, for the period 2015-2016 fell to Carlos Alberto Fleitas, in the category of architecture; Ivette Herryman in musical composition; Carlos A. Aguilera Rafael Domenech in writing and visual arts.
Before his death, the sugar and railroad magnate Oscar B. Cintas (1887-1957), an important art collector and patron, left instructions that part of his property will be used in creating a foundation able to recognize the work of Cuban artists set outside the island. Since 1962 the institution named Cintas Foundation, in honor of the philanthropist and former ambassador tapes. Already in 1963, the first awards were given in the categories of architecture, fine arts and musical composition. In subsequent years other genres, including literature were added. Since then, the Cintas Fellowship has been awarded to more than 300 Cubans. After half a century is the oldest and most prestigious recognition given to Cubans outside the island level.
A jury composed Breukel Claire, John Roselione-Valadez, Jose Carlos Diaz and Jeremy Mikolajczak, executive director and chief curator of the MDC Museum of Art + Design, who was responsible for the opening ceremony, the proposal Domenech selected as the most attractive in visual arts.
The artist told El Nuevo Herald that the "award is a momentous historical value and winning is an honor that places him alongside important figures who have received". Domenech emigrated to America in 2010 and has just graduated from the New World School of the Arts of the MDC. The project presented to the Cintas Fellowship is based on the "investigation of major processes of time and space", in which the three-dimensionality is an important for the study of color and light factor. Notes that "mine is experimenting with shapes and the study of space and dynamics of the time."
The other finalists in visual arts, Harold Batista, Vanessa Diaz, Florencio Gelabert, Antuán Varas Rodríguez and Clara, had their works on display. Gelabert, who recently moved to Miami, after living 10 years in New York shows The Wall (The Wall). Defines the set of his plastic through a series of summaries that are repeated, such as "lessons ruins of my own imagination, references to architectural fragments, elements of nature like branches, tree trunks and water, pieces mirrors and reflections ". Interesting is also the installation of Vanessa Diaz, interdisciplinary artist with a focus from discarded and abandoned the family home, to explore different angles of architecture that define personal territory objects. In particular, his work part of a dining set that belonged to his grandparents. "This set was bought for your home eight years after they emigrated from Cuba. For them, this series of furniture was a symbol of the new family that started, to be resolute and to succeed in a different country. "
In architecture there were only two finalists, Carlos Alberto Fleitas and Rolando Morales Paciel. The first won the award, and $ 15,000 associated with the prize, to develop its proposal.
In the category of musical composition, jurors, Barbara White, a professor at Princeton University; Samuel Adler of the Juilliard School and Johnny L. Pherigo, the chair of music at the University of Central Florida, chose Herryman Ivette proposal as the winner. The other finalists were Armando Bayolo, Evelín Ramon, Carlos Rafael Rivera and Ileana Pérez Velásquez. Not all finalists and winners were present at the official ceremony of the awards.
In literature there were three contenders: Carlos A. Aguilera, Armando Correa and Carlos Pintado. From Prague, where he lives, after spending a long time in Germany, Aguilera expressed his gratitude to know who was the winner: "Not only because it provides (at the time and economic) development of a work, but because it makes you creators sharing territory with the likes of Luis Cruz Azaceta, Baruj Salinas, José Kozer, Maria Irene Fornes and Carlos Victoria, among others. " That he applied for a scholarship to complete a book of stories, "which in turn will be a reflection on the fascination in some people that philosophers have called the voice of the leader, embodying an idea or delirium."
The jury was headed by Richard White, who rose to national recognition when reading a poem for the inauguration of President Obama and declaim other during the opening of the US embassy in Cuba. The jurors were restates the writer and editor Enrique Fernandez and Jacqueline Loss, Spanish teacher and creative writing at the University of Connecticut.
One of the finalists, the poet Carlos Pintado, who lives in Miami Beach, and who last year received the Peace Prize for Poetry, important award given by The National Poetry Series, Nueve coins for his book, published in bilingual, English- Spanish, he recognizes the prestige of the award and the Cintas Foundation. His project is narrative. "I've been working on a book that I could not tell if it's a novel, each chapter has its own independence, or a book of stories intertwined months. It occurs in Wausau, a small town in Wisconsin, during a snowfall that requires a family (the classic American family) to discover herself. Snow is the metaphor of a promising confinement. " Although he did not receive the prize, he will lead to an end the book in which he works.
Each artist award, as the regulation states, must complete the project for which the grant requested.
