Hispanic Heritage Month
Pompano Beach proudly celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month to recognize the achievements and contributions of Hispanic and Latin-American history that have inspired others to succeed. We have compiled a series of events in our cultural event programming to honor the celebration of Hispanics and Latin Americans in the history, culture, and achievements of the United States.
Pompano Beach
Sep 15 – Oct 15
ALEJANDRA ABAD – Venezuela
The Making of Water State: Florida As Refuge features Alejandra Abad’s past works and her new project, supported by a Broward County Cultural Division grant. Water State is an experimental animation celebrating Florida as a sanctuary for all forms of life, using a blend of analog and digital techniques. Abad will gather stories from Broward County residents through summer workshops, integrating these personal narratives into her animations. The project will culminate in outdoor screenings and an open mic event showcasing community responses.
Opportunities to participate in Alejandra’s project:
- September 14, 2024 – The Gathering | Apollo Park | 12 – 4pm | in Partnership with Rock Road Restoration
- September 18, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:15pm Lunch with Art: Visual Arts (Art Workshop) | BaCA Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.
Join artist Alejandra Abad at the Pompano Beach Cultural Center’s terrace as she walks you through her ideation process and the making of Water State using digital tools and analog materials. Indoor/Outdoor activity. Click here to learn more about Lunch with Art.
- September 20, 2024 – Closing Reception of The Making of Water State: Florida as Refuge Art Exhibition | Pompano Beach Cultural Center Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.
Join us as we celebrate stories of Florida as a refuge with stories of home and belonging. Click here to learn more about the exhibition.
ANTHONY TORRES – Puerto Rico
An Island in the Shape of a Prison Art Exhibition │Pompano Beach Cultural Center Digital Media Lab
An Island in the Shape of a Prison is an art exhibition that explores the artist’s search for meaning and purpose through the lens of his Puerto Rican identity and his experience coping with moral injury following his experience as a soldier deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq. This collection of works combine visuals (photographs, postcards, and video) with poetry previously written and performed by the artist in his theater work. The images and accompanying text explore the connections between the artist’s personal lived experiences in the U.S. military and the historical impact of war and colonialism on the island of Puerto Rico.
- Thursday, September 12, 2024 – Artist Talk and Reception; 6pm – 8pm
- Saturday, September 14, 2024 – Community Writing Workshop; 2pm – 4pm
FLORENCIA CLEMENT DE GRANDPREY – Spain
October Artist of the Month Art Exhibition │BaCA
- October 4, 2024 │Opening Reception │6pm – 8pm | BaCA West |FREE
Florencia’s artwork celebrates strong, confident, and soul-aligned individuals, emphasizing the beauty of our unique, perfectly imperfect selves. She portrays diverse ethnicities to ensure everyone feels represented. During the pandemic, she created the “Guardians of Sacred Space” series, featuring large, powerful portraits on area rugs, earning her the Artista Latina Award at ArtPrize 2021. Her 2022 series, “In My Eyes,” painted on vintage Persian rugs, won the 2-D Public’s Choice and Artista Latina Awards at ArtPrize 2022. Click here to learn more about Florencia.
MAGDA LOVE – Argentina
Imaginary Gardens Art Exhibition
October 4, 2024 – December 14, 2024
- October 4, 2024 │Opening Reception │6pm – 8pm | BaCA Central & East | FREE
“Imaginary Gardens” is a solo exhibition by Magda Love that explores cultural heritage, emotional landscapes, and nature’s beauty. Inspired by South Florida’s lush scenery and Latin American folklore, the exhibit features vivid gardens with textile plants, hand-painted pottery, mixed-media sculptures, and intricate embroidery. It creates enchanting spaces designed to evoke wellness, joy, and community. Blending poetry, magical realism, and ancient symbolism, the exhibition invites visitors to explore the divine feminine in nature and the transformative power of art.
VANESSA GARCIA – Cuba
What the Bread Says: Baking with Love, History, and Papan
October 5, 2024 │Story Time at the Blanche Ely House Museum │11am │ FREE
This will be a Bilingual reading. RSVP via Eventbrite here.
“What the Bread Says: Baking with Love, History, and Papan” by Vanessa Garcia, illustrated by Tim Palin, is a heartwarming book about a global bread-baking adventure. Based on a true story, it follows Vanessa and her Papan as they travel through Spain, France, and Cuba, baking bread and sharing life stories. Through these stories, Vanessa learns about her heritage, the strength of family, and the power of storytelling. The book is praised for its warmth, connection, and beautifully matched illustrations.
Bailey Contemporary Arts Center
Located in the heart of Pompano Beach’s new Creative Arts District, we encourage you to visit BaCA, which now houses a dozen art studios and also features large galleries that serve as exhibition and education spaces, and an open social area for artistic dialogue. BaCA offers studio space for visual artists, and is occupied with painters, ceramicists, photographers and interdisciplinary artists. Here we provide the opportunity for residents to explore their creative side with workshops, events, studio visits and monthly exhibitions.
BaCA also offers the opportunity for visitors to come by, or sign up and take a class, attend a lecture, see an exhibition and get an organic look at the artistic process. Please check our calendar for upcoming events!
ALEJANDRA ABAD – Venezuela
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandra Abad is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator who explores belonging and mutual compassion as key parts of collective wellness. Through layering, abstraction, and light, she creates new landscapes that relate to place, family, and community. Her playful storytelling often features fragmentation, folklore, and mythology. Her style is informed by architectural studies at Florida Atlantic University, Film/Video/New Media/Animation at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Interdisciplinary Media Art Practices at The University of Colorado. She uses analog and digital processes for the projection of moving images in public spaces which are rooted in her pedagogy of care. These processes often transform drawings, paintings, collages, prints, and handmade materials into audiovisual elements, animated shorts, visual essays, and site-specific installations that center around community, collaboration, and shared oral histories.
This has led to a series of works centered on environmental futures and the implications of the anthropocene. Her installation work creates environments that include sculptural elements and video projection that relate the history of anticolonial movements to international surrealism and magical realism – particularly from South America and the Caribbean – and how these elements are interconnected in new spaces. Her work features conceptual and collaborative pieces that work to break down the barriers between artist and audience.
ANTHONY TORRES – Puerto Rico
Anthony Torres is a writer, performer, and Executive Director of Combat Hippies, an ensemble of Puerto Rican military veteran performing artists based in Miami, Florida. A grandchild of Puerto Rican immigrants, Anthony was born in New York City and raised in Utica, New York. Following high school, he enlisted into the military and later deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq where he provided mental health treatment to deployed troops, coalition forces, and Iraqi detainees. The Combat Hippies was founded in 2015 during a veterans creating writing workshop created by MDC Live Arts and led by renown theater artist and director Teo Castellanos. Their latest and most ambitious project, AMAL, premiered during MDC Live Arts 2018/19 season and is touring nationally. AMAL explores the quest for meaning, purpose, and identity sought through enlisting in the military and shares the unifying experiences of both combatants and noncombatants as people of color. This all-Puerto Rican theater company places Puerto Rico’s colonial status, cultural, and military heritage center stage. Anthony holds a MS in Psychology from Carlos Albizu University and a Master’s degree in Social Work from Barry University.
FLORENCIA CLEMENT DE GRANDPREY – Spain
Born and raised in southern Spain, Florencia is the daughter of an American mother and a French/Italian father, living and working in Fort Lauderdale, FL, since 2004.
Florencia is a self-taught mixed media figurative artist, whose mission is to empower and inspire through positive and meaningful artwork. Her artistic adventure began in late 2014, when she quit her full time job in interior design to pursue her real passion: painting.
In the absence of any formal training, Florencia has developed a style without rules, which gives her great freedom. She combines her love of the classic masters with contemporary design flair to produce mixed media paintings.
Initially, Florencia painted on canvas and incorporated up-cycled and repurposed materials such as discontinued fabric and paper samples, to create backgrounds and “dress” her subjects. Three years into her adventure, she discovered she could paint directly on upholstery fabric and area rugs and fell in love with the effect she’s able to achieve in this new medium. The patterns become intertwined with the image and add yet another dimension to it. To her, the layers are a metaphor for us to look deeper than what meets the eye.
During the pandemic, Florencia started a series entitled “Guardians of Sacred Space” composed of her largest pieces yet, ranging between 6’x4’ and 10’x8’, painted on area rugs. They are powerful portraits that command attention and infuse a sense of protection and calm to the space they are in. This series won the “Artista Latina Award” in the prestigious international contest ArtPrize 2021.
In 2022 she worked on a series entitled “In My Eyes”, painted on vintage Persian area rugs, exploring life as a keen observer of what surrounds us while also looking into who we are as part of the whole. This series won two top prizes in the ArtPrize 2022 international contest: 2-D Public’s Choice Award as well as the Artista Latina Award
At the heart of Florencia’s artwork is her desire to portray strong and confident, soul aligned men and women. She wants to celebrate who we are and everything that makes us unique, perfectly imperfect beings, by bringing out our strengths and our beauty; as a reminder of who we really are and to say “I see you and honor you”. Florencia portrays a variety of ethnicities as it is important to her that everyone feels represented in her artwork as a mirror of society.
Florencia welcomes commissioned artwork and loves working with her clients to create unique pieces that perfectly fit their heart, space and décor…
