Museum of the African Diaspora is pleased to present Vincent Miranda: Florida jitt, the final presentation of the 2019-2020 Emerging Artists Program. Raised in a white and Afro-Latinx household in southern Florida, Miranda’s work explores the embodied tension of being caught between multiple cultural identities. This seeming lack of ‘self’ created what the artist calls an “identity vacuum;” a space that would eventually be filled by his surrounding environment: the whole Down South.

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Miranda’s work inhabits the interstices of Southern hip-hop, masculinity, and the natural landscape—exploring how these entities contribute to a sense of identity for young men-of-color. Referencing regionally specific gestures, artifacts, humidity, and foliage, Miranda creates sculptural interpretations consisting of silicone objects, armatures, and glass vessels to begin to convey the experience of a ‘New South.’

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Miranda is drawn to linguistic and cultural signifiers of adornment, success, and the self-made like “peacocking” or “flexing” and the ways these concepts show up in the natural world: the sublimity nature being perhaps the biggest “flex” of all. The juxtaposition between the fragile floral and glass arrangements against the hardened gestures of the male body push us, as a collective, to re-imagine what it means to embody masculinity.