About Aluna
Aluna Art Foundation is a non-profit organization 501 (c)3 created to promote a wide range of dialogues among artistic practices through a continuous and open invitation for artists to engage in its projects. As an alternative space, Aluna Art Foundation offers Miami’s artists the possibility of participating, together with those from other regions or countries, in curatorial projects whose aim is the production of creative visions of the context we live in.
Considering that Miami is an epicenter of Latin American art in the world, Aluna Art Foundation strengthens our understanding of the past and the present of this art through formative and sensitizing strategies of knowledge and participation. Forming institutional and organizational alliances serves as a platform for artists that are not represented, promotes exchanges between established and emerging artists, and offers a space for those projects that can’t find a place within the mainstream.
Aluna Art Foundation’s vision is to provide the community of Miami with curatorial projects that involve a dialogue between the local and international art scene, conducting its mostly collective inquiries around the connection between art and society. The foundation will continue to serve as an ever-expanding platform for the introduction of Miami artists in galleries, organizations, and institutions in a changing and mobile context.
Our vision includes the possibility of crossing the abysm that has been separating the general public from contemporary art. Through our curatorial practice, and our diverse strategies of interaction, we will construct awareness of contemporary art in general, and of Latin American art in particular. These efforts will not only strengthen our vision of art history, but our outlook on the present. The processes of dialogues will allow the people to experience the artworks, and to participate in their practices in a transformative way, living an experience capable of mobilizing ideas and social imagination.
Aluna was founded on April 18th, 2011 under the laws of the State of Florida.
Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos) is the curatorial instance of Aluna Art Foundation.
Focus Locus is an Aluna Curatorial Collective project for contemporary photography.
Mad Cow is an Aluna platform for performance, experimental and emerging art.
Aluna Curatorial Collective
“Curating is a practice-of selection, of dialogue with and between the works, of display-that causes an experience of knowledge, capable of generating a vision and, ultimately, of engaging the intimate and social imagination. It is a job that involves a process of accompanying in the creation and the unfolding of art works, in order to trigger a way of thought production that moves around, that does not have property, that is not static, but that becomes alive with every spectator that it moves. This creation of visions generates sensibility, new relationships to the personal and collective reality and, above all, new imaginative possibilities for everyone. For us, it is vital to cross the abysm that has been separating the general public from contemporary art. We want to generate processes of dialogue that allow us to get closer to the thought process of the artist and experience the work as a hopefully transformative, lived experience that in any case is capable of mobilizing ideas and imaginations”.
From “Aluna Art Foundation: Rethinking Curating. An Interview with Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos”. Art District Magazine, Florida. April-May 2014.
ADRIANA HERRERA, PhD
Adriana Herrera earned her P.h.D. with an interdisciplinary dissertation in the fields of Literature and Art, proposing the concept of “Extreme Fiction” as derived from a particular way of its relation that ultimately filters reality. Her curatorial vision searches for the connection between the intimacy and the collective, the personal and the social realms, and the interest for the need and possibilities of imagination.
She conducted the panel Strategies of Post-Utopian Art: Panel with Cuban Artists at the Miami Art Fair (2010). This research was essential for the curatorial project Critical Strategies of Post-Utopian Cuban Art, presented at Houston Art Fair in 2011. In 2012 she co-curated María Thereza Negreiros: Offerings, at the Frost Art Museum.
Adriana Herrera was an art critic for El Nuevo Herald from 2000 to 2013. She worked as an editor advisor with Arte al Día International Magazine, conducting the publication to a new level of intellectual strength. She has work as a free-lancer art critic with publication such us Art Nexus, Arte al Limite, Art Experience NYC and also wrote for and managed the contemporary art section of the magazine Poder in Mexico for ten years. She is member of Art Table, and was part of the Advisory Committee of the Bakehouse Art Complex.
Herrera lectured about Ernesto Oroza’s “Arquitectura de la necesidad” at Arizona State University. During the V Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Spanish and Latin American Literatures, Linguistics, and Cultures at the University of Florida, she presented the essay “Paradojas del mercado de arte cubano de la generación disidente de los 80” (published in the academic magazine Sin fronteras). Furthermore, she has given different lectures about art in local spaces of Miami and participated in many cultural panels.
Herrera is the co-author of the critical essay for the book of “Raúl Canibano” published by La Fabrica/FotoBolsillo (Madrid, 2012). She is one of the authors of “The Island Rape. Nesolectura exercises around Bill Viola”, published by the Deputy Ministry of Culture of the Canary Islands. She has written essays for the catalogues of artists from different countries and generations such as the Peruvian Fernando de Szyszlo, the Cuban Rubén Torres Llorca, the Argentinean Miguel Angel Giovanetti, the Venezuelan Nela Ochoa, and the Colombian Joel Grossman, among others. She wrote essays for the Museum’s catalogs of the exhibitions of Lorna Otero (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico), Xavier G-Solis (Mussée International de la chaussure de Romans, France), or the Cuban Art Collection of Arturo and Lisa Mosquera (Museum of Art + Design, Miami), as she participated in the book Gonzalo Lebrija. As times goes by (“Other Criteria”, Londres, 2010) to name a few. In 2011 she was awarded at Art Tables as one of the outstanding women leading in art in South Florida. She was included for the curator Adriano Pedrosa in the anthology Brazilian Art in Art Nexus (2011).
In 2011, she created with Willy Castellanos called Aluna Art Foundation as an alternative art space which the aims to promote the dialogue among local and international artistic practices and explore unreeled practices in Miami. Since its founding, Aluna Curatorial Collective has curated, organized and/or produced more than 30 exhibition projects that were hosted at Aluna’s space or in different galleries and museums in Miami, Siberia and Monaco. Among the most significant of them are: “Contemporary Families in Miami: a Photo Album” (The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, 2015, Miami); “Affective Architectures” (AAF, 2014-2015, Miami); “Walking in someone else’s shoes: Identities in Transit” (AAF, 2013-2014, Miami), “Exodus: Alternate Documents” (CCEMiami, winner of the “Best Cultural Event of the Year 2014 in Miami”), “Seminal Art” (Siberian Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013, Siberia); “Damien Hirst & Sonia Falcone” (General Society Private Banking of Monaco, 2013, Monaco); Vanishing Points and Convergences: Salvadorian artist in Perspective” (Biscayne Art House, 2013, Miami); “Memories of the Oikos: The House Re-Presented” (CCEMiami, 2012, Miami), “Body, Maps and Territories: Personel Geographies” (AAF, 2012, Miami); and “Concerning The Spiritual in Art” (AAF, 2012, Miami).
WILLY CASTELLANOS
An Art Historian, Curator and Photographer, holder of a degree in History of Arts from the University of Havana (1993) were he graduated with a thesis on photography: “Nude as Objet and Strategy in Cuban Photography (1982-1993)”.
In Havana, he worked as a free-lance photographer for magazines like Bohemia, Prisma Internacional and Revista Tablas. He lived in Buenos Aires for 7 years working for local magazines, newspapers and other organizations. He worked as a photojournalist for the magazine Pugliese and the music publisher BAM (Buenos Aires Música), both projects of Buenos Aires Cultural Affairs Department. A contributor to the entertainment pages of the newspapers Clarín and La Nación, Castellanos as also co-authored two books: “El Deseo en El Pavo Real (Historia de una academia de Tango)” with the composer and dramaturge Alberto Muñoz (Buenos Aires, 2000); and “Obras: 1996-2000 ” (Group of Authors), a publication from El Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.
In 2001, he moved to Miami, where he actually lives and works. His shots have been featured in one-man and group shows in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, and belongs to collections like the Jorge Reynardus Private Collection, NY, and The Cuban-American Phototeque Permanent Collection, Miami. His writings on art have been published in the magazines FotoVision, Revolución y Cultura, Alante Magazine/The Sun Sentinel, Arte al Día International, Art Nexus, LetraUrbana.com and Nagari Magazine, as well as in several exhibition catalogs in the United States.
In Miami, Castellanos was the Curator of the photography exhibition “Prayers for Saints and Orishas” at the Spanish Cultural Center of Miami (CCEMiami), and also of “New Gods: José Franco,” and “20 Brands by Felix Beltrán” (co-curated with Rafael López-Ramos) for the Miami Dade College Art Gallery System (AGC).
In 2011, he created with Adriana Herrera, Aluna Art Foundation, to promote artistic practices that question the hegemonic in Miami. Since its founding, Aluna Curatorial Collective has curated, organized and/or produced more than 30 exhibition projects that were hosted at Aluna’s space or in different galleries and museums in Miami, Siberia and Monaco. Among the most significant of them are: “Contemporary Families in Miami: a Photo Album” (The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, 2015, Miami); “Affective Architectures” (AAF, 2014-2015, Miami); “Walking in someone else’s shoes: Identities in Transit” (AAF, 2013-2014, Miami), “Exodus: Alternate Documents” (CCEMiami, winner of the “Best Cultural Event of the Year 2014 in Miami”), “Seminal Art” (Siberian Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013, Siberia); “Damien Hirst & Sonia Falcone” (General Society Private Banking of Monaco, 2013, Monaco); Vanishing Points and Convergences: Salvadorian artist in Perspective” (Biscayne Art House, 2013, Miami); “Memories of the Oikos: The House Re-Presented” (CCEMiami, 2012, Miami), “Body, Maps and Territories: Personel Geographies” (AAF, 2012, Miami); and “Concerning The Spiritual in Art” (AAF, 2012, Miami).
Castellanos is the co-author of the critical essay for the book of Cuban photographer Raúl Canibano published by La Fabrica (Madrid, 2012); and is currently working on the publication of two more books on Cuban contemporary photography.
“Exodus: a missing page in history”, (a 20 photo’s selected of the entire work curated by Adriana Herrera) which documents the start of the massive wave of “rafters” that left the coast of Havana in 1994, was selected and invited in 2012 to open the Photoamerica edition of Arteamericas, the Latin-American Contemporary Art Fair of Miami. Then in 2014, an extended version of the series –“Exodus: Alternate Documents”, conceived as a participative and community art project-, was awarded by Artes Miami Foundation with the price of the “Best Cultural Event of the Year”. This Exodus’ series is also part of the book “Artists in Purgatory”, published by “Alianza de Arte Cubano”, Miami, 2015.
Focus Locus is an Aluna Curatorial Collective project for contemporary photography.
Mad Cow is a project room for performance, experimental and emerging art.
SUPPORT US
Aluna Art Foundation has devoted its space and vision to support the development of contemporary artistic practices within the city. Your support will allow us to continue organizing not only our future exhibition program, but also our lecture series, workshops and presentations. For donations, please call Aluna Art Foundation or contact us at alunarfoundation@gmail.com. Thank You!