At the opening of his latest exhibition, artist Raymond Elman lingered in front of “Striped House,” the portrait of Justine Chichester, a disability advocate and performer. It showed Chichester standing with one hand on her pink walker and smiling brightly, framed by her childhood home.
“A lot of people would give up when you’re told you’re never going to walk again, but she had the will and determination to keep working,” said Elman, who is also editor-of ArtSpeak.
Chichester, who recovered from a spinal cord injury and breast cancer and is now the chairwoman of the City of Coral Gables Disability Advisory Board, stood among the crowd who joined Elman for a tour of his work.
“If you have someone who’s a wheelchair user or who uses a walker, as I do, come to the show and see that, it is empowering,” Chichester said before smiling for pictures next to her portrait with her walker.
The exhibition, “Portraits of People in the Performing Arts,” opened in the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Miami on Feb. 20, featuring 13 large mixed-media portraits of various Miami performing artists with intriguing stories.
The show continues with a second section opening on April 17 at the Ziff Ballet Opera House.
The portraits, like Chichester’s, are displayed alongside QR codes that link to in-depth interviews conducted by Elman for ArtSpeak, the online art magazine sponsored by the Lee Caplin School of Journalism at Florida International University, giving viewers insights into the subjects’ artistry and everyday lives.
While organizing the placement of his portraits days before the opening, Elman paused to gesture at one and describe the multimedia design as seeing a still image and then having the person speak to you.
“It’s about a person and communicating something about the essence of that person,” Elman said.
But to create his portraits, Elman first asks his subjects to choose a place that speaks to them and photographs them there.
For Chichester, it was her childhood home, designed and built by her late father.
“It was an emotional time for me,” Chichester recalled. “It was a wonderful way for me to honor my dad as well as the work I’ve been doing with disability rights.”
After taking the photograph, Elman enlarges and prints it on multiple sheets of paper, then soaks them in water and adheres them to the canvas.
Then he paints, enjoying the process of transforming the photograph into something else.
Portraits are also a way Elman honors his artistic journey and the connections he makes.
In Provincetown, Massachusetts, the oldest continuous art colony in the United States, Elman made large mixed-media portraits to document his life and the everyday selves of prominent artists he knew and met there.
It would accumulate to hundreds of portraits and connections, inspiring his artistic practice in South Florida.
Though he didn’t start with portraiture.
Elman was an abstract artist and used his training, which provided him with an innate sense of composition, to direct his portrait work.
Gesturing at the large portrait of Knox Martin, his mentor and friend, in his studio, Elman explained, “I’ll take a whole bunch of photos and pick the ones that I think would work, but part of that is seeing those dynamic tensions between shapes.”
Dynamic tension was at the heart of Elman’s abstract work, like his “Urban Masks” series, which juxtaposed masks from indigenous cultures with contemporary marks.
However, like Elman’s artistic inspiration, Pablo Picasso, who Elman firmly believes would have used everything if he were alive today, Elman is not stuck in a single lane.
He continues to experiment with his abstract series, “Orts,” which is based on the remains of roasted vegetables on parchment paper.
“I wanted people, in their mind, to finish the image off, so it expanded the dimensions of the canvas because mentally you didn’t stop when the canvas stopped,” Elman said in his studio while flipping through pages of his sketches using the golden grid, a design compositional tool.
This idea evolved with his portraits, all of which are large-scale works.
Elman typically makes portraits that are 60 inches by 40 inches or 40 inches by 30 inches.
Though on the largest wall of the Knight Concert Hall, “On the Run,” a portrait of jazz vocalist Nicole Henry, is printed at 205 inches by 135 inches.
Phillip Church, a professor emeritus in the theater department at FIU, said the monumental scale of all Elman’s works makes them seem as if they’re coming toward the viewer.
“It’s up close and personal when you have a portrait that enlarged, that big,” Church said.
Many people at the opening stopped to take in “On the Run” and framed by the supersized portrait, Elman talked about his experience and process.
He emphasized the portraits of former astronaut and trumpet player Winston Scott and preservationist Dr. Enid Pinkney, which are collaged with images from the Historic Hampton House, a former motel and cultural center for Black travelers, artists and activists during the Jim Crow era.
“He captures the essence of the goodness in a person,” said Curb Gardner, the CEO and executive director of the Historic Hampton House.
“He’s always connecting good to good, so I think he’s a force to be reckoned with based on his sensibility for people, for art and making all of it work,” Gardner said.
A self-described pot-stirrer, Elman is always connecting people.
He spent the opening evening introducing strangers, reconnecting with friends and finding common interests between those who came to support him, leaving them smiling and sharing stories of their own.
Elman quoted the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese text, on the drive back to his studio after delivering his portraits to the performing arts center days before the opening.
“Perseverance furthers,” Elman said thoughtfully.
With a career spanning decades, it rings true for Elman, who finds himself empty if not making art.
“You have to be making the art because you want to make the art,” Elman said with conviction.
Both sections of “Portraits of People in the Performing Arts” will be on view at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts through September, with the second section opening in April. Visitors can see the portraits by attending a show at the Knight Concert Hall or Ziff Ballet Opera House or by scheduling a private viewing with Elman by contacting him here.
