ArtMedia Gallery is proud to welcome back photographer Silvia Lizama for a new solo exhibition. With a long and esteemed artistic career, Lizama has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad for more than four decades. In addition to her accomplishments as an artist, she is also highly regarded as a distinguished university professor.

Drawing on American photographic traditions, her Cuban heritage, and Latinx influences as her personal background, Lizama forged an individual path in the practice of mixed photography in her formal artistic training in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, she has combined her visually precise black-and-white photographs with hand-coloring techniques using photo oil paints applied with a cotton-wrapped toothpick. For this exhibition, she has experimented with digital methods, using the same aesthetic in coloring each image with Adobe Photoshop to enhance her work.

Creator of a particular universe, Lizama brings attention to aspects of popular culture that are often overlooked, exploring them with sophistication and nuance. Her work reveals the complex layers of everyday life, approached with empathy, delicate irony, wit and a probing eye.

ArtMedia Gallery is honored to present her latest body of work, titled The Great Indoors, part of her ongoing Taxidermy Series produced this past year. In this series, Lizama continues her exploration of how ordinary people define their habitable spaces, navigating the blurred lines between indoors and outdoors, between cultures and eras, and between human and natural realms.

In Lizama's photographs, the human impulse for decoration manifests in multi-layered representations. Her work poses timely questions about how we conceive our connection to the world and to the traditions we've inherited when configuring our environments.

In this exhibition, animals appear as meticulously arranged decorative artifacts. At first glance, the images are quiet, visually calm. Yet upon closer inspection, an unsettling stillness emerges. Then you can realize they are not innocent.

About the artist

Silvia Lizama, born in Havana, Cuba, moved to South Florida in 1960. She earned a BFA from Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. She served as Professor of Photography and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida for 37 years and was awarded the distinguished title of Professor Emerita upon retirement in 2023. Her hand-colored photographs have been exhibited extensively.

About the curator:

José Antonio Navarrete (Cuban-Venezuelan, based in Miami) is a critic, researcher, and independent art and visual culture curator. He is in charge of the ArtMedia curatorial program and participates in several international projects as a curator or writer contributor.

About the gallery:

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Little River, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission to exhibit and promote contemporary art based on photography and video practices. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology.