Miralda: Honeymoon Project 1986–92

November 29–December 20, 1989
Beaver College Art Gallery

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Miralda's "Honeymoon Project" celebrates the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World through a series of installations, performances, and exhibitions happening around the world and based upon the theme of the symbolic courtship and marriage of the Statue of Liberty to the Columbus Column in Barcelona's harbor.

Installation view, "Miralda: Honeymoon Project 1986–92," Beaver College Art Gallery, November 29–December 20, 1989

In Philadelphia, the Samual S. Fleisher Art Memorial is sponsoring the creation of the Liberty Belle Cape — a "trousseau" gift for Lady Liberty made to monumental scale — in collaboration with the Mummers Museum and other area cultural institutions. The Cape will be presented to the public on New Year's Day during the Mummers Parade.*

Beaver College Art Gallery is participating in this project by presenting Liberty's "engagement" ring and other Honeymoon Project related material to provide a further context in which Miralda's vision, the presentation of the Cape, and the "Honeymoon Project" as a metaphor for cultural exchange can be understood.

This exhibition continues "Transformations", a series of installations for Beaver College Art Gallery. It has been funded in part by a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Friends of Beaver College Art Gallery, the Forum Committee, and the Department of Fine Arts.

Installation view, "Miralda: Honeymoon Project 1986–92," Beaver College Art Gallery, November 29–December 20, 1989

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Since the early 1970s, Miralda, who lives in Barcelona and New York City, has created large scale sculptures, video works, and environments which he employs within performance works based upon the symbolic aspects of traditional popular ceremonies and events, such as processions, parades, and rituals of good preparation and dining. His work is uniquely attuned to the mythology of everyday life. Critic and curator Pierre Restany has written of Miralda, "...[his work] attaches itself to a situation, analyzes its causes and effects, its sociological structures and their semantic correspondences... he studies customs and isolates usages and habits; he heightens their aesthetic and poetic transference, their projection into the universe of the feast."

*The artist in consultation with Paula Marincola, the project's director and Thora Jacobsen, director of the sponsoring Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, later pulled the cape from the parade and instead presented it on the grand staircase of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on January 9, 1990.

Rubin, Daniel and Von Bergen Jane M. "A Mummers spectacular fizzles", The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 1989.