Miranda was the invited artist in the Boston Printmakers Biennial in October 2013. He referred to the piece, Dumbo and the Candies, A Misunderstanding, as “a dream that was never made”. Ibrahim believes that it had been difficult to produce the piece due its perceived social, political, and cultural message. The edition was printed in the fall of 2015 at Brand X Editions in New York, and published by Latin Art Space.
Ibrahim Miranda is from Pinar del Rio, and currently lives and works in Havana. He is one of Cuba's most important visual artists and printmakers, who began showing his work in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the US shortly after graduating from the Instituto Superior de Arte. He has since gained international recognition for his work based on maps, particularly maps of Cuba, emphasizing qualities of water and isolation, suggesting a state of metamorphosis and change. Miranda’s Mapaglifos series imaginatively redefines the borders of cities as animals, ascribing symbolic meaning to each metropolis and chronicling the shape shifting nature of our annexed world. With poetry inspired in “Islandness” as a concept with all the thematic connotations and psychology it entails, Miranda reinterprets his vision of this island, expanding its borders and physical limits so as to make it universal. Suggestive icons -- such as the alligator, the sleeping Indian and the tracing of history as a way to know our interior selves-- make us reflect on our origins and their worth, the geography that each of us carries wherever we go and that defines us as human beings.
Miranda is a master of woodblock, and was very influential in the resurgence and revitalization of Cuban printmaking in the 1990s. He bases many of his works on found maps tracing the distinctive "crocodile" profile of the island of Cuba, and plumbs its literature, music, religion, history and flora and fauna in an exploration of enduring themes of geographical and existential isolation, the urban condition, Afro-Cuban heritage, and personal/collective biographies. The poetry and songs of Cuba provide literary and philosophical ideas, deepening the meaning and impact of his prints and paintings.
Ibrahim’s work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including the Museo Bellas Artes in Havana, Casa de las Americas, Havana,the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA), The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation in Madrid and the Apeldoorn Museum in the Netherlands. In 2012, Ibrahim Miranda won a residency in the Hugh MacColl Center in Charlotte, NC., among others.
