Criola paints new dimensions in Jungle Plaza.
Criola’s striking and colorful “Interdimensional Portal” mural is now on view in the Miami Design District’s Jungle Plaza. PHOTO BY LUIS GOMEZ
Following her United States debut with “Black Girl Magic,” a temporary double mural on a downtown Las Vegas building, urban artist Tainá Lima—better known by her artistic moniker Criola—brings her bold imagery to Miami’s vibrant Design District. Born in the creative mecca of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, Criola melds Afro-Brazilian culture and design with natural history in her artwork. Now in her largest mural to date, which spans the neighborhood’s Jungle Plaza, Criola’s Gemini image offers an interactive exploration across space as well as time periods. Aptly titled “Interdimensional Portal,” the mural ignites associations to identity and culture through figuration, symbols and motif, and invites a rethinking of what defines Black female identity while probing human relationships with nature.
As a mirrored tableau, “Interdimensional Portal” functions as a Rorschach test, used in psychology to decode human perception according to associations to inkblot images. Positioning the viewer as patient, Criola applies seductive aesthetics including color, stylization and design to set an associative stage where female protagonists are adorned with layered symbols to entice further intrigue. Twin hummingbirds, common to Brazil, hover suckling nectar from flowers suggesting the hum of wings. Two women are wrapped in snakes and hold elongated plant leaves. In many folklores, including in Brazil, reptiles appear in innumerable legends and beliefs, representing danger yet also offering medicinal venom. The native West African snake plant leaves are said to have protective powers within the Candomblé religion, among others. For Criola, the flora and fauna adorning these women signify medicinal virtue and illustrate a symbiotic “jungle wisdom” embedded in Afro-Brazilian ancestry and ritual—a wisdom she sees as undervalued by colonial history and contemporary Western life.
Criola’s striking and colorful “Interdimensional Portal” mural is now on view in the Miami Design District’s Jungle Plaza. PHOTO BY LUIS GOMEZ
Two central female protagonists with elaborate blue braids are fashionable, celebratory and powerful. Their silhouettes stylistically recall artist Kara Walker’s cutout caricatures depicting slave atrocities, yet the mural’s narrative paints Criola’s characters as both complex and wise.
Criola’s striking and colorful “Interdimensional Portal” mural is now on view in the Miami Design District’s Jungle Plaza. PHOTO BY LUIS GOMEZ
“There’s an undeniably strong history of representation of Black female figures in Brazilian art, from Candido Portinari and Tarsila do Amaral to Dalton Paula and Rosana Paulino. Criola’s work builds on this legacy but also pushes the boundaries on the possibilities for Black women’s self-determination, thereby confronting systemic racism and state repression,” says curator Karen Grimson.
Although there are many ways to enter “Interdimensional Portal,” in the mural’s center an altar offers a portal to a more enlightened world underpinned by precolonial ideals and the prospect of a renewed future.
Criola shares, “For me, the possibility of having a mural in Miami is symbolic and important. I feel I am crossing imaginary borders constructed by colonialist logic that exerts real dominations and division.”
For Grimson, selecting an Afro-Latina artist for the Miami Design District’s grand public mural is a political gesture that she hopes will resonate with Miami’s heterogenous communities. 3801 NE First Ave., Miami, miamidesigndistrict.net
Photography by: Photo By: Luis Gomez
