Mostrar 7545 resultados

The Department of Microbiology and Immunology is a basic science, research-oriented unit within the University of Miami School of Medicine. The department consists of 42 faculty members, approximately 45 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, and a technical staff of 45. Departmental research efforts are supported by a number of core units including flow cytometry, transgenic/knockout, sequencing, imaging, and stem cell/hematopoiesis facilities. In addition to studying basic microbiological and immunological questions, the department also directs the Gene Transfer Immunotherapy Program together with physicians from the Division of Hematology and Oncology and maintains close ties with the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Diabetes Research Institute through collaborative projects. Members of the department share a common belief that complex biological and medical questions are best solved by integrating investigators with differing expertise and perspectives.

Alvaro de Villa was a Cuban writer and journalist most notable for his work with the American sitcom ¿Qué pasa, U.S.A.? Before moving to Miami, he wrote for Cuban radio and television. He also wrote several novels, short stories, screenplays, nonfiction works, and radio scripts.

Rosendo Rosell was a Cuban actor, writer, and entertainment journalist. He starred in a number of movies in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, as well as working in Cuban radio. He emigrated to Miami, where he became known for his talk show "El Show de Rosendo Rosell." He was also a producer, writer, and journalist who wrote about Cuban television and radio.

Artifacts Artist Group was founded by Howard Davis in June, 1984. According to Davis, "Artifacts was conceived with four goals in mind:

1. To provide a showcase for emerging as well as more established artists in Miami/South Florida

2. To provide a framework for artistic collaboration

3. To engage the various cultural communities in South Florida

4. To promote the 'demystification of art, i.e. presenting multimedia art happenings and installations in unconventional settings and venues, e.g. nightclubs, etc.'"

To that end, Artifacts would set up art salons and events in galleries and nightclubs throughout Miami, in neighborhoods such as the Design District and Miami Beach, places that were just then beginning to experience the renaissance that would eventually bring them to the forefront of the global arts community with contemporary events such as Art Basel.

The StoryCorps oral histories project began in 2003 as an effort to “provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives.” As of 2015, the project has recorded more than 50,000 interviews with more than 90,000 participants. The work of StoryCorps provides an “invaluable archive for future generations,” and is housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Pablo F. Lavín (1905-1992) was a Cuban born lawyer and academic. He was professor of political science at the University of Havana from 1927-1960. Lavín was also the dean of the faculty of social science and public law at the University of Havana. Lavín served as the Attorney General of Cuba and as the Director General of the Department of American Affairs in Cuba. He was a published author of books, articles, and essays which covered a range of topics.

From the earliest moments of its colonial history, builders and engineers have been part of the Cuban landscape. [1]However, it was not until 1803 that a royal decree gave more weight to the presence of the engineering corps.  The engineering corps attached to the island was very small and without sufficient support, thus forced to carry out its projects using regular enlisted men and civilians.  Throughout the rest of the 19th century, personnel attached to the Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers would continue to increase in order to sustain the number of projects taking place, mainly in the capital city of Havana.

The arrival of the twentieth century saw a surge in the engineering field.  With a new school formally attached to the University of Havana, which later became a department of the University, future Cuban engineers were able to obtain their education at home. These new educational opportunities were reflected in the surge in public works and feats of engineering that took place in the first half of the twentieth century.

Cuban engineers had long been affiliated with the Sociedad de Ingenieros Cubanos, an organization that dated to the end of the 19th century.  However, relatively large changes in the educational process leading to a degree in Engineering led to the creation of societies or organizations that focused on individual engineering disciplines.  Thus, the creation of the Colegio de Ingenieros Civiles de Cuba in 1945, whose membership was open to civil engineers throughout the island.

The official publication of the Colegio de Ingenieros Civiles de Cuba was titled Ingeniería Civil.  It was published quarterly and highlighted not only the past work of notable engineers, but current projects involving the society’s members.  The journal served as a chronicle of the work carried out by the island’s civil engineers.

The 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power led to the immediate exile of many of the association’s members.  Many of them arrived to the United States in reduced circumstances, forced to begin their studies anew and to make their way in an unfamiliar environment.  As early as 1961, the association began to establish its exilic identity, with meetings and bulletins that kept its members informed.  In exile, the organization changed its name to the Cuban-American Association of Cuban Engineers (C-AACE), but kept its ethos of professional development.

One of the ways in which the new association provided support for its members was through the ratification of their Cuban engineering degrees.  State and local governments from all over the United States wrote to the association to solicit their help in establishing the credentials of these newly arrived engineers.

[1] http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/b3w-398.htm

Jan Mapou (Jean-Marie Denis) is a Haitian author, playwright, director, and arts advocate. He was one of the founders of the Haitian Creole Movement, which began in Haiti in 1965. That same year he also created Sosyete Koukouy (The Fireflies Society), a multi-disciplinary arts company dedicated to preserving Haitian cultural traditions and rituals. In 1969, Mapou was arrested by the Duvalier government for his activities promoting Haitian Kreyol. He immigrated to New York in 1972, before settling in Miami in 1984. He helped found chapters of Sosyete Koukouy in both New York and Miami, and serves as the Society's artistic director. Mapou's writing legacy includes 2 poetry books,1 short story, and 8 plays. He has also directed more than 15 plays in Haiti, New York,and Miami. He owns Libreri Mapou (Mapou Bookstore) in Little Haiti, which has one of the largest inventories of titles on Haitian culture and history in the nation. He also hosts two radio programs on education and culture on WLRN Public Radio and has served on numerous boards, including the Miami Book Fair International. Finally, he is the co-founder of the Haitian Arts Alliance . In 2007, he was the recipient of the Folk Life Award from he State of Florida.

María Martínez-Cañas (b. May 19th, 1960), in her own terms, is a queer Cuban-born, Puerto Rican-grown, American photographer. Her experimental work, which tests the limits of photography while remaining grounded in it, explores personal and national identities – most notably the concept of the self, memory, and migration. She is described by Manuel E González as “an alchemist mixing materials, methods and processes.” Martínez-Cañas’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions throughout the world including Julie Saul Gallery, New York; Freedom Tower, Miami; Schneider Gallery, Chicago; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and more. She has been the recipient of many awards and grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1988), a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship (2014) in Umbertide, Italy, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Photography fellowship (2016). Her works reside in private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami; and the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Though born in Cuba, at just three months old Martínez-Cañas’s family moved to Miami and remained there until she was four years old, when they relocated again to Puerto Rico – where she spent her childhood and adolescence. Her early years in Puerto Rico indelibly shaped the artist she would become. Martínez-Cañas grew up in a household surrounded by art; her parents were collectors of Latin American and Cuban art – especially modernist art – and held works by Jesús Rafael Soto, Rogelio Polesello, Roberto Matta, José Luis Cuevas, Amelia Peláez, Wifredo Lam, and Carlos Mérida, among many others. Additionally, classical music gave sound to these artistic surroundings as her father played the violin and regularly held music and art gatherings at the home where Martínez-Cañas met numerous musicians and visual artists. Her fascination with photography began when, upon leaving Cuba as exiles, her mother carried with her a Rolleiflex Twin-Lens camera that enchanted María. She convinced her mother to let her play with the camera on the premise of cleaning it and taught herself to use it; at eight years old she developed her first roll of film and has continued to practice the art of photography ever since. Later in life she reflected on the deep significance of photographs and photography in her parents’ household, stating: “I absolutely believe that the importance of the photographic image to my parents as a ‘memory link’ to their homeland was a defining aspect in my life. Photographic images were a way to connect with family members, to know our roots, to know about Cuba” (Nuez).

In 1977, when Martínez-Cañas was just seventeen, she had her first exhibition at the Galeria Aboy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which was a result of the support of her parents and other important mentors. One such mentor was the modernist Cuban painter Cundo Bermúdez, who was also in exile in Puerto Rico and a close friend of the Martínez-Cañas family – he was even commissioned to paint a portrait of the family by María’s father. Another family friend and important influence on Martínez-Cañas was the art curator and critic José Gómez-Sicre, whose archives were later bought as a gift for Martínez-Cañas by her father; extracts from these archival documents were scanned and reprinted and appear in the series, REBUS + DIVERSIONS (2016). In 2013 Martínez-Cañas reflected that, in excess of being the place where she was artistically and intellectually formed, growing up in Puerto Rico shaped the sense of ethnic identity that is explored in her works; “Puerto Rico also gave me an identity – as Latina…,” she relayed to Ramón Nuez.

Martínez-Cañas left Puerto Rico to attend the Philadelphia College of Art and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1982; she then pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1984. Her first solo museum show, María Martínez-Cañas: Photographs, was held at Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, in 1983. Later, in 1985, she was awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant which allowed her to move to Spain and conduct research for six months; during this time, she frequently visited the Archivo de Indias in Seville and Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. While she consulted a wide variety of sources there, she mainly focused on maps from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries that recorded Spanish explorations of Cuba, such as those drawn by Christopher Columbus on his voyages around the Americas. These archival sources inspired her to create negatives based on Cuban maps and these works appeared in her 1990-1992 series, Black Totems. In particular, in “Encounters” (1991) she combined maps and geometric patterns with photographs of buildings to evoke a mystical Cuba, conjured from her own imagination. In “Quince Cellos Cubanos/Fifteen Cuban Stamps” (1991-92) she arranged generic photographs of place inside the quotidian format of the postage stamps, adhering to its confining borders. Her time in Spain had an irrevocable impact on her work and cemented the questions she has spent her career exploring; she reflected, “For the last few years my work has dealt with the search for a personal identity … the daily life of Cuban culture before the revolution, family stories, memories of Cuba where I was born but have no recollection of. After a while, I find myself with a terrible need of discovering, on my own, that which has been so unknown for so long. I am dealing … with a terrible sense of … separation, and alienation. I have always experienced a desire to belong to a 'particular place”’ (qtd. in Yorba). In 1986, Martínez-Cañas returned to the United States and settled in Miami.

Throughout her career, though to varying degrees in different projects, Martínez-Cañas’ work has been consistently invested in both the experimental and the personal. As Marcela Guerrero narrates, “Martínez-Cañas’s experiments with photography have included such diverse methods as utilizing stains, saliva, and onion skin and printing on tapestry, newsprint, and vellum. In 2007 she began to combine photographic images with hand-traced drawings printed on canvas in her ‘Tracing’ series.” Notably, in her Tetralogy series, which was shown in a museum installation in the Freedom Tower, Miami, during the winter of 2009/10, she digitally manipulated photographs taken by José Gómez-Sicre and photographs of her father. This experimentation resulted in “a technical intervention of images that pays homage to and defies the fatherly figures in her life” (Guerrero). In 2016, after experiencing an extremity of opposing emotions – on one hand she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Photography fellowship and on the other she was coming to terms with the loss of a twelve-year relationship – Martínez-Cañas broke with the work she was doing previously and carved out new artistic territory. In four months of uninterrupted artistic labor she produced twenty large-scale works. Included in this collection are works that utilize documents contained in José Gómez-Sicre’s archives. Concerning these works, González narrates: “[Martínez-Cañas] considers the scanning and reprinting of this historical and archival material a transformative process: the rebirth of treasured originals that transcend their original Modernist intentions and brings them into the present as part of an inquiry trying to make sense of the fragmentary nature of memory and place.” After a very busy couple of years, Martínez-Cañas took some time off and is currently at work on another collection. Though she relayed in April 2020 that the project is still in its infancy, her comments to Jess T. Dugan concerning being a woman in the arts world are surely an indicator of the important work she will release in the future: “The struggles encountered through the years have made me resilient and determined. The constant struggles to prove my worth have made me stronger and continue, in many ways, to keep me always looking forward. I came to understand, through the years, that the things I can't control need to be dealt with in creative ways – that I just need to keep going. Always forward.”