  
Soperas in a Miami botánica, 2007 (left); Botánica window with life-size images, Miami, 2007 (center); Eclectic home altar discretely mounted in a kitchen window, Miami, 2008 (right).
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Botánica window with images and paraphernalia for Santeria and other home altars, Miami, 2007. |
Public display of a wide array of (unconsecrated) Christian images for sale in a botánica store located in a Miami shopping center. An image of the Virgin of Charity/Ochún is in the middle of the display. In the bottom shelf (and behind the images) porcelain soup tureens or "soperas" are also displayed. An intrinsic European accrouetment of 19th century Spanish and Cuban bourgeois homes, these "soperas" made their way into Santería altars as receptacles of an orisha or deity's sacred stones, while the images constitute mere visual representations of the orishas in Christian anthropomorphic shapes. They also constitute Cuban vernacular expressions of synchretic kitsch. Commercial displays of religious images and paraphernalia are today fairly public in Miami, New Jersey and elsewhere, but not in Cuba--at least not yet.
OF INTEREST
"Making Secular Art Out of Religious Imagery" (NY Times: Art Review & Slide Show)
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