Words on Glass: In Conversation with Jon Fernando Brito
Jon Fernando Brito (b. 1955, Havana, d. 1990, Miami) lived in New York where he was a practicing and successful artist. His collage work on glass dissected and recombined religious imagery, fanciful images, and Victorian motifs into dreamlike spaces and landscapes. Like scores of other gay men living in the United States in the 80s and 90s, he was a casualty of the AIDS epidemic, prematurely ending his life and career. The artist and curator Andrew C Horton (b. 1982, Miami, FL) currently lives in Miami. Brito was his mother’s cousin, and although Brito was not physically a constant figure in Horton’s life, his art and his death have been. In this diorama Horton curates a survey of his own older works (2006-2010) and Brito’s as a time capsule, preserving a period in his early career where his work was still heavily based on the work of his relative. As Horton nears the point in his career where Brito was when he passed away through a narration transmitted across the diorama window he examines this relationship and the way familial ties shaped him into an artist.
This project was installed in the Historic Alfred I. Du-Pont building in downtown Miami and made possible by Tilia Venture. Photos by Ginger Photo.
