Featured Cultural Partner: Art of Transformation
Garden of Humanity

Jems KO KOBI
Les hommes de ceÌdre, 2018
Cedar sculpture
102.3" x 23.5" x 23.8" / 260 x 60 x 60.5 cm
Photograph courtesy of the artist and Le Galerie 38, Casablanca, Morocco

On View: Dec 2nd – June 30th, 2024
Curated by: James Brazil (Australia)
Location: The VFW Lot, 757 Ali Baba Ave., Opa-locka, FL 33054

The sculpture pavilion presents two large-scale sculptures acquired by the Ten North Group in a lushly designed garden:

1. Yemaya
Ten North Group is pleased to unveil the newest work by contemporary artist Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy “Diago” (Cuba), a six-foot bronze sculpture titled Yemaya, after the goddess of the living ocean, the mother of all. Yemaya will be exhibited in a setting conceived by Curator James Brazil as a dialogue with the spirits that accompanied African peoples during the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Middle Passage.

2. The Cedar Men
Sculptor and performer Jems Robert Koko Bi (Côte d’Ivoire), whose work mixes avant-gardist influences and the artist’s African history, has created five six-foot-tall works which are sculpted from a single cedar trunk weighing half a ton each. The Cedar Men tells the history of humanity through the earth's first inhabitants in Africa as the works initiate a conversation with the forces of nature, the ancestors, the native land, and the exile.