Fernando Garcia: Calendars & Gradation Systems
Curated by Isabella Marie Garcia
Opening exhibition: Saturday, May 31st from 6—9PM
Laundromat Art Space
185 NE 59th Street
Miami, FL 33137
Fernando Garcia: Calendars and Gradation Systems is a posthumous solo exhibition celebrating the life and work of the late Cuban artist Fernando Garcia. In partnership with the Miami-Dade Main Library, who will be loaning the majority of the artwork in the exhibition, the showcase considers how Garcia, as an educator and interdisciplinary artist, utilized time in his practice and brought artmaking to the masses. Recreating a site-specific installation by the artist, the exhibition will present archival materials and ephemera of the late artist in vitrines placed throughout the space, reflecting on the deadly impact AIDS had on Miami’s artists and art scene in the 1980s and 1990s.
The curatorial debut of Isabella Marie Garcia, an interdisciplinary lens-based artist, writer, and photographer based in Miami, Fernando Garcia: Calendars and Gradation Systems builds on the research conducted by Isabella through the 2024 Visual Aids Research Fellowship, which financially supports writing and scholarship about artists who have been lost to AIDS. Each year a cohort of fellows works with Visual AIDS to develop a piece of original writing for the Visual AIDS website. Research fellows work with primary sources in the Visual AIDS Archive, as well as interviews with estates, families, and friends, and other materials in private and public collections. An accompanying exhibition catalogue with an essay on the artist will be available for the duration of the exhibition, along with special programming during the month of June. Steeped in calculated translations of mathematics, Fernando Antonio Garcia’s journey from Cuba to Miami to Atlanta and back reflect an artist who needed the distance for his roots to begin. Born on November 1st in the ward of La Vibora in Havana, Cuba in 1945, Garcia emigrated from the island to Miami at the age of sixteen through Operation Pedro Pan. Arriving in Miami, Garcia would go on to study at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School and Miami-Dade College, North Campus before relocating to Athens, Georgia to complete a Bachelors of Science in Physics and Mathematics from University of Georgia in 1968. He finished his secondary education in 1976 with a Master’s Degree of Fine Arts from Georgia State University in Atlanta.
From releasing weather balloons for the inauguration of the Miami Art Museum (MAM) to passing a Cuban flag mirror that clarifies a chalkboard wall bearing Jose Martí’s La edad de oro drawn in reverse, Garcia wielded the manipulation of time and space during his lifetime. Normalizing the simultaneity of multiple exhibitions at once and across sites in Miami, he represented pushing the extremes of what was already possible in an emerging arts community. Challenging the status quo in incorporating his studious background in mathematics and physics through the visual arts and the transitory, Garcia immortalized the present as once-in-a-lifetime, suspending time eternally through his symbiotic participation and artistic contributions.
“I hope the exhibition brings honor to who Fernando Garcia was and how his work was the first of its kind in the city. From archives I’ve had the honor of working with and visiting in Miami, Atlanta and Athens, Georgia and Washington, D.C., I’ve realized how much about him remains out of sight for the general public, which is the antithesis of what Garcia practiced through his public performance work and installations. May this be the first of many future opportunities to shed light on those lost all too soon,” states Isabella Marie Garcia.
About Isabella Marie Garcia
Isabella “Isa” Marie Garcia is an interdisciplinary lens-based artist, writer, and photographer living in her native Miami, Florida. Interested in alternative educational spaces, holistic aftercare, and supporting visual artists in the American South in her practice, Garcia is a recipient of a 2025 Oolite Arts Ellies Creator Award and the 2024 WOPHA Research Fellowship for The Photography Care Matrix: Teaching Traditional and Experimental Photo Techniques within Prison Environments, Residential Rehabs, and Alternative Schools, the recipient of a 2024 Visual Aids Research Fellowship, and the 2023 Locust Projects Wavemaker Research and Implementation Grant Recipient for What Happens When the Dust Settles?. Currently a 2024-2025 ProjectArt Miami Resident and O, Miami Lead Sunroom Teaching Artist, Garcia graduated summa cum laude with her Bachelor of Arts in English from Florida International University. More information on her work can be found anywhere and everywhere through @isamxrie and at isamxrie.com.
About Visual Aids
Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS is the only contemporary arts organization fully committed to raising AIDS awareness and creating dialogue around HIV issues today, by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums, and publications—while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS. We are committed to preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement. We embrace diversity and difference in our staff, leadership, artists, and audiences.
