Running concurrently to Purvis Young: A Visionary of Miami's Cultural Identity, a solo exhibition of the celebrated artist Purvis Young, Voices from the Edge: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art in collaboration with Juan Martin’s NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions by the Mentally Ill) will spotlight important works by artists across its collection. This collateral presentation explores unfiltered creativity and the intersection of mental health and art.

The practice of Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi of scavenging in the garbage has resulted in him being popularly known as "the diver". He utilizes recycled materials such as brass and wood boxes on whose exterior and interior sides he adds black and white photographs. To do this he trims and draws with a blue pen content of a sexual and diabolical nature. Endearing scenes become grotesque images in which the portrayed – even children – lose their faces or are characterised with devilish traits like long ears, horns or claws. Far from dealing with themes like the loss of identity, or extinctions, the faces ripped out of these characters appear in macabre ways on other parts of the composition.

They also form part of his usual iconography, the explicit representation of male and female sexual attributes. The final touch is added to all this with the production of some absolutely irreverent images. 
Hernandez Cadi is a native of Havana; he has had a diagnosis of schizophrenia for more than two decades. Years ago he tried to kill himself, and since then has practiced meditative gymnastics and martial arts (Karate, Judo, Wing Tsun). He works with collage, drawings and clay.

NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions by the Mentally Ill)

Misleidys was born with brain, hearing and autistic impediments. She has always lived in her own secluded world, inserted in a familiar environment.Painting with watercolors and pencils has been her great passion since early childhood. Over time, the sketching of muscular male figures with hard facial features has become central to her work. Gradually these figures she colors, cuts and pastes on the wall have acquired a large format –even bigger than the actual human size– and can be looked at as sculptures.

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Her father left home when she was a young kid. As a result, she acquired a rather particular vision of masculinity: a caricatured stereotype of the super strong and muscular man who marks his anatomy extending his arms up and down. These burly characters wear tiny laced underpants with the letter "E" inscribed inside a heart, or else they have been stripped of all clothing. In this way, Misleidys breaks with convention and inscribes her work in the contemporary debate around genre: she highlights the absence of male nudes throughout art history (except for the representations of the great gods of classical mythology) and the prevalence of the female nude body.

NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions by the Mentally Ill)