NSU Art Museum presents the first solo museum exhibition of Miami artist Cici McMonigle (b. 2001, Tianjin, China). The exhibition showcases her exuberant and colorful paintings of fabulous beasts and monstrous creatures derived from Chinese and American western fables and tales, and a new series of painted wood cutouts inspired by traditional Chinese folk toys, which symbolize peace and prosperity. She notes that her work is a “distinctive and exaggerated blend of cultural spiritualism.”

Monsters seem to be everywhere these days in the work of South Florida artists, a number of whom have been featured in solo exhibitions at NSU Art Museum in recent years, including Susan Kim Alvarez, Matthew Carone, Joel Gaiten, Jaime Grant, Emilio Martinez, and Zoe Schweiger. From whence did these creatures emerge? Could it be South Florida’s geography as the Southernmost point of the East Coast of the continental United States instills fear of falling off the map? Sixteenth-century cartographers drew scary sea monsters in the oceans as signs of the great unknown, adding the inscription “Here there be Monsters” (a phrase popularized in the blockbuster film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003). The unknown also encompasses the subconscious, and in this centenary year of the founding of Surrealism, there is a renewed fascination with the Surrealists’ techniques of pure automatism that bypass their conscious mind, and the monstrous creatures they unleash. The recent proliferation of monsters in work by South Florida artists also diverges from the identity-defining figurative art that was pervasive during the last two decades. These artists’ Chimeras are universal and free of human restraints. They can speak in coded and veiled messages to express the unmentionable and unburdened buried anxieties. The monster is the “other” in a land where foreigners are everywhere.