Calida Rawles Catalog
Published in conjunction with the artist’s first solo museum exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and presented at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, this striking catalogue explores Calida Rawles’s transcendent, hyperrealistic paintings of Black bodies immersed in water. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and the cultural and historical symbolism of water, Rawles’s work reckons powerfully with the legacy of racial injustice while foregrounding healing, resilience, and presence.
Los Angeles–based Rawles (b. 1976) treats water as both subject and symbol—an active force that evokes spiritual renewal alongside histories of trauma and exclusion. For this body of work, she turns her attention to Overtown, a once-thriving Miami neighborhood dismantled by systemic racism and gentrification. In a pivotal shift in her practice, Rawles photographed her subjects submerged at the formerly segregated Virginia Key Beach, directly engaging with the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow–era segregation, and Miami’s ecological history.
Through luminous surfaces and carefully composed portraits, Rawles creates a space where past and present converge, offering a deeply moving meditation on visibility, memory, and survival.
Details:
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Print length: 152 pages
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Language: English
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Publisher: DelMonico Books
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Publication date: July 30, 2024
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Dimensions: 9.5 x 0.7 x 12 inches
