Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
DOMINO EFFECT
Exhibit connects the dots of history and symbolism.
On a sunny afternoon in the Marianao neighborhood of Havana, Cuba, two teenage domino players seem confused when they flip over artist Rodolfo Perraza’s wooden domino tiles, each one engraved not with black dots but with the faces of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other notorious political figures.
In Perraza’s art video “I Don’t Play Dominoes,” the teenagers sit at a white table, surrounded by the boastful racket of middleaged family members. One player, a girl with cornrows, lays down her first wooden tile and says, “Che Guevara.” Her opponent, a boy wearing a black tank top, prepares to slide his tile across the table: It’s Fidel Castro’s face, which represents double-nine, the highest value in the domino set. He looks conflicted about playing the tile, but slaps it down, anyway.
“It’s a kind of social experiment,” says Perraza, who laser-cut the domino tiles by hand, in a recent phone interview. “I went to a specific part of the city where people play dominoes, and I saw that they related [Fidel’s] personality to the tile. They tried to get rid of him as fast as possible. In Spanish, they said they wanted to ‘cut out the fat’ in their tiles.”
The 55 tiles in Peraza’s domino set will go on display this week at the Perez Art Museum Miami, which is hosting a larger exhibition about the game titled “Spots, Dots, Pips, Tiles.” Opening today and subtitled “An Exhibition About Dominoes,” the show features works from 21 artists who trace the origins of dominoes and examine the game’s enduring popularity in South Florida’s Latin neighborhoods, including Little Havana, and its social and political ties to New York, South Africa, Cuba, Puerto Rico and China.
Peraza, 36, immigrated to Miami in 2010 after the Cuban government seized his art supplies and political paintings. When Peraza was younger, his family and neighbors would play dominoes in Havana, usually while socializing about politics, an inescapable topic that turned Peraza off the game.
“There was nothing else to talk about, and they talked more than they organized,” says Peraza, who still visits Cuba on occasion, and doesn’t play dominoes. “So I wanted to use the game to express ideas of power and control.” Among the largest goals of the show, says Maria Elena Ortiz, the museum’s assistant curator, is to connect the dots between contemporary art and dominoes.
“So many of these artists are using a lighthearted game like dominoes to talk about serious things,” Ortiz says during a recent tour of the exhibition. “It’s a very intimate game, and people from every social class play and gossip around the table, and the conversations feel so vibrant.”
“Spots, Dots, Pips, Tiles: An Exhibition About Dominoes” will open with a reception from 5:30-8:30 p.m. at Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., in Miami. The exhibit will close Oct. 29. Admission is $12-$16, but will be free July 8. Call 305-375-3000 or go to PAMM.org.