OBJETS D'ART: The Freedom of Things

Pan American Art Projects Miami · Little River / Little Haiti

Exhibition on view: Nov 29, 2026 - Jan 5, 2027

Eleven artists, including Troy Abbott, Ricardo Brey, León Ferrari, Kcho, José Toirac and Rachel Valdés, use assemblage, appropriation, accumulation and reworked materials and images to explore how objects acquire new identities while keeping fragments of their former selves, a reflection on loss and reinvention as displacement and political uncertainty reshape lives and identities.

Rachel Valdés

Rachel Valdés (b. 1990, Havana, Cuba) is a visual artist based between Havana and Barcelona. A graduate of the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts, she specializes in painting but works across photography, land art, public interventions and large-scale immersive installations. Her art explores perception, materiality and interaction with space, often using mirrors, glass, stainless steel and polycarbonate to create sensory experiences that connect viewers to their surroundings and to themselves. Her mirrored installation "Happily Ever After" was installed on Havana's Malecón for the 2012 Havana Biennial, and "Blue Cube" (2015) became a landmark of public art in the city. Her work "The Beginning of the End" (2016) was shown in Times Square in New York. Her works are in collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and the Donald Rubin Foundation, and she is represented by Galeria Mayoral.

Rachel Valdés. Photo by Rachel Valdés, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Troy Abbott

Troy Abbott (b. 1967) is an American multidisciplinary artist working in digital media. He earned a BFA in drawing from the University of Florida in 1990 but gravitated toward digital art. In 2002 he made his first birdcage, inspired by the film "Blade Runner," in which humans and machines coexist and become almost interchangeable. From 2006 he devoted himself fully to the series, giving up his job running a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale. He scours thrift stores and vintage shops for antique cages with personality and combines them with recycled technology, placing small screens inside that play video of real birds, which perch with only an occasional movement. Though the cage doors stand open, the birds never leave, a meditation on freedom. In later works he exposes the circuitry that gives the birds life, deepening a subtle commentary on the nature of reality.

Artworks in this exhibition

Ricardo Brey

Ricardo Brey (b. 1955, Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban artist who has lived and worked in Ghent, Belgium, since 1990. Educated at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro and the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana, he took part in the landmark 1981 exhibition "Volumen I," which brought him wide critical attention. His practice spans drawing, sculpture and installation, and its backbone is assemblage, combining made and found objects into new wholes that draw on many cultures, religions and natural worlds. In the 1980s he mined the legacies of colonialism and Afro-Cuban traditions, producing faux historical documents and Santería-influenced sculptures. In 1992, at the invitation of curator Jan Hoet, he became the first Cuban artist to take part in Documenta, in Kassel. His later projects include "Universe" (2002–2006), and his series of boxes, presented at the 56th Venice Biennale. He is represented by Alexander Gray Associates.

Ricardo Brey. Photo by We Document Art, courtesy Alexander Gray Associates

León Ferrari

León Ferrari (1920–2013) was an Argentine artist who is regarded as one of the most important Latin American artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His work blends art with politics, drawing with sculpture, and concept with form. He began his career pursuing parallel interests in art and engineering, an influence visible in the structural emphasis of much of his work, and first exhibited ceramic sculptures in the 1950s. Over the following decades his experiments expanded to film, drawings, found objects, heliographs and hanging sculptures in materials ranging from wire to bones. A fascination with language runs throughout his career, notably in his written drawings that take their departure from script. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and in 2009 MoMA paired him with Mira Schendel in "Tangled Alphabets."

León Ferrari. Photo by Ministerio de Cultura, Argentina, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

José Manuel Fors

José Manuel Fors (b. 1956, Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban artist who works with photography, objects and installation. He studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Art in Havana from 1972 to 1976 and at the Institute of Museology from 1983 to 1986. Through his photographic work and objects, he has sought to rewrite the silenced, fragmented history of his generation in Cuba, reconstructing memories and the beauty he was able to save to build a metaphorical language of identity and social memory. Rooted in minimalism, his practice recycles and repurposes objects, so that fragments become autobiographical statements, and his dissatisfaction with traditional means of art opened the way to experimentation. His exhibitions include "Hojarasca" at the Fototeca de Cuba (1996), "Historias Circulares" at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana (2006) and "Pormenores" at the 11th Havana Biennial (2012).

Graciela Sacco

Graciela Sacco (1956–2017) was an Argentine artist and professor from Rosario. She earned a degree in visual arts from the National University of Rosario in 1987, with a thesis on the Argentine avant-garde of the 1960s and the landmark political-conceptual action "Tucumán Arde," and taught there until 1997. Her work addressed social conflict, political violence, migration and the relationship between memory and photography, using photography, video and interventions in public space. She represented Argentina at the biennials of São Paulo (1996), Havana (1997 and 2000), Venice (2001) and Shanghai (2004), and was named artist of the year by the Argentine Association of Art Critics in 2001. Her works are held by the Museo Reina Sofía, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.

Graciela Sacco. Photo by CCPE Rosario, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rusty Scruby

Rusty Scruby (b. 1964) is a Dallas artist known for cutting and weaving paper and photographs into mathematically precise constructions. He initially studied aerospace engineering in college before changing his major to music composition, and studied at Texas A&M University and the University of North Texas; he eventually turned to art while incorporating elements of his earlier studies into his work. He often uses music and mathematical configurations of waves in his fabrications, cutting photographs into modular units and reassembling them into undulating "photographic reconstructions" that read as an image from a distance and dissolve into abstraction up close. His practice has expanded to works on paper constructions, wooden cube networks and hand-knit wool. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, as well as Microsoft and Capital One.

Kcho

Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado, b. 1970, Nueva Gerona, Isla de Pinos, Cuba) is a Cuban artist who began his artistic training on his native island before moving to Havana, where he completed his studies and continues to live and work. He emerged on the Cuban art scene in the early 1990s with a highly distinctive style. In a decade marked by growing migration from the island, his work gravitated toward that theme, portraying the drama of Cuban migration and, above all, the perilous voyage by sea. He builds his sculptures, installations and drawings from the materials of that journey, such as inner tubes, boats, oars, fishermen's nets and hooks. Today he is regarded as one of the most important artists of his generation. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Kcho. Photo by Anteros01, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mabel Poblet

Mabel Poblet (b. 1986, Cienfuegos, Cuba) is a Cuban multimedia artist who lives and works between Cuba and Madrid. Her practice explores identity, mobility and belonging, often through photographs that are cut, folded, woven and layered into reflective, sculptural surfaces. She graduated from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 and earned a degree from the University of the Arts (ISA) in Havana in 2012, and in 2008 took part in Tania Bruguera's Cátedra Arte de Conducta workshops. The daughter of a theater director and an architect, she has said that art first appeared to her as a way to communicate what she found hard to express in words, and that from theater she inherited an interest in presence and the body, and from architecture an attention to space and memory. She has taken part in several editions of the Havana Biennial and represented Cuba in the Cuban Art Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

José Toirac

José Toirac (b. 1966, Guantánamo, Cuba) is a Cuban artist whose work observes and dismantles historical and political processes. He graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana in 1985 and from the Superior Institute of Art in 1990. Drawing on documents and images from public sources, such as official newspapers and magazines that had already passed state censorship, as well as Cuban national records and archives, he exposes the silences of official history and the ways history is manipulated to reinforce a given idea. His work was included in "The American Effect" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003, and his project "Orbis: Tribute to Walker Evans," made with Meira Marrero, was shown at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana in 2007. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ludwig Forum in Aachen. He received Cuba's National Prize of Plastic Arts.