El Monte is a major exhibition by Cuban American identical twins Elliot and Erick Jiménez at the Pérez Art Museum Miami
Running from August 2025 to March 2026, the show reimagines Afro-Cuban spirituality for a contemporary audience, weaving photography, sculpture, and immersive installation into a meditation on duality, ritual, and cultural memory.
At its core, El Monte draws inspiration from Lydia Cabrera’s landmark 1954 text of the same name, a foundational ethnographic account of Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions. Cabrera’s study of Lucumí practice (often known as Santería) has only recently become more widely accessible through its 2023 English translation. For the Jiménez twins, her writing provides both a historical anchor and a provocation: how can rituals once documented from the outside be embodied and re-imagined through contemporary art inside the white cube?
The exhibition makes that question visually and audibly tangible. Visitors enter a central womb that evokes both a forest at night and a chapel interior, echoing Cabrera’s description of the monte, the sacred wilds where ritual practice takes place. Photographic works surround the space: silhouetted twin figures connected by golden cords, baroque compositions merging Catholic iconography with Yoruba symbolism, and portraits charged with glittering surfaces that blur the line between sacred altar and fashion editorial.
Key works include El Monte (Ibejí), an archival pigment print staging the Yoruba twin orisha, and El pequeño gigante, a 19th-century French tabernacle repurposed as a Lucumí altar to Elegguá, the deity of crossroads. Assemblages of crystals, antique furniture, and liturgical fragments form an Ibejí altar that doubles as an offering and an act of cultural care. These works push at the tension between colonial religious objects and their Afro-diasporic reinterpretation, collapsing binaries between reverence and critique.
Curated by Maritza M. Lacayo, the show situates Miami itself as part of the story. Cabrera lived her final years in exile in the city, and the Jiménez twins are Miami-born. The resonance of re-staging El Monte here is not incidental: it locates Miami as both archive and laboratory, where diasporic histories remain alive in the present. Critics have described the exhibition as a project of visibility. By foregrounding Lucumí cosmology, the artists refuse the marginalisation of practices often dismissed as superstition or exoticism. Their work makes the invisible visible, not by literal ethnographic re-staging, but by translating symbols into new aesthetic forms that speak across generations.
As a spiritual tradition and living practice, aspects of Lucumí become less about secret rites and more about shared story, a framework through which identity and change are continuously reimagined as a sacred myth. The Jiménez brothers position their practice alongside traditions that have long shaped Western art – Greek tragedy, Biblical allegory, the cycles of death and rebirth. The works in El Monte tap into that same register: symbolic, archetypal, and transformative, yet grounded in the lived experience of a diasporic community.
This framing unsettles the binary between anthropology and art. What might otherwise be labelled “ritual” is instead revealed as both human and (in)humane, a narrative system that addresses not only individual expression but also the collective imagination. For example, in revisiting the motif of Ophelia, Shakespeare’s tragic water maiden, and reimagining her in a Lucumí-inflected realm, the Jiménez vision channels a regenerative version of the grief-soaked transcendence behind an existential rebirth. The cultural weight of European myth is transposed into their spiritual lexicon, where movement is cyclical, suffering is a form of passage, and water is sacred terrain.
El Monte is not simply about Afro-Cuban ritual. It is about twinship and duality, the mirror and the cord, diaspora and belonging. It asks how identity can be remade through images that are simultaneously sacred and seductive, devotional and defiant. Both as siblings and as heirs to diasporic memory, the Jiménez brotherhood see themselves in that submerged body, tethered between the Western canon and the traditions they inherited.
