Eddie Arroyo
5901 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL 33127 (Botanica)
5901 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL 33127 (Botanica) is a series of paintings that artist Eddie Arroyo created over an extended period of time, depicting the same site as it appeared from 2016 to 2018. Like the series shown at the Whitney, their focus is a building complex that until recently housed a Voodoo Botanica and Variety Shop, another iconic set of businesses on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti that housed practitioners of voodoo proffering candles, potions, and incense. It was one of many businesses in the area bearing paintings by Serge Toussaint, a local artist and professional sign painter known for his portrayals of Little Haiti.
In the series of paintings, gentrification transforms the color palette from vibrant yellow and green to white, chronicling the erasure of a community by real estate development. Arroyo works to resist such forces through the very act of making these paintings as he works alongside local activists fighting to change the current trajectory of the neighborhood.
Arroyo feared that the poor, residential neighborhood of Little Haiti would find it hard to withstand the onslaught of developers, and his fears were not unfounded. So part of his practice became preserving the memories and history of the city, especially those areas with few resources to do such a thing themselves “to record the community and culture,” as he puts it. Muralists like Toussaint, who mixed art and activism and left paint on buildings and signs, in a sense to mark both the realities and memories of a place, inspire his practice.
Eddie Arroyo is a painter who documents residential and commercial structures that will soon be replaced by new development, chronicling the negotiations of the cultural, social, and economic fabric of a community. Arroyo’s urban landscape paintings focus on Miami’s Little Haiti, where he lives and works. The artist’s style recalls historical European landscapes as well as scenes by American artists such as Edward Hopper, but his subject matter — the gentrification of a primarily Black and Latinx neighborhood — is contemporary.
In his work, he paints buildings and structures from Little Haiti; the fast-disappearing, family-run storefronts, restaurants, and botánicas, all victims of the gentrification that is rapidly taking over this neighborhood which is home to many Haitian immigrant residents, as well as many residents from the rest of the Caribbean.