Miralda: Cowboy’s Dream

Portraits of carnivals, storefronts, subways and other scenes of American life, recently unearthed from the archives of the avant-garde legend

Since the 1970s, Catalan artist Antoni Miralda (born 1942) has created avant-garde installations, happenings and performances all over Europe and the US, most famously with his restaurant El Internacional (created with his partner, the chef Montse Guillén), which became a celebrated 1980s New York hot spot, and the FoodCulturaMuseum. Miralda has spent a large part of his career in the US, especially in the 1960s and ’70s when he traveled widely across the country and amassed a substantial oeuvre of photographs. This volume compiles these black-and-white images, recently discovered by chance in Miralda’s archives. Often comical, sometimes somber, the photographs range from shots of Easter celebrations in Brooklyn to portraits of Louisiana carnivals, scenes from Harlem, the Bronx, Kansas City, Miami, Philadelphia and elsewhere in the US, as well as photographs taken in Europe.

Antoni Miralda (Barcelona, 1942) cuenta con una extensísima trayectoria artística multidisciplinar reconocida internacionalmente. Es un referente indiscutible de su generación, lo que le ha hecho merecedor de prestigiosos premios y becas: el Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas (2018), los premios Arte y Mecenazgo de “La Caixa” (2015), el Nacional de Cultura de Catalunya (1996), el de la Bienal de París (1967) … Y las becas de la Juan March (1978), la del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979) y, recientemente, la del Gray Center Mellon de Chicago (2019). Pero todos estos galardones no hubieran sido posibles si en el año 1962 la Diputación de Barcelona no le hubiese concedido por un gran collage que incluía sus primeras fotografías una beca para proseguir con sus estudios en París.