Music Woven Into Gold: IlluminArts Honors Olga de Amaral at ICA Miami

Last Friday night, IlluminArts opened its season at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, with a concert that blurred the boundaries between sound and vision. Conceived in tandem with the museum’s exhibition of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, the program offered an immersive evening where music echoed the shimmering textures and vibrant colors of the legendary textile pioneer’s work.

Now 93, de Amaral is a towering figure in Latin American contemporary art. Her woven pieces—at once tapestries, and shimmering fields of light—occupy the ICA’s expansive top floor through October 12. Gold leaf panels float before the museum’s wide windows like sails of a ship, while filigreed polyethylene sheets and dense knotted wools evoke both pre-Columbian craft and Medieval tapestries. To walk among them is to wander through a labyrinth of color and texture, and IlluminArts sought to create a parallel journey in sound.

Artistic and executive new director Shawn Crouch, working with IlluminArts founder Amanda Crider, crafted a program that drew connections across time and geography. Pianist Alan Johnson, a longtime advocate for new and underperformed works at the FROST OPERA UM, gave a masterful performance of Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis. The repetitive yet ever-shifting patterns of Glass’s music seemed to mirror the woven complexity of de Amaral’s work, the piano’s resonance filling the gallery like threads binding disparate strands into unity.

Soprano Catalina Cuervo provided the evening’s emotional core. In Britten’s “Embroidery Aria” from Peter Grimes, she traced Ellen Orford’s sorrow with poignant intimacy, her voice carrying both fragility and strength. The atmosphere shifted with Villa-Lobos’s Melodía Sentimental, which evoked tropical warmth akin to de Amaral’s radiant color palette, then Cuervo unleashed fiery passion in María Grever’s Júrame. In Glass’s “Hymn to the Sun” from Akhnaten, Cuervo’s voice soared with radiant clarity, perfectly matched by Johnson’s steady, glowing accompaniment. Together, they created one of the evening’s most transcendent moments.

Guitarist and composer Álvaro Andrés Bermúdez added a touch of intimacy and cultural grounding. Seated alongside Cuervo, he offered a gentle set of Colombian folk pieces, including the bambuco Bochica and Bunde Tolimense. Their duets on Amo and Soy Colombiano carried a near-patriotic fervor, warmly received by the audience and resonant with de Amaral’s deep Colombian roots.

The program concluded with Barber’s Sure on this Shining Night, a gem song whose luminous serenity seemed to summarize the evening. With Johnson’s sensitive piano and Cuervo’s supple voice, the music conjured the healing embrace of summer, a world renewed and viewed with hope—an ideal complement to de Amaral’s radiant panels gleaming against the backdrop of Miami’s lush landscape.

IlluminArts has long distinguished itself by pairing visual art with carefully curated music, creating experiences that are more than concerts or exhibitions but rather dialogues across disciplines. This latest offering reaffirmed that mission with rare elegance. For one evening, Amaral’s textiles seemed to sing, and the music shimmered like thread woven in gold.