"Voy a llevar este barquito a la orilla del mar": The Lives and Legacies of Carlos Alfonzo and Fernando Garcia

Research Fellow Isabella Marie Garcia brings together the stories of two Cuban artists, Carlos Alfonzo (1950–1991) and Fernando Garcia (1945–1989), focusing on how their work reflected the experience of being Cuban immigrants and grappling with a variety of political and social forces working against them. Garcia's personal connection to the work and comparison of these two artists creates a heartfelt exploration of the cultural impact of the artwork.

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In 1987, Cuban artists Carlos Alfonzo and Fernando Garcia presented their work together as part of Public Art Indoors at the Miami-Dade Main Public Library. The two artists had much in common beyond their similarities on paper: queerness, experiences of living in exile from their Caribbean homeland, and working within the burgeoning art scene of Miami-Dade County at the end of the twentieth century. Their shared commitments to making art accessible to the public, as well as repurposing found materials and configuring language in their work, speak to a mutual desire to find community and recreate home elsewhere. Their labor and public artwork—some of which is still on view in the city—paved the way for a later wave of Cuban-born artists, especially those with interdisciplinary and unapologetically critical practices. Alfonzo and Garcia did this in the context of a 1980s Miami grappling with its identity during and in the wake of the Mariel boatlift, immigration laws that pitted Cuban and Haitian immigrants against one another, the riots in the wake of the lynching of Arthur Lee McDuffie, the drug wars of cocaine cowboys, and Reagan-era conservatism.¹

on encountering carlos alfonzo’s late paintings

of knees scraping
against the floor
praying and pissing
bellies big
pregnant with remorse

they are black
with deep reds of pain

i am a proud baby and mother
all at once
there is motion and reverence
reverence in motion⁵

Alfonzo’s desire to leave the island fermented in 1978 with a growing acknowledgement that his artistic expression would always be limited by the country’s economic downturns and growing censorship under Castro’s dictatorship. In 1980, through the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, he arrived in the United States on a boat in Key West, leaving behind his son Alejandro, mother, and sister in Cuba. He was then detained for arriving “unannounced” and sent by the US government to Fort Chaffee Detention Camp in Arkansas. Letters kept by his lover reveal the realities of living within the camp: Alfonzo writes in Spanish about it all being a “pesadilla cruel macabre y increible [cruel, macabre, and unbelievable nightmare].” Additional details on the everyday recollections of the camp are found on handwritten letters written on found materials, such as an American Red Cross notepad.

The specifics of how Alfonzo reached South Florida from being detained in Arkansas are seen in a love letter dated June 27, 1980, which was written on the verso of an Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) order. ICEM assisted with the resettlement of refugees from the 1980 Mariel boatlift.⁷ Alfonzo was eventually able to get sponsored by his extended family, who provided food, shelter and clothing, along with guidance in navigating American systems, like filling out documents for green cards and work permits.⁸ He struggled with the turmoil of migrating and living in exile, along with adjusting to Miami’s urban environment despite reuniting with his maternal aunt Chuqui and uncle. Del Pilar helped Alfonzo get a job in the design department at the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove (del Pilar’s own place of work), where Alfonzo designed mosaics for the residence of Burton Goldberg, the hotel founder. The couple lived together during this time at 1045 Pennsylvania Avenue in Miami Beach, where Alfonzo also worked in a pharmacy at Jackson Memorial Hospital.⁹

I found myself in the Mutiny Hotel in September 2024 with Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, a Cuban artist who had served as the director of the Visual Artists Program for the New York State Council on the Arts from 1981 to 1991. I learned of Alfonzo’s knack for compartmentalization as Gutierrez-Solana vocalizes that “he kept a lot of people he knew separate.”¹⁰ Gutierrez-Solana met Alfonzo at the opening reception for 10 Out of Cuba: A Selection of Cuban Painters in 1982—where Alfonzo was invited to participate by the curator Inverna Lockpez. Gutierrez-Solana was “charmed” by Alfonzo and recalls falling in “unrequited love” with him. A ceramic plate and letter with artwork bearing symbology that would characterize much of Alfonzo’s 1980s work remain as testaments to this romance within Gutierrez-Solana’s artwork collection. I say all this to note the consistencies in Alfonzo’s ability to leave behind visual breadcrumbs of his personal ties across these individuals in different parts of the world.

Garcia’s move from Athens to Atlanta marked the start of the artist’s public-facing practice. Similarly to how I learned of Alfonzo, I became aware of Garcia through my work at LnS Gallery and through research commissioned and completed at the Vasari Archive at Miami-Dade Public Library to contextualize a series of works by Garcia titled Jazz Babies (1988) and Untitled (Calendar Series) (1982) that were brought in by a collector. I wondered about the significance of Athens and Atlanta in the artist’s path, as he eventually returned to Miami, where he spent the rest of his life.¹¹

In my research, I reached out to the universities in Athens and Atlanta where Garcia spent a formative decade of his life. To my pleasant surprise, the original notions vocalized by those I worked with at the gallery of “not much being found elsewhere outside of Miami” were debunked in the responses to my inquiries, which I gradually received over email and included yearbook headshots and article clippings from the artist’s exhibitions in the city.¹² Atlanta was a platform for the work he would be most recognized for in Miami. In Garcia’s typewritten words, his interest in studying art was credited to a stint serving in Heidelberg, Germany, through the US Army from 1969 to 1971 after completing his bachelor’s at University of Georgia, Athens in 1968, the artist moved for three and a half years to New York City. He was Dan Flavin’s personal assistant, along with assisting artists such as Daniel Buren, Christo, Dorothea Rockburne, Sol Lewitt, and Christo. He described this period as “postgraduate education and experience,” which motivated him to return to Georgia and pursue a master’s studies in drawing and painting at Georgia State University in Atlanta beginning in 1972.

During January 2025, following my time spent in Atlanta completing research in September and October 2024, I had the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, as I worked a production assistant gig for the presidential inauguration. During my web-based research on the artist in the fall, I learned that Garcia’s best friend of seventeen years, Nancy Clark, donated a chunk of his personal ephemera to the archive. Booking an appointment to see the ephemera in person, I spent hours poring over intimate photographs, grant applications, professional correspondences, personal letters and handwritten postcards sent by the artist to his aunt and uncle in Miami as he traveled the world in the later half of the 1970s.¹³

According to an unattributed essay found in the archive, Garcia developed a strict organizational system for his painting practice during his graduate studies at GSU. The essay notes that Garcia “started keeping a diary in calendar form, using symbols to denote specific events and appointments.” His record-keeping in these diaries continued as he relocated back to New York City in 1976 after graduating, where a limited living space and the struggle to survive financially in the city propelled him to create small canvases that were translations of his fascination with the passage of time. Thus, the Calendars series was born and executed over the course of five years, which Garcia notes as being “the most consistent thing I have ever done.” The essay explains:

Although they are pleasing asymmetrical compositions of repeated shapes and colors on what appears to be a shaped canvas, each shape, its placement, and number of times it is repeated is very significant to Garcia. As in his small diaries, the shapes symbolize ‘emotional, physical, and sexual events,’ which he will not elaborate on. Some canvases have heavy horizontal lines coursing across sections of the ‘month,’ which indicate times when Garcia was traveling. He explains that when he travels he does not take his diary, and to cross out the time he was gone “remains consistent to the idea of documentation. This may break with tradition, but these are not traditional paintings. The literal shape of the object is given to me by the month. The frequency of events is given to me by when they happen—I have no control over that.”

Garcia first showed his work in group exhibitions at the Atlanta-based Heath Gallery beginning in 1975, including Grid Structures / Gradation Systems in May 1976, where artists who “use as a referential structure some form of grid, explicit or implied, or a series or progression system resulting from arrangement of rank and order” exhibited together, recognizing Garcia’s entrypoint into this style of mark-making within a broader community. His Calendars premiered publicly in his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 1978. Public awareness of Garcia in the city of Atlanta is noted by Clyde Burnett, the arts editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who described Garcia’s Calendars as “very handsome, bold, and colorful.”¹⁴On the front of the exhibition postcard, a modular grid system created with black and red paint bears the numbers one to thirty, with a red slash through a sudden switch-up of numbers that are out of order in the midst of this sequence. ¹⁵

In 1979, Garcia began dividing his time between New York and Miami, where his parents were now living after leaving Cuba. In Miami, he worked a part-time job scraping boat hulls at the Coconut Grove Marina. This work meant the artist spent the majority of his time outdoors: “The contrast between the gray of the New York skies and the vivid blues and greens of the Miami environment, as well as the sunsets he almost ritually watched, greatly impressed him. This inspired a series of drawings dealing with the duration of daylight [...] Garcia rendered his almost romantic observations in a scientific manner.”

The $4000 Garcia was awarded when he won the CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in 1978 allowed him to execute a series of blue and black rectangle paintings that he saw as representing a twenty-four-hour period. Sourcing the exact times of sunrise and sunset from the University of Miami Hurricane Center, he divided forty-eight vertical intervals that represented thirty minutes each with painter’s tape, with the blue that was inspired by the Miami sky representing daytime, and black as night. As many as sixteen coats were applied on the canvas, with no two canvases looking alike as they were contingent on seasonal changes throughout the year. The Daylight series was exhibited in 1979 in a solo exhibition at Nobe Gallery in New York City. Later that year, Garcia moved back to Miami full time, finding New York “just as draining as it was stimulating.”¹⁶

Del Pilar gifted Alfonzo a drawing table as he worked at the Mutiny Hotel, in order to replicate his former Havana studio and lessen the emotional impact of the traumatic sequence of events following his exodus out of Cuba. Alfonzo rekindled his creative hand gradually but jumped around major American cities in the process. His mind was expanded tremendously by the quality of artists and work on view at New York institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Following a breakup with del Pilar, he bounced back to Miami and eventually to Los Angeles between the summer of 1983 and spring of 1984. His motifs sharpened tremendously in their symbolic intensity and spiritual meaning in terms of how realistic in depiction and frequently they appeared across compositions. Alfonzo often incorporated found materials in his art, especially paper bags during the 1970s, and in the first half of the 1980s he began using car tarps as substrates—as in The Feast of Wrath (1983–84) and Petty Joy (1984). In these works he incorporated imagery such as eyes, knives, crowns, and tongues, that would recur throughout his later practice. I wonder if these symbols speak to Alfonzo’s experiences with his severance from a longtime love and difficulty adjusting to Miami—far removed from his life in Cuba and requiring him to navigate new friendships and begin his art-making practice from scratch.

Settling in Miami and connecting with Barbara Young and Margarita Cano, key curators and librarians who worked within the Miami-Dade Public Library System, Garcia created and showcased pivotal installations such as 10,865 (1980) at the former Main Library’s location in front of Bayfront Park—titled after the number of Cubans that encamped and protested at the Peruvian embassy in Havana on the cusp of the Mariel Boatlift. The installation bears collages made out of pages from Granma—the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba—and The Miami Herald, sections of which the artist crossed out in red pigment, and in others stamped with the words “Dia 1,” “Dia 2,” and so forth up to the total amount of sixty-three days of the mass exodus.¹⁷

All roads led back to Miami for Alfonzo. Returning in April 1984, he lived there until the end of his life, in 1991. During this period, he strengthened the iconography of his paintings. He developed a signature style of telling narratives about his identity and lived experience as a gay Cuban man who pulled inspiration from faith through vibrantly colored layers of mosaic. He received recognition not only in the Miami arts scene, but also nationally and internationally, as he continued to portray a growing awareness of the violence fermenting with the AIDS epidemic through works like Still Life with AIDS Victim (1990), which recontextualizes the traditional style of a still life with a body resting atop what appears to be a hospital bed and a tombstone next an upside-down cross in the top left of the painting. Created following the loss of close friend, artist, and curator Sheldon Lurie, who was always an advocate of Alfonzo’s practice, this period marked a particular emotional state of rage for Alfonzo.

In the spring of 2025, I visited and looked at photographs of Alfonzo’s former home and studio in Little Havana, and although the decades have altered its surface-level appearance, the site still gives insight into the artist’s surroundings as he invested more time into his paintings, ceramics, and sculptures.¹⁸ Alfonzo’s worship and belief in Santeria emerge in works such as Babalú Ayé (1987) and Yemayá (1987)—these, I learned from an avid collector, were set to be donated and incorporated into a display of stained glass windows for a Santeria church in Miami that was never built.¹⁹

Large-scale exhibitions and installations by Garcia, such as Calendars (1980) at the Miami-Dade Public Library System: The Artmobile; Projections (1983) at Art and Culture Hollywood; Full and ½ Full (1984) at West Dade Regional Library; and Making Purple (1986) at the Okeechobee Metrorail Station, trace Garcia’s insistence on making his work accessible to the general public. With BH/2 (1981), installed across three locations—Miami-Dade Public Library System Coral Reef, Hollywood Federal Savings Bank in Coral Gables, and Miami-Dade South Campus—Garcia unified three independent community spaces into a singular experience by making each of the locations a vertex of a triangle. Physically mapping a triangle across the three sites on a Miami-Dade county map, he presented a single, simultaneous exhibition across these sites. He cut a triangle into the ground with a shovel on the grass outside of one of the venues—this incision has since been covered, but its existence is memorialized in an accompanying silent B-roll housed within the Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Special Collections and Archives.²⁰ By showing his work in these public spaces, Garcia brought art to the masses, engaging with demographics of individuals that may never witness art within gallery and museum spaces. He reflects in another B-roll located in the MDPLS database: “I try to highlight performances. At least four or five of them took place in the Miami-Dade Cultural Center in Downtown. Others took place in little cafes in Little Havana or parking lots or places where the average viewer, the person that was there, is the type of person who may never walk into a gallery or museum. It was bringing art to the people.”²¹

Garcia’s time in Miami was formative: he made lasting friendships and brought joy to his community. Across the decade he lived in the city, he began to increasingly present ephemeral work (documented meticulously through sketches and by photographers the artist brought on) that ensured his practice’s accessibility to a bigger viewing audience outside of those immediately present. The act of documentation was the art itself. Miami was a playground for concepts to come to life, as Garcia’s confidence in his own skin emerged, as seen in his playfulness and ability to incite camaraderie in invitations to loved ones to participate in these conceptual projects. For example, the artist sent a questionnaire to friends—including art dealers, artists, librarians, and educators—requesting their responses to “erotic” foods, films, jewelry, scents, and so on. The individual questionnaires, each handwritten and decorated by the participants, were distributed as booklets at an Erotic Art group exhibition at Lanvin Gallery on Valentine’s Day in 1984, organized by the artist. In Performance: Concrete Poetry (1985), the artist, alongside longtime collaborator Antonio Dos Santos, cemented sexually-charged poetry into permanence by tracing his finger into wet concrete that dried over time, with lines that read: “tearing you with my fingers / each moan enrages me to the climax / and to leave on you my trace / and harden you.”

In 1984, Garcia became part of a Miami artist collective known as NADA, which in the immediate release of the group found in Rafael Salazar’s Hialeah home archive signifies the following: “They united under the name of NADA, a name not chosen as casually as the Dadaists chose theirs. NADA could possibly mean No Art Dealers Allowed, but it doesn’t. If the nothing implied by NADA means anything at all—it may be the idea that the artists feel they owe nothing to critical or popular prescription, implied or stated.” The group of multidisciplinary artists frequently collaborated on projects and staged guerrilla exhibitions in unlikely locations, like the Miami MetroRail, the Tropicaire Flea Market, the Miami-Dade Public Library and the Cuban Museum. Their headquarters were the Coral Coffee Shop at 1247 Coral Way, where “evenings” were held to “provide a comfortable setting for artists who are interested in good conversation and Cuban coffee.”

A practicing educator at Miami-Dade College’s South Campus—the now-defunct International Fine Arts College and Metropolitan Museum School—Garcia also educated through his blackboard-style installations. His Anti-Bilingual Bigot (1987), which resembles a crossed-out classroom blackboard, openly critiqued a 1980 Miami-Dade County ordinance that restricted county funds from promoting communication in any language but English.²² Using excerpts from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote as the background, Garcia then covered the Spanish text with paint. Garcia was not afraid of informing viewers about the harm in this cultural censorship and erasure, especially during a time in which Miami was receiving high waves of immigration. The installation featured an audio tape of Garcia reciting Federico Garcia Llorca’s poetry in Spanish; the speaker from which this emanated sat hidden behind a pillar of books in foreign languages and a part of a marble tombstone. The installation was undoubtedly a form of resistance, while also displaying his referential interests in literature and law.

When considering why Alfonzo and Garcia should be in conversation with one another in this essay, I wanted to contextualize how two artists who exhibited in community together and passed within two years of one another were remembered. In 1993, a group of investors bought Alfonzo’s estate, which assisted in keeping his work in circulation and elevated, as seen in many posthumous exhibitions.

I hope to soon visit Garcia’s best friend Clark’s Fort Myers home and that of Rafael Salazar, a Hialeah-based photographer who was in the NADA artist collective with Garcia. Sending exhibition brochures I designed and printed for the Laundromat Art Space exhibition via snail mail to curators, I recognize now that there’s no need to ask for permission. It’s a matter of taking initiative to visit the archives in person, speak with those who are vital to further understanding Alfonzo and Garcia as people, first and foremost, and artists, secondarily. In this, the work continues to keep their names in the conversation of looking back at history to continue forward as artists working now in Miami. May this be the first of many future opportunities to shed light on those lost all too soon.

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