Jorge Fernandez – Artist and Businessman
Biography
Jorge Fernandez was born in pre-Castro Cuba in the 1950’s. He was part of the generation of Cubans who left the island after the revolution. He was raised in Miami’s famous “Calle Ocho” – the heartland of the exile Cuban community and the heartbeat of its émigré culture. This was the Miami of Celia Cruz, Willie Chirino and, later, of Gloria Estefan, the Miami of Viernes Culturales and the annual Carnaval, and “lest we forget” the Memorial Flame to Cuban heroes. Cuban Americans were a self-confident community, they were enterprising and famously hardworking and Jorge’s own development in his adopted homeland was to follow a similar trajectory.
As with many Cubans newly arrived in the US, he started at the bottom. He left school without recognized qualifications and worked as an electrician. He was self-taught, without formal training, but mastered his new vocation. Over time, he built a successful business that took him across the US. It was while working on projects away from home that he would fill time by visiting galleries and museums. His lifetime passion for art developed out of this spontaneous encounter with the arts.
Curiosity and interest in art evolved into practice and experimentation. Thus started the secret life of Jorge Fernandez the artist. He used oil paint or acrylic and painted on whatever surface came to hand: canvas, wood, metal - even on scraps of paper. As with his “day job”, he had no formal training but a prodigious capacity to observe and to learn.
This aptitude for learning outside the official framework of institutionalised education brought Jorge into the sphere of “outsider art” – a type of art that lent itself to no stereotype and that included artists such as Henri Rousseau, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Englishman Alfred Wallis, amongst others. These were self-taught mavericks with a highly personalized style; they followed no formal rules other than their own, they were at the margins of the art establishment before being embraced by it.
Jorge’s development as an artist was unusual because it went hand in hand with his work as a commercial installer and designer. His growing business involved projects as varied as custom lighting, sound systems and marble installations; he built wine cellars for the rich and famous or stainless steel flooring in hip discos or he would work on public commissions for the Miami authorities.
It was while working on Dade County’s “Art in Public Places” that he came into contact with Cuban artist Carlos Alfonzo and the African-American artist Betye Saar. Jorge worked on the installation of Alfonzo’s “Ceremony of the Tropics” - a colourful mural in ceramic tiles at the Santa Clara Metrorail station in Miami’s wholesale fruit district - and on Saar’s compelling “On our Way” installation at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Metrorail station.
In 1986, the commercial installer and part-time artist opened a new chapter in his life with the establishment of Gem Paver Systems –a manufacturer of patented “interlocking” paving stones. By 2007, his company was the market leader in the paver sector across the Americas, literally from Alaska to Patagonia, earning Gem Paver Systems, a listing as a Hispanic Top 500 company. At a personal level, Jorge has been short-listed for “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2008” by Hispanic Business Magazine as well as the prestigious “Bizz Award, 2008”.
The untiring spirit of the artist-industrialist has not stopped there, however: he has broadened his artistic work from painting to sculpture and has worked on his first public commissions as a sculptor including his cross at the San Juan Bosco church in Miami and St Patrick’s church in Miami Beach. In moving to sculpture he brings together different strands of his experience and insights: art and engineering and paint and metal are the obvious combinations but his Cuban roots in urban America add texture and depth to his work.
His latest creations are large in scale, over ten feet tall, made of stainless steel. They are his “Welcome …” sculptures that celebrate love and the mystery of life.
Of recent Jorge Fernandez played a part in the “Art inspired by Burning man” exhibit on Star Island, kicking off Art Basel Miami 08 and exhibited at Sculpt Miami 2008.
He is currently on display at the Lurie-Kavachnina gallery in Miami and will be featured there, in a one man show during the month of March 2009.