The "mosaic collages" of local artist and printmaker Charles Humes Jr look into the Black experience in Miami while paying homage to lost lives and historical figures.
MOTIC, a collection of Humes’ work that combines collages, drawings, and paintings, is on display at the Gate D31 Gallery in Miami International Airport (MIA) until September.
Most of MOTIC’s large-scale mixed-media works, created between 2010–2021, were created using discarded materials Humes found in his neighbourhood, such as large commercial vinyl banners with grommets the artist utilised to make his "tapestries," a series of mixed-media portraitures and assemblages that hang like traditional paintings on a wall. Humes' collages are balanced arrangements that consist of cutting and pasting tiny pieces of newspapers, magazines, and fabric, resulting in images lined with lively textures and unexpected juxtapositions. The larger-than-life figurative forms and the emphasis on elongated stylised angles and shapes symbolise the complexity and multifaceted condition and predicament of the people and community to which the artist pays homage, according to the airport.
For more than 50 years, Humes' vast body of work across various mediums has focused on chronicling the life, struggles, triumphs, and character of Black people, African Americans, and people of colour. Influenced as a young man in the 1970s and 1980s by important cultural movements such as Black is Beautiful and Black Pride, Humes' work follows a rich tradition of former African American artists who expressed the everyday life and conditions of Black people.
Humes is currently an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA (The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) as part of a partnership between MASS MoCA in Massachusetts and Oolite Arts Miami.
Images: Daniel Portnoy/ MIA Galleries
