The Most Powerful 40 Minutes of My Time in Miami

It was one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in years.

And paradoxically—I knew exactly 0% about it before walking into the gallery.

Maybe that’s why it hit so hard. That jump from total ignorance to, let’s say, 10% understanding felt like a good workout. Suddenly things start connecting. Dots that were scattered begin forming a pattern.

At the Pérez Art Museum Miami, I came across the Jiménez brothers’ exhibition: El Monte.

And the first thing that struck me was the eyes.

Magnetic.

Terrifying.

Hypnotic.

These figures—black silhouettes set against almost Renaissance-like landscapes—have only one clear source of light: white, glowing eyes. They look at you as if they know something you don’t. And from the conversations I overheard in the gallery, I wasn’t alone in that feeling.

I haven’t felt that kind of tension in response to art in years.

That kind of… duende. Federico García Lorca wrote that duende is a force that doesn’t come from the mind, but from the blood. That’s exactly what I felt here.

The exhibition is rooted in the Lucumí tradition (also known as Santería)—an Afro-Cuban religion born from forced mixing. Enslaved people from West Africa, mainly the Yoruba, were brought to Cuba. Officially, they had to become Catholic. Unofficially, they preserved their own gods—called orishas.

They did it cleverly: they began blending their deities with Catholic saints. Syncretism became a survival strategy. Religion as resistance. Beneath a surface of compliance with the colonial narrative, they smuggled in their own culture.

That’s what Elliot and Erick Jiménez explore—the twin Cuban-American artists behind the exhibition, raised in this tradition.

Formally, their works are photographs, but they look like oil paintings. Baroque compositions. Red and blue return like a refrain—colors associated with Ibejí, the divine Yoruba twins. The motif of duality is everywhere: in religion, in history, and in the artists’ own relationship as twins.

One installation feels like a chapel and a forest at the same time. Monte—the forest in Cuba—is a place of spirits, transformation, encounters with something greater. The central object resembles a 19th-century Catholic tabernacle, but inside, instead of a host, you see those eyes.

Another piece reverses the motif of sacrifice: a ram holds a knife. Who is the victim, and who is the perpetrator? In the context of colonialism, the question stops being symbolic.

I also learned that despite the official atheism introduced after the Cuban Revolution, these practices survived. Religion went underground, but it didn’t disappear. And in Miami—especially after the migration wave of 1980—it lives on. In private homes, small communities, and in the memories of older residents.

That’s where the magic of this exhibition lies. At its core, it’s a story about cultural survival. About the fact that identity can be hidden, but not erased. That adaptation doesn’t always mean surrender.

Eighteen dollars for a ticket to Pérez Art Museum Miami? Worth it for that one room alone.

Interestingly, a few hours earlier I had watched Surface Image: Epilogue—a vision of utopian Miami 2024: reformer Pilates studios, rooftop parties, perfect bodies, glossy waterfront office towers. Miami as a promise machine. And then you walk into the next museum room, and the eyes of a religion that survived human trafficking, colonialism, bans, and migration stare back at you.

Two versions of the city. The Instagram-optimized one—and the one rooted in centuries of migrant history.

That awareness is what made this exhibition stay with me.

If you’d like to read my full reflections on Miami, you can find them here.
Want to see the photos? They’re available here.

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