Calida Rawles Takes A Deep Dive Into Overtown In PAMM’s ‘Away with the Tides’

Artist Calida Rawles spent time exploring Miami’s Overtown neighborhood as part of the research for her first solo museum show “Away with the Tides” at the Perez Art Museum Miami through Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Lazaro Llanes)

Artist Calida Rawles swims at high noon. She knows this is most dangerous time to swim —one so easily burns, but she cannot stop herself, for it is then and there she most loves the play of light on the water.

Her current exhibition, “Away with the Tides,” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)  is a full-on rendering of such light in all its dazzling, even baroque sensuousness.

But Rawles is an artist as interested in exploring history and the psychological as giving herself over to the beauty of her acrylics. And water itself, for Rawles, is, above all, the holder of memory; memory for Rawles always returns to “us” as she calls persons of color.

Calida Rawles, “Release What I Will Not Give You,”
2024. Acrylic on canvas. 30 x 40 inches. (Photo by Marten Elder, courtesy of the artist/ Lehmann Maupin)

And so, in this current exhibition, Rawles first solo museum show, hyper-realistic portraits of African-Americans, Overtown residents all, share the canvas with the slow poetry of waters in motion. The result is plenty moving, and often alarming.

According to Rawles, “I use the beauty of the canvas to seduce viewers into harder conversations.” When PAMM contacted Rawles about the exhibition: “All I was thinking about,” Rawles recalls, “was Florida’s governor’s decision to deny Black history a place in Florida school’s Advanced Placement classes. Our history not worth acknowledging? I had turned to a friend, asking what to do with my rage. ‘Put it into your art,’ he said.”

And so Rawles, born in Wilmington, Delaware and now working in Los Angeles, began her own study of Florida history. It didn’t take her long to learn of Overtown, the once prosperous African-American jewel of South Florida, precisely where “old boy” power brokers decided a highway should be constructed, destroying a thriving Black community. ” ‘Urban renewal,’ ” Rawles says with an acute sense of irony. “The experience of Overtown is hardly unique,” she added, citing similar destructions of Black communities in New Orleans, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Atlanta, and the list goes on.

Calida Rawles, “To See What It Is,” 2024. Acrylic on
canvas. 84 x 48 inches. (Photo by Marten Elder, courtesy of the artist/ Lehmann Maupin)

But she set out to make that experience unique. Rawles spent weeks in Overtown, listening to the stories of those living there, witnessing what Rawles calls the myriad “moments of tenderness so rarely recorded in places like Overtown” and finally taking literally thousands of resident photographs and videos at two sites intricately connected to South Florida history: Virginia Key, the first (1945) and at the time only beach in Miami where African Americans were permitted; and the public pool at Overtown’s Theodore Gibson Park.

Then came the Herculean task of deciding which photos spoke most deeply to Rawles’ questions — the photos she would use to guide her painting.

Upon entering the exhibit, there’s a large canvas, “To See What It Is,” the portrait of a male elder. He floats between water and empty white canvas — “history erased,” according to the artist. Always the virtuoso colorist, Rawles paints his T-shirt a rich red, his jeans a deep blue. The beauty of his skin tones is a stunning reminder of how infrequently one sees dark skin in major museum exhibitions. His pose there in the waters, like so many in this exhibit, is triangular in nature suggesting movement — “resilience,” says Rawles. He is squinting as he looks beyond the canvas; it seems what he is looking at is too painful or too bright. This is a face that has seen everything.

The exhibit features three other portraits even larger than this one and several smaller ones.

In the first of these large canvases, a male body is caught as it is entering the water, or perhaps it is history. Entitled “Impact,” the portrait focuses only on legs and feet; the rest of the body is already submerged. The burgundy of the man’s attire is nothing short of luscious against Black skin. But Rawles’s subject may have hit the waters hard. Is he able to make his way through the deep? The viewer is far from sure. The light and the waters here are Rawles’ most menacing and surreal.

Calida Rawles, detail of “Impact,” 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 60 x 72 inches. (Photo by Marten Elder, courtesy of the artist/ Lehmann Maupin)

At a ninety-degree turn, the viewer encounters “Away with the Tides,” another half-submerged portrait, this time of a woman. This canvas chronicles sheer joy as a figure is lost and found in the sublimity of the waters. A shoulder becomes quite literally a breath-stopping mosaic as flesh has become infused with golds and blues. The danger of “Impact” now only splendor.

With still another ninety-degree turn, alone on its own wall, there’s a figure resting on a wooden plank in the sea. This canvas may be the real jewel of the collection. After the previous portraits, it is a relief to see a face, and what a face it is — one worthy of a flag. Rawles was able to catch all the sweetness and hopes, and all the skepticism that manage to live side by side in this young man. His musculature is rendered masterfully. The portrait’s title — “Towner For Life” — comes from a tattoo, a valentine to Overtown, that spreads across his torso. So do drops of ocean water that in Rawles’ light resemble blood.

Calida Rawles, “Towner for Life,” 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 102 inches (Photo by Marten Elder, courtesy of the artist/ Lehmann Maupin)

The smaller canvases in the exhibit often feature portraits of women. In what is among the exhibitions most unnerving works, one entitled, “Release What I Will Not Give,” a female figure both floats in the calm waters and seems to hover slightly above it. Her eyes are closed; her peace is palpable; she is nearly in rapture. Yet in the extreme right corner of the canvas, hardly noticeable at first glance, a small hand is there in the waters. Its gesture can only be read as a final lost cry for help.

But Rawles’ exhibition does not end with such images. Perhaps to emphasize that, she includes an 11-minute video installation, entitled “We Gonna Swim,” which is chock full of stills from her community photos as well as sections from those videos. The installation, a collaboration with Los Angeles documentary-maker Laura Brownson, is an essential postscript to Rawles’ paintings.

If, in her canvases, Rawles has examined the complexity of water itself as a mirror of its complex place in African-American memory, her video almost exclusively focuses on water as healer, source of the sublime as well as just plain fun.

Calida Rawles, “Away with the Tides,” 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 120 x 96 inches. (Photo by Marten Elder, courtesy of the artist/ Lehmann Maupin)

Upon entering a curtained off room, the viewer is surrounded on three sides by images that cover the walls in their entirety.  Only when the images are of water or of a single swimmer do the images of all three walls become one. There’s lots of laughter in these stills: children frolic, light filtered through water hits wading feet, dreadlocks, tattoos, impossibly decorated fingernails — all are rendered glorious. There are uncannily intimate close-ups of Black men in peace as they swim. Their images are beloved by the camera and glisten with grace.

The video does include some painful photos of the destruction of Overtown and its current disrepair. Most often they are juxtaposed with historical photos of a vibrant town and its elegant families. But, in the face of all the installation’s images, the ugly ones seem to speak of the hope and pride found in memory rather than despondency.

Perez Museum Associate Curator Maritza Lacayo, who commissioned the exhibit, describes it as an opportunity to know more of our hometown and its real history. But she knows, as does anyone who has seen the exhibit, that this is a chance to learn more of the human heart — your own as well as a community’s.

WHAT:  Calida Rawles: “Away with the Tides”

WHERE: The Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday through Monday; closed Tuesday and Wednesday, through Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025

COST:  18 for adults; $14 for seniors (62 plus with ID), and students (with ID), and those 7 to 18 years old; free for children 6 and younger, museum members, active U.S. military and veterans (with ID), disabled visitors and caregivers, healthcare professionals and first responders (with ID), Florida educators (with ID)

INFORMATION: 305-375-3000 or pamm.org.

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