Dionisio Perkins

Dionisio Perkins (1929 – 2016), better known as Dennis (sometimes spelled "Denis") Perkins, was a Cuban artist recognized as a key member of the early Cuban exile art community in South Florida.

Life and career Early years

Dionisio Perkins Milian was born in Havana, Cuba in 1929 to an English father and Cuban mother. Due to his mixed cultural background, Perkins was fluently bilingual in English and Spanish throughout his life. While mostly self-taught in the arts, he did receive brief formal training from Cuban artist Domingo Ramos (1894–1956), who is mostly known for his landscapes. The trio are recognized as an important early group of Cuban artists in Miami that, along with the larger and more formal Grupo GALA, helped establish the modern Miami art market. Perkins' art is known for its moody, heavily saturated colors and figures with a Cuban interpretation of cubism that reflects his embrace of Pablo Picasso through the lens of his cultural heritage. Armando Alvarez Bravo, another Cuban journalist and art critic, considered Perkins a modernist while Cuban art historian Lynette M.F. Bosch described his style as "quickly recognizable and "quintessentially Cuban." In 1965 he won the Third Place Prize for watercolor fine art in the CINTAS Foundation’s annual exhibition and was also a featured artist of the Second Pan-American Exhibition where he received an honorable mention. Perkins had also exhibited in the Miami Museum of Science and had been commissioned by Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, one of his high-profile clients, to produce a series focused on the Stations of the Cross. and Latin American art journals and American art magazines such as Art in America (1982) and Arts Magazine (1990).