CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/18/2024

History and healing in Calida Rawles' 'Away with the Tides'

“Thy Name We Praise” (2023) is reproduced from Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides, published to accompany the artist’s first solo museum show in America—on view at the Pérez Art Museum through February 2025. Specifically for this show, Rawles’ paintings depict residents of Miami's Overtown neighborhood—known as the Harlem of the South before it was bifurcated by the development of I-95—submerged in the formerly segregated waters of Virginia Key Beach. “Overtown continues to become further fragmented, but the heart and soul of the community is still there, beautiful and connected,” Rawles writes. “I wanted to capture that beauty holding together the fragmented. I’m excited and honored to create something that comes out of my time with the residents and the folks of Overtown. In one of the paintings, you can see light that has a spiritual element to it, that light coming through the fragmented body. This is a time for unity, mobilization, creativity and power. We are going to make it through, and these beautiful Black people, their culture and history are going to be honored.”