October 10 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
In Person: An Evening with Rosa Lowinger & Elizabeth Cerejido
Books & Books presents…
AN EVENING WITH ROSA LOWINGER
in conversation with
Elizabeth Cerejido
discussing
Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair
(Row House Publishing, $27.99)
Tuesday, October 10th, 7:00 PM | Books & Books, Coral Gables
RSVP HERE FOR FREE
Books & Books is thrilled to present an evening with Rosa Lowinger & Elizabeth Cerejido to discuss Lowinger’s powerful memoir: Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House Publishing, $27.99).
This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event so make sure to stay after the talk for a book signing! Please RSVP only if you intend to join us.
About the Book:
An illuminating debut memoir by one of the few prominent Latinas in the field of art and architectural conservation; a moving portrait of a Cuban Jewish family’s intergenerational trauma; and a story about repair and healing that will forever change how you see the objects and places we cherish and how we manage damage and loss.
Dwell Time is a term that measures the amount of time something takes to happen – immigrants waiting at a border, human eyes on a website, the minutes people wait in an airport, and, in art conservation, the time it takes for a chemical to react with a material.
Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life.
After moving away to escape the “cloying exile’s nostalgia,” Lowinger discovered the unique field of art conservation, which led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota, and Port-Au-Prince. Eventually returning to Havana for work, Lowinger suddenly finds herself embarking on a remarkable journey of family repair that begins, as it does in conservation, with an understanding of the origins of damage.
Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family’s story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.
Dwell Time is an immigrant’s story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one’s heart to another person’s wounds.
From the book: “How, I wondered, was it possible that no one in my family had ever told me that Havana, the place where we were from, was so closely aligned to my work? More importantly, how had I managed to reencounter this ornately decorated, sagging city at the precise moment when I was beginning to see a link between restoration of the material world and personal healing?”
BUY THE BOOK HERE
About the Author:
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American writer and art conservator. The author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016), she is the founder and current vice-president of RLA Conservation, LLC, one of the U.S.’s largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms. A Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa writes regularly for popular and academic media about conservation, historic preservation, the visual arts, and Cuba.
About the Moderator:
Dr. Elizabeth Cerejido’s professional and academic work has focused on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora. Her scholarly interest in these communities has been implicit in her work as a museum curator, educator, scholar and administrator. In all these roles, the lens of visual arts has been critical to her exploration of Cuban and Cuban diasporic cultural production in the post-revolutionary period.
Elizabeth has taught at the university level in a number of institutions; her most recent course was entitled Cuba: Society in Transition which she co-taught with Rachel Weiss in Cuba for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elizabeth’s curatorial work entailed creation of exhibits and public programming for the Patricia and Phillip Art Museum at Florida International University, and later at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where she served as Assistant Curator of Latin American and Latino Art. The exhibition and public programming she developed at FIU invited several well-known Cuban and Cuban-American artists to present significant projects in Miami for the first time. Her post-graduate research interests are reflected in her numerous publications. A recent example is “Museum as Battleground: Exile and the Contested Representation of Culture in Miami’s Cuban Museum (1972-1996)”, a chapter in Art Museums of Latin America: Structuring Representation, published by Routledge in March, 2018.
Before joining the Cuban Heritage Collection, Elizabeth took on innovative leadership roles within the Miami arts community as independent curator and researcher for projects developed for the CINTAS Foundation, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Cuban Heritage Collection, and the Cuban Research Institute at FIU. In 2014, she received a Knight Foundations Arts Challenge grant for her project, “Dialogues in Cuban Art” that brought together Cuban and Cuban-American artists and curators through cultural exchanges, symposia and exhibitions in both Miami and Havana. Cerejido recently curated the exhibition “Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s” a collaboration between the CHC and the Lowe Art Museum, with an accompanying catalog.
Elizabeth received her PhD in Art History from the University of Florida in Gainesville. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in art history at Florida International University and her Masters of Arts in Latin American Studies at University of Miami.