FLORIDA PRIZE IN CONTEMPORARY ART 2025

Cuban-born and Miami-based artist Amanda Linares was initially trained in printmaking and graphic design. Her multidisciplinary practice now spans drawing, mixed media sculpture, and installations that include materials such as wood, soil, ceramics, concrete, molded glass, and found objects, often evocative of the landscape of Cuba. Linares investigates how personal and collective histories—often fragmented or obscured— continue to shape the present. She draws on literary and poetic language to deepen her engagement with narration, space, and to explore the intersection of materiality and memory.  

In September 2024, Linares presented the site-specific immersive Yo vengo de todas partes, y hacia todas partes voy at Piero Atchugarry gallery in Miami, a piece that was four years in the making and for which she received three grants that allowed her to scale up her work, while also staging her first performance as an activation within the work. The installation delves into themes of belonging and identity, inspired by her paternal great-grandfather’s migration story. The project emerged from a significant discovery: a photograph of her paternal great-grandfather’s home in Asturias, Spain. Although Linares had never stood before the actual building, the photograph became a portal through which she could access familial memory and ancestral connection. This installation does not seek to recreate the home in a literal sense, but rather to reconstruct the feeling of reaching toward something just out of reach—an echo of home and heritage, filtered through time, space, and imagination. 

A large-scale graphite drawing anchors the space, depicting the façade of the ancestral home. Portions of the drawing have been carved away in precise geometric forms, leaving intentional absences that evoke the imperfect nature of memory. These missing pieces are not lost, however—they reappear as sculptural objects throughout the gallery, materialized into forms that resemble geological strata, or “sediments,” as the artist calls them. Made from layered materials such as concrete, resin, wallpaper, fabric, resin, and glass, these sculptural topographical elements blur the lines between architecture, landscape, and artifact. While memory has eroded and the pieces have fallen off the structure, they have enriched another part of the installation and have shifted in nature, diversified in composition. Linares also points out that the sediments are “made of many things you can’t take with you when you move from place to place. The interior landscape of a house. The fabrics were donated by friends and family.” The floor of the gallery, covered in three types of soil—evocative of skin color—invites viewers to feel physically engaged with the work. As the artist moves through the space, during her performances, the clear divisions between the soil types soften and mix, mirroring the erosion of rigid borders between past and present, self and other, here and there, and the mixing of cultures.  

Borrowing its title from a verse by José Martí, the installation weaves together poetry, memory, and materiality to examine the fluid nature of identity and lineage. Linares’ work suggests that we are all shaped by invisible forces—migration, heritage, displacement, the environment of a home—and that by sifting through these sediments, we uncover not only where we come from, but where we are capable of going. 

Linares’s evocative interplay of materials and memory continues through other works in the side gallery; 3D elements that all bear traces of her 2D drawings. Tarde Tropical captures the ephemeral imprint of a palm’s shadow cast on a wall or floor—a fleeting moment where light and shadow dance across a concrete surface, evoking transience and fragility. In contrast, Epígrafe unknowingly preserves a more enduring impression: the memory of the artist’s childhood home in Havana. Only recently did she realize that the tile patterns she has long embedded in her work are direct recreations of the very floors she once walked on. This discovery came just weeks ago, when she stumbled upon an old photograph of the house where the contrasted tiling was visible, revealing how memory can surface unconsciously through form and repetition. Epígrafe—like its use in literature—"tells us a little bit of what the book is about without giving us the full story,” says Linares. Like its broken labyrinth pattern, it allows us to meander and find intimate moments that encourage contemplation. Held, beautiful in its simplicity, presents a single small terracotta tile cradled by four weathered concrete tiles showing signs of erosion and time; a composition that quietly stands as a metaphor for the artist, held within the enduring strength of her ancestors. 

Linares’s poetic practice is an invitation to delve into the archaeology of the self, shaped by nostalgia, and offering moments of connection through observation and appreciation of the ephemeral. 

Exhibition essay by Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon, Chief Curator of Orlando Museum of Art

2025