Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas

08/27/2026

Ayer se llevó a cabo otra reunión de coordinación en el Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida para precisar detalles de la muestra "Colección MocAA en Yucatán (Arte cubano)". que se inaugurará en el mes de septiembre de 2026 como parte de las actividades de homenaje por el 20 aniversario de la creación de la Facultad de artes visuales de la UADY. De izquierda a derecha: el artista y profesor de la UADY Javier Barrera, el artista Enrique Miralles (Tente), el director del Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida José Manuel Civeira, el artista James Bonachea, Katia Lara Ancona del equipo de comunicación del Museo, Esmé Ramírez coordinadora general de exposiciones y David Mateo crítico de arte y director de Artcrónica.

08/27/2026

MOCAA Explores New Collaborations with Alain Arias-Misson

A recent meeting between the directors of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MOCAA) and Belgian-American poet, novelist, and visual artist Alain Arias-Misson opened the possibility of developing a series of projects of mutual interest aimed at bringing his work closer to audiences in South Florida.

The conversation created a space for collaboration around one of the defining aspects of Arias-Misson’s extensive career: his ability to move poetry and language beyond their traditional formats and turn them into visual, spatial, and participatory experiences. This approach finds clear points of contact with MOCAA’s mission to promote contemporary art as a living practice connected to its audiences.

For the museum, this possibility also represents an opportunity to strengthen its relationship with the community and to contribute to Miami’s position as an international platform for public art and visual poetry.

Educated at Harvard, where he studied Classical Greek, Alain Arias-Misson has developed an artistic and literary career spanning more than six decades. Over the course of that trajectory, he has participated in more than sixty solo exhibitions and two hundred group exhibitions. His work is represented in institutions including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Getty Museum, MuHKA in Belgium, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. His archives, including sketches, writings, and correspondence, were acquired by Yale University.

Arias-Misson is internationally recognized as the creator of the Public Poem, a form of poetry that carries writing into urban space and transforms the city into the medium of the work. Human-scale letters and signs are carried by performers who move through and interact with the surrounding environment and its inhabitants, turning reading into a physical and collective experience.

His first Public Poem, created in Brussels in 1967, emerged as a protest against the Vietnam War. Since then, Arias-Misson has developed these interventions in cities including Paris, New York, Rome, Venice, Madrid, and Berlin, and more recently at the Vatican and in Naples with his Public LOVE Poem.

His research also extends into visual and concrete poetry, a field in which he has worked since the 1960s and where the word moves beyond its exclusively textual function to acquire a material presence. This territory includes his Sculpture Poems, Chamanic Dark Light Poems, Poemamobiles—automobiles transformed into readable and sonic poems—and the panels derived from his Public Poems.

Across these different forms, Arias-Misson has constructed a body of work situated at the intersection of language, image, object, and action, making poetry an active presence within contemporary space.

Currently based between Miami and Europe, Arias-Misson continues to develop his work through exhibitions, lectures, and the publication of books. His recent meeting with MOCAA’s directors now opens the possibility of incorporating new projects connected to this trajectory into the museum’s programming and initiatives.

08/26/2026

08/24/2026

Como un acápite singular dentro de las entrevistas que hizo Artcrónica para la investigación sobre el “Arte cubano en la diáspora”, incluimos también diálogos con fundadores y líderes de proyectos artísticos de la Florida, como es el caso de Leonardo Rodríguez, coleccionista de arte y fundador del Kendall Art Center y, posteriormente, del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de las Américas (MoCAA).
(Cámaras Belkis Martín)
Leonardo Rodríguez: Hace muy poco tiempo que comenzamos a hacer todas las gestiones para poder convertirnos en Museo, lo que es hoy en día el MoCAA. Al dar ese paso, hasta las exposiciones que hacíamos antiguamente, con la defensa de lo que es el arte cubano, cambiaron un poco en el enfoque y la estrategia. Al convertirnos en Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de las Américas, tenemos que incluir entonces a toda la región y la diversidad de sus creadores. De todas formas, continuamos trabajando con el arte cubano; tomamos las obras de nuestra colección, son 177 artistas con piezas en el inventario, y las vamos a comenzar a introducir en los circuitos de Brasil, México, Venezuela, Argentina, Honduras, etc. Lo que estamos buscando ahora es el intercambio cultural. Yo traigo lo mío para acá y tú llevas lo tuyo para allá. Yo pago mis costos y tú los tuyos. Ya tenemos cinco propuestas para el año que viene. Es curioso: cuando tú le dices a la gente que estás dentro del perfil de Museo, se muestran más interesados en tus proyectos que si estás en un Centro cultural. Ahí está la diferencia entre lo que fue el Kendall y lo que es hoy el MoCAA. No hay ninguna diferencia aparentemente: es el mismo local, los mismos profesionales, pero cambia el denominativo y eso pesa mucho. El Museo nos está trayendo otro tipo de perspectiva, otro tipo de movimiento y alcance.

08/24/2026

The Caregiver’s Heart Draws an Engaged Audience to MoCAA
By Rodriguez Collection Team

The presentation of The Caregiver’s Heart. Art as a Bridge, by Yamilet Uzcanga Trujillo, drew an engaged audience to the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCAA) on Saturday, August 22, turning the launch of the book into a broader conversation about caregiving, vulnerability, family, and the forms of strength that frequently remain invisible.

Presented alongside the opening of Freddy Trujillo’s exhibition Eclectic, the event brought together readers, artists, families, cultural professionals, and members of the South Florida community. The considerable public response was particularly meaningful for a book devoted to an experience that usually occurs away from public view, inside homes and families, where the daily work of caring for another person is rarely documented or recognized.

Opening remarks were delivered by Edith Monge Silva, director of Languages Foundation, the Miami-based nonprofit that participated in the publishing project and whose work is devoted to language in its written, oral, musical, and artistic forms, with a particular commitment to preserving and strengthening Spanish within Florida’s Latino community.

Uzcanga Trujillo’s book approaches caregiving from within that lived experience. Reflections, family voices, and letters form a narrative in which art appears as shelter, accompaniment, and a means of reaching another person when ordinary language becomes insufficient. Published in Spanish as El corazón del cuidador. El arte como puente, the volume was conceived as a meeting place for those who care and those who have been cared for, and for readers capable of recognizing their own histories in those relationships.

Saturday’s presentation allowed that private territory to become collective. The book signing and conversations with the author extended the formal presentation into direct exchanges with members of the audience, giving the gathering a particularly personal character. The subject of caregiving moved from the pages of the book into the museum itself, carried through stories, recognition, and conversation among those present.

Its coincidence with Eclectic gave the day an additional resonance. Freddy Trujillo’s paintings repeatedly explore coexistence, family, bonds, and the possibility of sharing a common space; Uzcanga Trujillo’s writing addresses what is required to sustain those bonds when illness, dependence, or vulnerability alters everyday life. The two projects approached related human questions through different languages, and the public moved naturally between them.

The success of the presentation therefore rested on more than attendance. It lay in the quality of the exchange generated around a subject that affects countless families but is rarely given comparable cultural visibility. For several hours, literature, visual art, and personal experience occupied the same space, confirming the museum’s role not only as a place in which works are exhibited, but as a meeting point for the communities and experiences to which those works speak.

The Caregiver’s Heart. Art as a Bridge is published by Editorial María T. and was presented with the support of Florida Arts & Culture, Miami-Dade County, Languages Foundation, Editorial María T., and Rodriguez Collection.

08/24/2026

A Strong Public Response Marks the Opening of Freddy Trujillo’s Eclectic at MoCAA
By Rodriguez Collection Team

On Saturday, August 22, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCAA) welcomed a large and diverse audience for the opening of Eclectic, the solo exhibition by Venezuelan artist Freddy Trujillo. Throughout the day, visitors moved through the museum’s galleries, met the artist, and encountered a body of work in which abstraction has become the visual vocabulary of a practice developed over decades.

The strong public response gave the opening the character of a genuine encounter. Artists, cultural professionals, friends of the museum, families, and members of the South Florida community gathered around a painter whose biography itself explains much of the exhibition’s title. Trujillo has worked across television, literature, teaching, poetry, and the visual arts, while painting has remained a continuous presence throughout his life.

That continuity became particularly visible on Saturday. Rather than presenting abstraction as an exercise detached from lived experience, Eclectic brings together paintings built around ideas of coexistence, family, human connection, movement, secrecy, and the shared world. Works such as Coexistence IV, People, Family Meeting, Worlds, Roads, and The Secret translate these subjects into circles, fields of colour, intersecting forms, and relationships established across the surface of the canvas.

The exhibition also offered visitors an opportunity to approach a lesser-known dimension of an artist widely recognized for his long career in television. Trujillo trained at the Cristóbal Rojas School of Visual Arts in Venezuela and later continued his artistic development while studying audiovisual media in Paris. Painting preceded television and ultimately survived alongside it, becoming increasingly abstract as his career progressed.

His trajectory has also been marked by Parkinson’s disease, diagnosed in 2012, and by his subsequent work with others living with the condition. Today, through the American Parkinson Disease Association workshops Conectando a través del Arte, Trujillo uses artistic practice as a means of participation, exchange, and enjoyment. That dimension of his biography gives additional weight to an exhibition so insistently concerned with how people remain connected to one another.

The opening of Eclectic shared the day with the presentation of The Caregiver’s Heart. Art as a Bridge, by Yamilet Uzcanga Trujillo. The simultaneous programs brought painting, literature, caregiving, and community into the same space and contributed to the sustained flow of visitors throughout the event.

For MoCAA, Saturday’s attendance confirmed something beyond the success of an opening. It demonstrated the capacity of a museum program to bring different audiences together around an artist’s work and to make the exhibition space function as a place for conversation, recognition, and shared experience.

Eclectic is presented with the support of Florida Arts & Culture, Miami-Dade County, Languages Foundation, Editorial María T., and Rodriguez Collection.

08/22/2026

📖 EL CORAZÓN DEL CUIDADOR. EL ARTE COMO PUENTE — presentación y firma en el MoCAA

Hay una experiencia que ocurre a diario en miles de casas y casi nunca llega a la página: la de quien cuida. Yamilet Uzcanga Trujillo la escribe desde adentro.

Cuidar es un acto que nace del alma. Desde esa premisa, el libro abre un recorrido donde el arte se vuelve refugio, puente y compañía. Reflexiones, voces familiares y cartas que laten componen un tejido que revela la fortaleza invisible de quienes sostienen a otros, y de quienes son sostenidos.

✨ Su ambición es un espacio de encuentro: un lugar donde el lector pueda sentirse visto, comprendido y acompañado. Una invitación a mirar la vulnerabilidad con otros ojos y a descubrir la belleza que persiste incluso en medio de la incertidumbre. El subtítulo dice el resto — el arte como puente. Como pasaje. Como aquello que permite cruzar hacia el otro cuando las palabras se quedan cortas.

🎙️ Las palabras de apertura estarán a cargo de Edith Monge Silva, directora de Languages Foundation, entidad que participa en este proyecto editorial dedicado a promover el bilingüismo, preservar la lengua española y respaldar obras que fortalezcan el patrimonio cultural hispano. Con el sello de Editorial María T. Edición en inglés: The Caregiver's Heart. Art as a Bridge.

🎨 La presentación comparte jornada con la apertura de Eclectic, del pintor venezolano Freddy Trujillo. El museo concibe el día como un encuentro entre arte, literatura, cuidado y comunidad: en una sala, lienzos que llevan años preguntándose cómo se representa un vínculo; en otra, un libro que se pregunta cómo se sostiene.

📍 MoCAA · 12063 SW 131st Ave, Miami, FL 33186
🗓️ Sábado 22 de agosto · 11:00 a.m.
✉️ [email protected] · ☎️ 1 (305) 213-4162