TAMPA, FL.- Faded Elegance: Photographs of Havana by Michael Eastman consists of twenty-nine, 6 x 7 1/2 ft. photographs taken by the artist between 1999 and 2010. Over more than a decade, Eastman captured Havana’s changing cultural landscape in his images of the city’s architecture and lush interiors, ravaged by the effects of time. His large-scale photographs evoke the nostalgia and wealth of a bygone era, while shedding light on the harsh economic realities faced in present day Cuba. While in Havana, Eastman photographed a number of subjects, from the interiors of homes along Ambassador Way, to stairwells and music schools, to abstract patterns found on the exteriors of buildings. Eastman is known for his richly colored photographs, which he captures with his 4 x 5 camera. This exhibition is the first to explore the depth and range of Eastman’s Havana photographs.

Michael Eastman has established himself as one of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists. The self-taught photographer has spent four decades documenting interiors and facades in cities as diverse as Havana, Paris, Rome, and New Orleans, producing large-scale photographs unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use of color, Eastman is most recognized for his explorations of architectural form and the textures of decay, which create mysterious narratives about time and place. He continues to resist the digital movement, capturing his images on film and printing them himself.

Eastman’s photographs have appeared in Time, Life, and American Photographer, and they reside in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other prestigious institutions. His books include Vanishing America (2008, Rizzoli) and Horses (2003, Knopf), which is now in its fifth edition. Eastman lives in St. Louis.

Faded Elegance: Photographs of Havana by Michael Eastman is organized by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and curated by Alison Amick.

Miradas: Ancient Roots in Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art, Works from the Bank of America Collection
This unique survey of over 100 works takes a close look at paintings, prints and photographs created over the past eighty years. The exhibition examines and celebrates work by artists on both sides of the border —Mexican and Mexican American— to reveal a variety of cultural aspects as they emerged in the years after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) to the present day. The works included are by some of the best-known Mexican artists— including Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Gabriel Orozco, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Gunther Gerzso— as well as Mexican-American artists such as Judithe Hernandez, Roberto Juarez and Robert Graham. Visitors to the Miradas exhibition will have the opportunity to observe the works of many artists who have been attracted to and inspired by Mexico’s ancient civilizations and modern theories alike.

Many artists of Mexican descent working in the United States continue to implement social ideas and educational theories first taken up by modern Mexican artists at the end of the Mexican Revolution. They also understand and react to the sociopolitical climate in the United States and the global art and theories of the second half of the twentieth century, incorporating contemporary regional politics along with their broad understanding of their diverse heritages. The Miradas exhibition allows visitors to survey this rich trajectory.

The Miradas exhibition is part of Bank of America’s Art in our Communities â program. Bank of America launched the Art in our Communities program to share works from its distinguished art collection with museums across the globe. The corporate art collection has been converted into a community resource through Art in our Communities. The program allows museums and nonprofit galleries to borrow complete exhibitions from the collection at no cost. Art in our Communities is a collaborative effort that engages community partners and generates vital revenue for regional museums throughout the world. Since the program's launch in 2008, more than 50 museums worldwide will have benefited from the loan of an exhibition.