Cecilia Z. Miguez: A Thousand Years in One Night

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Cecilia Z. Miguez: A Thousand Years in One Night. On the evening of January 7, 2025, the deadly Eaton Fire ignited and rapidly spread, ravaging the foothill communities of the San Gabriel Mountains. Amongst the thousands of structures destroyed were Cecilia Z. Miguez’s Altadena home and studio, where scores of her bronze, wood, and found object sculptures were damaged or lost entirely to the blaze. This exhibition showcases what survived, albeit transformed by the fire: bronze torsos and limbs, glass cups and marbles, and the artist herself. Miguez’s salvaged sculptures, which she has reworked and reimagined in a makeshift studio, proudly bear the scars of the inferno on their beautiful, imperfect forms. They tell a powerful story of resilience, reincarnation, and the healing power of creative work.

Miguez’s figures are no less captivating for their blistered patinas and melted and missing parts. Instead, they are ever more enthralling for these lacunas as they defiantly string a bow with arms clipped at the shoulder, sport the liquefied remains of limbs as a glimmering headdress, and offer a ripe pomegranate from the void of an empty chest. Their ghostlike gestures are inscribed in air, whispering headless secrets and linking absent elbows in companionable silence. Miguez does not disguise, but elevates their transmutations, adorning the twisted and scarred metal with gold leaf and delicate glass microbeads. She embraces the weld marks of transplanted heads and hands as vital emblems of her figures’ strength and perseverance.

“Nature,” in Miguez’s words, “got to be my partner for a night,” as the fire accelerated the decay that all materials must endure with time. These objects were once raw ores refined by heat, pressure, and the hands of the artist into bronze sculptures of great beauty. Consumed by flames, they were subjected again to these immense forces, enticed back toward their naturally chaotic states. With Miguez’s intervention, they are forged anew once more, rising from the ashes of their ordeal to live on with renewed energy and purpose.

Works by Cecilia Z. Miguez are included in the permanent collections of the Long Beach Museum of Art; the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montevideo, Uruguay; and el Ministerio Transporte (MTOP), Montevideo, Uruguay, as well as in numerous private collections.

Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of Cecilia Z. Miguez.