Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides

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.

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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.

‍Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami and curated by Maritza M. Lacayo, Associate Curator, with the support of Fabiana A. Sotillo, Curatorial Assistant. It is organized at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art by C. Rose Smith, Assistant Curator of Photography.

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Presented by

All exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are underwritten by the MBMA Exhibition Fund.

Major annual support is provided by Kay Clark and Maggie and Milton Lovell, with generous annual funding from Anonymous, Gloria and Kenneth Boyland, Holly and Paul T. Combs, Deborah and Bob Craddock, Michael and Maria Douglass, Eleanor and William Halliday, Debi and Galen Havner, Buzzy Hussey and Hal Brunt, Jay and Kristen Keegan, the Doris S. and Hubert Kiersky Charitable Remainder Trust, Carl and Valerie Person, and Bill Townsend.