Calendars & Gradation Systems is the first ever posthumous retrospective of Fernando Garcia, a conceptual artist of Cuban origin who, throughout his life, exhibited frequently between Miami, Atlanta, and New York. Garcia was one of the many gay men who died during the AIDS crisis in 1989. The curator for this exhibition, artist, educator and writer Isabella Marie Garcia takes viewers on a journey through her discovery of his work, thanks to the extensive archives of exhibition documents, letters, and artwork held in the Miami Dade Public Library system, all of which was donated by a close friend of Fernando’s shortly after he passed. What’s more, this exhibition came to fruition at the Laundromat Art Space thanks to their open call, of which Isabella’s proposal was chosen over nearly 200 other applicants.
As one of the first generations of Cuban artists educated in the US, Fernando Garcia’s work is shockingly en vogue, even more than 30 years after his passing. Fernando was clearly grappling with subjects that artists are working through today, like the temporality of new media, the continuum of said temporality through city landscapes (BH / 2, 1981 Four pieces with secondary colors, 1974), the demonization of uneducated immigrant populations (Anti Bilingual Bigot, 1987) in the United States, or even avenues of alternative exhibition spaces (I Can Draw (ArtMobile Tire Tracks),1986), something artists today explore more as a result of necessity than anything else.
Walking into the exhibition, what's most immediately noticeable is the large chalkboard-painted installation on the right wall, featuring a blown-up letter sent to Fernando Garcia from a potential lover, rewritten in handwriting with chalk. As a teaching artist in the ‘70s and ‘80s, chalkboards frequently found their way into Fernando’s practice, whether it was in Anti Bilingual Bigot (1987) or A Marti (1983) both installation based, politically driven performance works referenced in Calendars & Gradation Systems through archives. At the same time, this first installation is a nod to what’s missing; Calendars & Gradation Systems certainly expresses a deep knowledge of the artist's practice by way of research, but there are many places that want for more work rather than archives of work. Most of Fernando's existing work is likely in the hands of a dispersed network of private collectors, and though MDPLS was able to provide several pieces in their collection, and Isabella was able to work incredibly well with what was available, the work itself is hard to replace. If Fernando truly is goading Isabella to these new discoveries as he seems to be doing, then he will certainly lead her to more work soon.
Across the room hangs January 1978, a work on loan from the CINTAS foundation, where Fernando was once a fellow. The piece is a calendar for the month with acrylic paint symbols within each day. Each symbol represents something that took place that day, but neither the curator nor the people she interviewed who knew Fernando were familiar with what any of the symbols represented, until the work arrived from CINTAS on installation day. Fernando had stapled pages from his agenda 47 years ago to the back of the calendar, with notes on what he did throughout the month. The notes have since been removed from the backing and scanned, allowing for some insight into the meaning of the red circles and the blue X’s. Whether through a date correction or a hidden note, the magic of this show is its continued discovery and the way in which it unfurls as it lives in the public, like a magical game of Clue or a mystery film.
Walking into the end of the main entrance, viewers can see two related works, 10,865 (1980) and Untitled [4 Panels] (1970). Both feature enlarged images of newspapers from their respective eras, with annotations and painted panels referencing the passage of time, a theme in which Fernando also explored in his calendar works. Now that the news referenced in this work is global political history, (in the case of 10,865, the Peruvian Havana Embassy Crisis of 1980) they hold a new level of depth to them, another layer of temporality that lives even beyond the artist himself. Viewers of the work today now know the eventual refugee crisis, the Mariel Boatlift that brought Castro’s so-called “undesirables” to the United States. They can now look up how the events in these newspapers were swiftly followed by the fall of the Soviet Union, El Periodo Especial, the AIDs crisis that looms over the exhibition and its mystery, and the longevity of the Castro regime well into the 21st century. All of this was impossible to know when this work was made, and yet it now informs this work in a way that only time could produce.
The majority of the work that lines the walls of Laudromat’s hallway at the end of the exhibition are studies, process photos, or promotional images of performances and installation-based projects Fernando did before he passed away. These drawings and images help ground the exhibition into a more holistic view of Fernando’s work, like how he considered the flow of bodies through the Miami Reading Symphony (1986) a performance piece he did where people would read into a microphone, how he developed the concept for A Marti (1983), or even some of the last works he made before passing with To Eneida, 1989, one of his last works before his death.
Calendars & Gradation Systems makes one consider the sheer matter of loss felt during the AIDs crisis, how many young, talented people’s lives were cut short, and how, by dying prematurely, many artists were eventually lost to obscurity. That even these archival materials and works are available to someone like Isabella is thanks to a lucky break and a loving friend. This is one story of thousands, many of which were not as lucky to be saved, guarded, and then turned up years later by happenstance. The loss is felt beyond the immediate years of the crisis and the victims of this disease; it was a heaving loss of great flood proportions, leveling communities and setting the world back dramatically. This exhibition makes me think of the legacies of all the artists working today, my own writing, and our own exhibitions; will all that remains in the end be some still shots and invites? Will the technological age preserve things more effectively, or simply make them lost in the everythingness of the online ether? Perhaps the value of these exhibitions truly lies in the here and now.
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