This is the season of transition and transformation.  In the spirit of Halloween and Los Dias de los Muertos, the Days of the Dead, Indigo Arts presents a collection of masks from Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific.  They are masks that conceal, but may also reveal the wearer behind them. Masks are agents of celebration and transcendence, of commemoration and transformation.

José Garcia Montebravo was one of Cuba's leading naif artists, with an international following. While he was self-taught as an artist, he was hardly naive in the English sense of the word. ‘Monte’ was a witty and sophisticated man with a sure, fluid line in pen or brush. In his relatively short career the Cienfuegos teacher turned artist created a rich self-contained world of myth and fantasy. Escenas Fantasticas presents paintings and works on paper dating from 1984 until shortly before his death in 2010.

Shrines of Life celebrates the art of the contemporary Peruvian retablo. The retablo is a kind of portable shrine or nicho holding figures sculpted of pasta (a mixture of plaster and potato) or maguey cactus wood. The making of retablos is a folk art whose roots go back to the sixteenth century in the Andes (and even to the Greeks and Romans before that). While the art’s origins are religious, the contemporary Peruvian retablos exhibited at Indigo Arts range from the sacred to the secular, to the profane.

Indigo Arts presents a selection of artwork from African and the African diaspora. The exhibition includes paintings, prints and sculpture by artists from Brazil, Botswana, Cuba, Haiti, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. The exhibit reflects both the diversity of work from the African continent and the rich trans-Atlantic tradition of African descendants in the New World.