ECLECTIC NETWORK MAGAZINE

Tomorrow Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 11AM, the Freedom Tower in Miami will formerly unveil Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tower of Snow bronze sculpture located on the corner of 6th Street and Biscayne Boulevard.

The dedication ceremony will be followed by a reception that will include performance from 11 to 12 by Miami-based Baby B Strings.

Martínez Celaya’s monumental scultpture was also unveiled in the courtyard of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia on view through November 31st, 2012.

The Tower of Snow, 2012, which depicts a boy on crutches carrying a house on his back, is the latest large-scale sculpture installed in the Russian museum’s courtyard following, among others, Louise Bourgeois’s Maman in 2001 and three reclining figures by Henry Moore in 2011, according to the Art Newspaper.

For Martínez Celaya, who left his native Cuba as a child, the work is about his own experience of exile, but also about Operation Peter Pan, when more than 14,000 Cuban children were sent to the US between 1960 and 1962 by parents who feared the Cuban government would take away their right to decide how their children should be educated. 

“It’s about the anguish of those children,” Martínez Celaya says. “I wanted to memorialize that event.” 

In Miami,  The Tower of Snow symbolizes exile, duality and fragility, concepts that are too familiar for all emigrants that come through Florida to live in the United States. 

The Freedom Tower, a historic 1925 building that once housed the offices of the Miami News & Metropolis it also served as a center for Cuban political refugees that were coming from the island when Castro regime came into power, thus the name The Freedom Tower.