miami to marco marco island center for the arts Cundo Bermúdez, Untitled
Cundo Bermúdez’s Untitled (1989), courtesy Marco Island Center for the Arts

Miami to Marco Brings Latin American Art to Southwest Florida

Marco Island Center for the Arts partners with a Miami museum in a cross-cultural exhibition, celebrating the region's multicultural landscape.

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BEST CULTURAL SHOWING

Southwest Florida’s cultural landscape reflects the collective influence of its Indigenous voices, Midwestern transplants, global visitors and growing Latin American community. Shining a light on the colorful tapestry and influx of diverse talent, Marco Island Center for the Arts (MICA) spotlights Hispanic artists in one of the most anticipated exhibits of the season for Gulfshore Life’s editors. 

On May 5, MICA opens Miami to Marco, a two-month exhibition of works by 15 artists from the permanent collection at Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCA-Americas). Formerly the Kendall Art Center, the museum was founded by Cuban-born collector Leonardo Rodríguez to promote and preserve Caribbean, Central and South American art. Since achieving official museum status in 2022, MoCA-Americas has been broadening its mission, engaging diverse artistic voices and enriching America’s art scene with Latin cultural narratives.

The show marks the beginning of a cultural exchange between the arts centers, kindled by Naples artist Lisett Llorens, who recently discovered the Miami museum and recognized the institutions’ aligned visions. In June, a group of MICA artists—including globetrotting abstractionist Garry Scott Wheeler, Italian-born painter Giampaolo E. Curreri and South African creator Myriam Kriel—display their work in MoCA-Americas, extending the island’s blended culture to the East Coast. “We are bringing our version of multiculturalism,” MICA’s executive director Hyla Crane says.

Cundo Bermúdez

Cundo Bermúdez traveled the world in the mid-1900s, drawing inspiration and exhibiting his works. Influenced by defining Mexican painters Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, as well as Spanish master Diego Velázquez, the late Cuban Modernist explored the midcentury era’s evolving conception of color and form through scenes of Cuban everyday life. Feeling out of place in his native country—and later living in Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C. and Miami—Cundo expressed himself through his art. The Rodríguez Collection includes several pieces from his gouache work in the late 1980s and 1990s, which reflect his experience adapting to life in the United States and resonate with the Latin community’s integration into American culture.

Ivonne Ferrer 

Multihyphenate artist Ivonne Ferrer explores the intricacies of gender and societal pressure through the female form. Her figures are often rendered with missing or additional limbs, split craniums or cracked torsos, symbolizing the fractured demands modern women endure. Pieces like No hay rayo que por bien no venga juxtapose classical motifs with digital-age imagery. Roman columns frame a disembodied arm—cell phone in hand—growing out from a mass of tentacles. Ancient figurative sculptures and cityscapes stand obscured by a cell phone, evoking the constancy of digital intrusion. Throughout, Ivonne reminds us that even the human experience—messy, overloaded, uniquely formed—remains shared across form, culture and time. 

Carlos Enrique Prado

A Cuban ceramicist living in the United States, Carlos Enrique Prado projects Greco-Roman-style figurative sculpture work into the modern era, recontextualizing classical motifs with industrial materials and sharp-edged symbolism. In Way of Sorrows from his Stubborn collection, the University of Miami ceramics professor explores themes of struggle and grief. The marble-like figures—cracked, collapsed and struck by blunt objects—reflect a personal and cultural reckoning, bridging centuries-old iconography with the dissonance of modern immigrant identity.