Black Gold

Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective

 

For Black Gold, a multimedia exhibition honoring the bold and unpredictable life of Rolando Peña, I was tasked with designing a timeline installation, gallery graphics, and exhibition materials including a full-scale wall timeline, banner, and invitation.

 

Working closely with fabricators, I developed a gold vinyl timeline that stretched across an entire gallery wall—juxtaposing Peña’s conceptual milestones with key moments in global oil history, art movements, and technological change. The gold band represented time as an energy current, mirroring the glinting oil barrels used throughout the exhibition.

 

Peña—dubbed “The Black Prince” by Andy Warhol—infused this show with the same avant-garde, uncontainable spirit that defined his life. The invitation and banner designs centered on a 3D rendering of golden barrels arranged in a circular chamber, emphasizing his most iconic symbol: the barrel as global metaphor. Much like Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, Peña’s gold barrel was transformed into a universal icon of power, energy, and contradiction.

 

This exhibition was a wild ride—Rolando was magnetic and spontaneous—and the design process reflected that same charged energy. From working with unconventional materials to collaborating on a layered narrative of science, politics, and conceptual performance, this project was both technically demanding and creatively electrifying.