Elliot and Erick Jiménez Reimagine Cultural Duality at PAMM

This summer, Miami-born twin artists Elliot and Erick Jiménez presented “El Monte” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami—their first solo museum exhibition and an immersive step beyond photography into installation, sculpture, and mixed media. Known for images that merge Lucumí spirituality with references to the Western art canon, the brothers use this exhibition to expand their practice into a full environment where myth, memory, and identity become not just subject matter, but atmosphere.

Born to Cuban immigrants and raised in Miami, Elliot and Erick grew up immersed in layers of cultural duality. Their biracial family carried Lucumí traditions—an Afro-Cuban belief system blending Yoruba cosmology with Spanish Catholicism—alongside the rhythms of American pop culture and the diasporic textures of South Florida. Today, splitting their time between New York and Miami, the brothers channel these hybrid experiences into a visual language shaped by art history, mythology, Catholic syncretism, and Yoruba symbolism. Their work is perhaps best known for its theatricality, seen most widely in their 2023 TIME commission photographing Bad Bunny for the magazine’s first all-Spanish cover, a milestone that placed them firmly among the leading Latino visual artists of their generation.

Entering the Forest

“El Monte” takes its name from Lydia Cabrera’s seminal text on Afro-Cuban spirituality, newly translated into English in 2023 and often referred to as “the Santería bible.” The reference is intentional: the twins use Cabrera’s work not as a direct guide, but as an open door—an invitation for viewers to seek the knowledge that has long shaped the Caribbean diaspora yet rarely appears within Western art institutions.

The exhibition begins with a monumental ceiba tree trunk, a central symbol to Afro-Cuban cosmology. From it, two pathways extend in opposite directions. Visitors choose their route, stepping into a dim, atmospheric forest where antique furnishings, repurposed 17th-century objects, and found materials evoke both a chapel and a wilderness. Masked “shadow figures” emerge within the darkness—anonymous silhouettes that reference practitioners who once concealed their identities out of fear of persecution. Here, however, they stand as commanding presences. Stripped of recognizable features, they become reminders of both resilience and fragility, prompting visitors to consider how easily identity can be obscured or threatened.

This nocturnal passage eventually leads to a hidden two-room chamber: part sanctuary, part womb-like environment. It is an origin point, a return to the beginning of the twins’ shared story, a symbolic embodiment of duality before separation, before naming, before cultural and spiritual inheritance took shape.

Hybrid Images and Transcultural Memory

While “El Monte” expands the Jiménez brothers’ sculptural and spatial vocabulary, photography remains central to the exhibition’s emotional and aesthetic impact. Their images employ advanced camera techniques, costuming, and theatrical set design—with select garments created by designer Willy Chavarri—to evoke Western art historical references. Light, texture, and atmosphere blur the line between painting and photography, creating hybrid works that exist between the contemporary and the sacred.

This in-between space mirrors the artists’ own transculturation. As children of the diaspora, they experienced cultural layers that overlapped, competed, and sometimes contradicted one another. Their images give form to that tension, positioning the Caribbean spiritual world not as exoticized material but as a sophisticated visual system equal to the Western canon that often overshadows it.

“This show offers a view of Caribbean history shaped by that very complexity,”

—Elliot and Erick Jiménez

A New Narrative of the Caribbean

“This show offers a view of Caribbean history shaped by that very complexity—one of dual identity, of being neither fully from here nor there, but navigating the space in between,” the brothers explain. “El Monte” embodies that statement. It is not simply an exhibition but a reorientation—a vision of Caribbean identity that is expansive rather than marginal, sacred rather than suppressed, and rooted in the rich, intertwined cosmologies that shaped Elliot and Erick Jiménez from birth.