PAINTING THE TOWN

Pain ti ng RAYMOND ELMAN captures the likenesses—and the stories— of the Magic City’s most creative movers and shakers the Town

BY NICOLE MARTINEZ

Like so many others before them, artist Raymond Elman and his wife, Lee, became Miamians after a conversation about the lousy weather up north.

The couple had owned a Miami Beach condo since 2001, but they spent the majority of the year at their home on the northern tip of Cape Cod in Provincetown, Massachusetts. “The Cape can be lousy weather in May and June,” Elman says. “We were driving, and my wife just looked at me and said, ‘Why are we going back?’”

Sure, relocating to South Florida is nothing new. But when Elman moved to Miami full-time in 2012, he took a uniquely artistic approach in getting to know his new home. As Elman puts it, having a footprint in Miami since the early 2000s allowed him to “witness the cultural explosion here” and understand that there was room for real storytelling.

A dedicated portraitist of both visual and literary forms, Elman has spent the last decade or so documenting the Magic City’s cultural greats—from cartoonist Jim Morin to poet Juan Felipe Herrera, dance director Robert Battle to architect Bernardo Fort-Brescia, and musician Tony Succar to fi lm director Billy Corben—in large-scale portraits and in-depth interviews.

Primarily an abstract painter during the ’70s and ’80s, in 1989, Elman began focusing on a series of mixed-media portraits (measuring 60 inches by 43 inches and 40 inches by 30 inches) of prominent people in the arts. His portraits of Pulitzer Prize recipients Jhumpa Lahiri, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky are in the collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. To date, he has completed more than 400 portraits.

Artist Raymond Elman at work on a new series called Orts in his Miami Gardens studio

Right: Elman in his Cape Cod studio

DAVID DUNLAP

As a resident of Provincetown—known for its artists’ colony that has attracted heavyweights like Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell— Elman says he uniquely understood the importance of chronicling such a rich critical and artistic commingling. He founded Provincetown Arts magazine in 1985 as a way to capture and share the spirit of the local arts community—and to provide an outlet for his portraits and interviews that portrayed his subjects in their everyday lives.

“I thought of it as documentation inside an art colony from an insider’s point of view, and as a memoir of my life,” Elman says.

Post-move and fully ensconced in South Florida, Elman began actively creating and curating a new series of Miami-based works in 2013. He says that his initial Miami portraits were aimed at really getting to know the people who knew the city from the inside.

“In the beginning, I was searching for people who either grew up in Miami or went to school in Miami,” he says. But a conversation with a friend helped him realize that “Miami is like this tidal place where people fl ow in and fl ow out, and they bring culture and also take Miami culture with them,” Elman recounts. “So I started thinking people coming in for Basel and Book Fair were fair game.”

Soon, Elman needed a new place to publish the southern swing of his storied career. He told his fi rst portrait and interview subject— Cuban-American Miami-raised poet Richard Blanco—about his dream for a Miami arts publication. Blanco suggested that Elman contact artist John Bailly, who teaches at Florida International University (FIU). After a series of discussions with the university, in 2015, Elman and FIU launched Inspicio, which showcases the diverse talent within Miami

One of my great pleasures in life is knowing someone from point A to point B.”

Elman with Samurai and South Florida’s arts communities (inspicio.fiu.edu). Elman edits the Swordsman, a portrait of his teacher, publication, and its pages often include his portraits and interviews with mentor, and friend, some of the Magic City’s most creative residents across the visual, perKnox Martin. forming, and literary arts.

Elman’s artistic process begins with him asking his subject to take them to the place where they feel most comfortable. On location, Elman spends about 15 to 30 minutes photographing them with plenty of natural light. Back in his light-filled studio, Elman will enlarge the photographs and print them on up to 20 sheets of archival 11-inch-by-17-inch paper. He then soaks the printed pages in water and adheres them onto canvas and into the original portrait using polymer resin. Once that process is complete and has dried, he’ll paint over the photo with oil paint, a technique he developed himself.

Elman’s local work has earned him praise—and expanded his opportunities. In 2018, he was honored with an Ellie Award from the ArtsCenter South Florida (now known as Oolite Arts). The accolade included funds that Elman used to create a series of 40-inch-by-60-inch mixed-media portraits and interviews celebrating The Historic Hampton House (historic hamptonhouse.org). Located in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood, the former motel was a “Green Book” location in the ’50s and ’60s, offering refuge for Black travelers (including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Josephine Baker, and Aretha Franklin, to name a few) who needed a place to stay when they visited still-segregated South Florida. Portraits in Elman’s Hampton House series include Enid Pinkney, who led the Hampton House preservation efforts; former astronaut Winston Scott; and Khalilah Ali, ex-wife of Muhammad Ali. Next up? An exhibit of 20 portraits at the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach in 2023. (jmof.fiu.edu)

For Elman, the point of every portrait he creates and every interview he conducts is as much to honor his subjects as it is to remind himself of the honor of knowing them. “One of my great pleasures in life is knowing someone from point A to point B,” he says. “In some ways that’s what’s happening with these portraits; I’m capturing the experience of knowing them.” (raymondelman.com)

Photographer Robert Zuckerman

Robert Zuckerman passed away in June. But his legacy as an accomplished major motion picture industry photographer lives on in the hearts of the people he worked with and whom he

counted as friends—stars like Will Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Denzel Washington, Melissa Leo, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.

His big- and small-screen photography credits include I Know What You Did Last Summer, Any Given Sunday, Training Day, National Treasure, Transformers, Pursuit of Happyness, The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck.

But Zuckerman also worked in still photography, publishing a book entitled Kindsight, which tells the story of the richness of everyday encounters and experiences through photographs of ordinary people, from taxi and bus drivers to waitresses, plumbers, and kids at a playground.

After a rare progressive disease put him in a wheelchair, Zuckerman moved to Miami to teach at FIU. He often visited local schools, putting on workshops aimed at teaching students how to photograph and write, with the goal of connecting them to the things that move them.

“I think the Miami art scene is amazing. It has so much energy,” Zuckerman told Elman in an interview before his death. “Art is really encouraged in Miami, both in the art districts and in the schools. I try to work with young photographers and make myself available as much as I can.”

“Robert was a saint,” Elman says of Zuckerman. “I never heard him complain about anything. He was constantly doing outreach work and finding ways to help others. I call his portrait, Saint Robert at Haulover Cut.”

Miami was a wonderful launching pad for the hopes and dreams of a young woman.”

Artist Michelle Oka Doner

A Miami Beach native whose family is deeply embedded in the city’s cultural and political history, Michelle Oka Doner is a celebrated visual artist with numerous public art installations across New York City, Miami, and other parts of the country. Working in a range of media including sculpture, prints, and drawing, Oka Doner’s oeuvre also includes costume and set design— like the stunning costumes she created for the Miami City Ballet’s 2021 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oka Doner is also the author of Miami Beach: A Blueprint of an Eden, which chronicles Miami Beach from the 1920s to the 1960s through her lens.

“I was born and raised in Miami Beach. It was a small community in those days,” Oka Doner recalled in her interview with Elman. “Miami was a wonderful launching pad for the hopes and dreams of a young woman. I have maintained a strong and passionate relationship with this community.”

“There is something in Michelle’s work that reminds me of the Golem in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay —fashioning life from natural debris and mud,” Elman says of Oka Doner. “In her case, when we shot the portrait, she said, ‘Let’s do it in front of my favorite banyan tree,’ across from where she grew up in Miami Beach. There’s a fierceness about Michelle, and I think I got that.”

Poet Richard Blanco

You might recall Richard Blanco’s heartfelt reading of his poem, One Day, during President Obama’s inauguration in 2013. The fact that this Miami-based poet, teacher, and memoirist was chosen to commemorate such an event says enough about what we he means to our community. Blanco’s writing has been published in The Nation and The New Yorker, among other prominent titles, and he has taught at Georgetown American University and Wesleyan College.

Elman recalls watching the historic moment on TV. “I thought, ‘This will be the first guy I do a portrait of in Miami.’”

“As a Cuban-American growing up in Miami, I never felt like ‘the other,’” Blanco told Elman during their interview. “I knew my community, and that is a very privileged space to grow up in. Writing and reading One Day at President Obama’s inauguration, I realized that there are many exile narratives that have always been part of the American story, they just aren’t highlighted like the story of the Pilgrims.”

Elman was sure to capture that feeling of home when he and Blanco connected. “I always say to my subjects, ‘Let’s capture an image of you in a place that’s meaningful to you.’ And we went to La Carreta,” he says, describing the Cuban restaurant where Elman photographed Blanco that is famous for its “abuela-style” food and authentic Cuban espresso.

Dancer Lourdes Lopez

A former New York City Ballet ballerina herself, Lopez has led the Miami City Ballet as its artistic director since 2012. Born in Havana but raised in Miami, Lopez studied ballet under the inimitable George Balanchine and danced as a soloist in a number of the company’s major productions. She later transitioned to a career in television, working as a cultural arts reporter at NBC in New York, before returning to ballet.

“I believe that dance has the ability to change lives,” Lopez revealed to Elman. “I have a real desire to bring what we do at Miami City Ballet to other South Florida communities, [so] that children have the opportunity to access professional dance training. Why should they have to leave South Florida like I did if they want to dance?”

Elman says Lopez’s personality shines through in his portrait of her. “I love that Lourdes is giving me an extraordinary grin,” he says. “Given her accomplishments, she could have been a very aloof person as she was one of the greatest dancers in the world. She was so warm and so welcoming, and that’s what came through in the portrait.”

I believe that dance has the ability to change lives.”

Poet Campbell McGrath

Campbell McGrath is a celebrated poet and arguably one of the most accomplished creative writing professors at Florida International University. Among his many accolades, McGrath is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, has been named a MacArthur Genius fellow and a United States Artists fellow, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

A native of Chicago, McGrath now calls Miami home. In fact, many of his works, including a 2003 collection titled Florida Poems, are centered around the state’s unique charms and challenges. “The best thing about the Miami literary community is that it is very mutually supportive and unified,” he told Elman. “New York and Chicago, for example, have cliques. Miami is open-ended and doesn’t have rival centers competing for attention.”

“I chose to do a portrait of Campbell because he is a major poet and a MacArthur Genius award recipient,” Elman says. “I especially love his book of poetry titled XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, which I think is brilliant. [It’s] a sequence of 100 poems—one for each year of the twentieth century— written in a wide range of forms and voices, including Einstein, Picasso, and Matisse.” «