DelValle, Eduardo & Mirta Gómez

Witness Number 4
FIU Art + Art History Professors Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez present the fourth volume in the Witness series. The book is composed of photographs taken in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico where for over twenty years del Valle and Gómez have focused on the metamorphosis of the vernacular domestic architecture of the region. The husband and wife team’s selection for this volume is compromised of the “Sections of Time,” a voluminous on-going project where the dwellings are photographed from the same spot over a number of years, bearing witness to how the structures are affected by seasonal changes and the passage of time. The fascination that del Valle and Gómez have with these houses has come to epitomize their own transformation as first generation immigrants — and like the houses they photograph, they, too, have had to adapt, change and evolve in order to survive. Witness Number 4 closes with a presentation of work by two other Cuban-American photographers who, like del Valle and Gómez, witnessed the start of the Cuban revolution in the late 1950s and who also emigrated to the United States in the early ‘60s: Tony Mendoza and Abelardo Morell.

Photographs by Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gomez were also selected and published in a new book of MoMA’s contemporary collection, “MoMA Highlights Since 1980.”
The book, published by The Museum of Modern Art, features what is said to be “a selection of 250 of the most important and influential works of art acquired by the museum since 1980.”