At the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte is the first solo museum exhibition of works by Elliot and Erick Jiménez. The artists, identical twin brothers, have conjured a body of work layered with personal identities, experiences of diaspora, references to art history and mythologies, and Lucumí spiritual traditions.
The exhibition takes its name from the 1954 publication by the Cuban ethnographer Lydia Cabrera. Her book, El Monte, documented Afro-Cuban religious practices and traditions, which combined elements of Yoruba, Catholicism, Spiritism, Palo Monte, and Lucumí, also called Santería. The work was translated into English for the first time in 2023, and the Jiménez twins, first-generation Cuban Americans raised in the Lucumí tradition, reference this knowledge and the syncretism of Catholicism with Afro-Caribbean religions in their exhibition.
“Essentially, el monte contains everything Black people need for their magic, to preserve their health and well-being and defend themselves from all adversity.” – Lydia Cabrera
The Jiménez brothers’ works appear painterly, but they are photographs—carefully staged, deeply saturated, archival pigment prints, some with other materials such as beads, brass, crystals, metal glitter, a pearl earring. Their visual language is dreamlike, with tableaus that combine art history and cosmology, colonialism and diaspora, Catholicism and Lucumí, all transmuted into a mythical Afro-Cuban syncretism.
At the center of the exhibition is a structure meant to evoke both a chapel and a forest. In Lucumí tradition, the forest, el monte, is a place associated with mysteries and spirits. Among the spirits may be the Ibejí, the divine twins who symbolize duality and balance. The Jiménez brothers invoke syncretism and their own spiritual inheritance in this magical space.
“We see the Ibejí not just as divine twins in Lucumí, but as a reflection of ourselves. Their story—of loss, of care, of sacred bond—becomes a way to tell our own.” – Elliot Jiménez
Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte is on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami through March 22, 2026.