National Art Exhibitions of the Mentally Ill (NAEMI)

Join us for an evening of rhythm, connection, creativity, and community at our upcoming Drumming Circle hosted in celebration of the closing night of the No Seasoning art exhibition. 🥁✨

Led by a performer in recovery, this interactive experience invites attendees to express themselves, connect with others, and experience the healing power of music and art together.

📅 Friday, May 22, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
📍 Copperbridge Foundation
373 NE 125th Street
North Miami, FL 33161

Last Saturday, February 27, we celebrated the opening of No Seasoning, curated by Elvia Rosa Castro, at The Copperbridge Foundation. ✨
Thank you to everyone who joined us and made the night so special.

Meet the Artist at “No Seasoning” | Luis Manuel Alcantara

Luis Manuel creates his sculptures with fragments from diverse kinds he finds around in derelict houses, with the leftovers of extinguished bonfires, or simply with the stuff he grabs from the streets. To give them shape, he adds scraps of wood and other materials tied with pieces of colored cloth.
Most of these figurative sculptures and sketches feature animals such as elephants, horses, hippos, et al. But his work also exposes emblematic symbols of contemporary culture, such as Mickey Mouse, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower. They all represent big icons in their cities. Thus, Luis Manuel combines two trends that appear to be irreconcilable: on the one side, the use of poor waste materials, like Arte Povera, and, on the other side, the representation of images drawn from the culture of consumerism -movies, comics, TV, etc.-, celebrated by the Pop Art movement.
Luis Manuel has no formal training in the visual arts. He has developed a career as a renowned activist, and he is imprisoned in Cuba right now.

https://www.artburstmiami.com/visual_arts/art-by-afro-descendant-cubans-with-disabilities-north-miami

www.artburstmiami.com

Meet the Artists | Isaac Crespo at “No Seasoning”

Isaac Crespo’s drawings and paintings show exquisite technical accuracy. He creates situations where the absurd and irrational intertwine with characters drawn from real life. Often dressed as clowns, his male figures have a diabolical, disturbing look. Crespo always includes the company of animals and insects - mainly flies – as part of the lunar landscape, which gives unity to all his compositions.
The son of a painter and art teacher, Isaac grew up in an environment that encouraged him to draw from an early age. In his work, we find numerous references to art history and literature, from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to his virtuoso reproduction of Dürer’s famous rhino engraving (1515). He also features an iconography of surreal elements, such as forks stabbing the body of an animal, mouths inserted in medallions, insects, or eggs from which new things emerge. In his satirical choral scenes and carnivalesque tone, we can see the imprint of James Ensor, Belgian painter of the nineteenth century, the precursor of Expressionism.
Crespo’s artistic career was interrupted for two decades due to his problems with drugs. In 2000, he recovered and returned to the brushes and canvas as a form of therapy. He has taken part in exhibitions in Latin America, the USA, and Europe.

Meet the Artists at “No Seasoning” | Misleidys Castillo Pedroso

Misleidys was born with brain, hearing, and autism impediments. She has always lived in her own secluded world, tucked 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 sharp facial features became central in her work. Gradually, these magnificent figures she colors, cuts, and pastes on her house walls, gained a larger format, even bigger than the actual human size, and can be appreciated as sculptures.
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 by 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 smashes the conventional representation of a male n**e, and inscribes her work in the contemporary debate around genre: she highlights the absence of male n**es throughout art history (except for the representations of the great gods of classical mythology) and the prevalence of the female n**e body.

Meet the Artists at “No Seasoning” | Gloria de la Caridad García

The work of Gloria de la Caridad (1958) is closely linked to the notion of domicile, and to the materials - cardboard, magazine clippings, nail painting, textiles, homemade rubber - that she finds around her. With them, Gloria creates anthropomorphic collages on a human scale, obsessively filled with figures. Some of them are feminine (smiling faces taken from couché paper), but there are also masks of primitive resonances, devils, and an endless number of decorative motifs that she draws with meticulousness. She unites all these figures with representations of chains, shells, letters, and numbers, creating electrifying compositions of palpable horror vacui.
Imagination and freedom overflow all these silhouettes that she stores with care in a friend’s house, protecting them from the precariousness of her own home, full of leaks during heavy rain periods. Self-taught, she embarked on several careers (Mathematics, Chemistry, Law, History), but none culminated. The loss of her father pushed her to the limit and led her to try to take her own life, so she was admitted and in treatment for several years. The postcards her mother gave her as a child, her father’s books, together with her appetite for drawing, helped Gloria to fashion the overflowing imagery that characterizes her work today.

Meet the Artists at “No Seasoning” | Pedro Pablo
Bacallao Perdomo

When he was a young kid, Pedro Pablo rarely ventured outside his family home: his repeated epileptic fits terrorized his parents, who preferred to be near him at all times. Not being able to play with other children, he developed a great capacity for observation and all alone, he created his own universe.
His work reflects the world of his childhood and the actual degraded environment of his neighborhood, where death, drugs, prostitution, and vacant lots are rife. Pedro Pablo builds his collages from papers with his writings, different forms, and pages from various publications. Then he intervenes with paint and pen to recover or produce new images. His figures are simple, rough, with heavy paint brushstrokes, an almost childish style with highly aggressive and disturbing content.
From adolescence Pedro Pablo has found relief to his crisis in painting and writing. He attended high school and specialized in literature. He went on to study for a degree on electronics technician, but he did not finish. He first exhibited his artwork with a group of graduates from San Alejandro School of Fine Arts he had worked with in a mechanical garage.

NAEMI( National Art Exhibitions of the Mentally Ill) 35th annual show in my old haunt Pembroke Pines tomorrow night.