Ebersole and Hughes exhibitions are inspired by the past, real and imagined
“Juntos,” a dual exhibition by the creative team of Ebersole and Hughes, will explore identity, history and artistic reinvention through painting and photography.
Picture it: It’s the summer of 1989, in the coastal town of Sitges, Spain. A 25-year-old Los Angeles native, clutching a copy of the provocative autobiography Tropic of Cancer. A creative urge takes hold. Now, after 35 years hidden away in storage, 13 watercolors from that formative period are finally seeing the light of day in P David Ebersole’s exhibition, “Whores & Other Characters Painted While Under the Influence of Spain And/Or Henry Miller.”
Running concurrently at the same venue is “Yucaman,” a photography “Lens Art” exhibition by Ebersole’s husband and creative partner, Todd Hughes, creating a fascinating dialogue between the two artists’ work.
“Yucaman” playfully reimagines Mérida’s history through a cinematic lens. Inspired by Patrick Dennis’ 1962 satirical novel Genius, Hughes creates a fictional narrative of a Hollywood director casting for an epic film to be titled Yucaman.
The photographs transform local men into Golden Age matinee idols, drawing aesthetic inspiration from the glamorous portrait photography of George Hurrell, who defined Hollywood’s visual style in the 1930s and ’40s. There’s also a mischievous nod to Orson Welles’ pseudo-documentary “F for Fake,” with its playful interrogation of authenticity and artistic deception.
“I’m interested in that liminal space between fiction and reality,” Hughes explains. “These portraits celebrate both Mérida’s rich history and the striking masculine beauty of its people, but through a deliberately artificial, cinematic construct.”
The exhibition showcases Hughes’ sophisticated understanding of classic cinema aesthetics, honed through years of filmmaking and film scholarship. His photographic approach mirrors the documentary impulse that has driven much of his filmmaking work with Ebersole, albeit with a more playful, subversive edge.
The couple has directed several acclaimed documentaries, including Dear Mom, Love Cher (2013), which offered an intimate portrait of Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, and House of Cardin (2019), their comprehensive look at the life and legacy of fashion icon Pierre Cardin.
Hughes has been instrumental in bringing these long-forgotten watercolors to public view. The pair, known for their keen eye for visual storytelling and cultural anthropology, saw in these decades-old paintings a thread that connects Ebersole’s past artistic self with his present creative endeavors.
A Spanish Summer and Henry Miller’s Influence
The summer of 1989 represents a crucial chapter in Ebersole’s personal mythology. Seeking both creative inspiration and the quintessential European experience, he settled in Sitges, a picturesque coastal town south of Barcelona known for its artistic community and liberal atmosphere. It was there, immersed in the pages of Miller’s boundary-pushing prose, that Ebersole first felt compelled to explore visual art.
“I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings,” Miller wrote in Tropic of Cancer—words that resonated deeply with Ebersole then and continue to do so now.
The paintings themselves—vibrant, sensual, and provocatively titled—bear the unmistakable influence of Miller’s unapologetic exploration of human desire and expatriate experience.
Full Circle: Expatriate Life Revisited
What gives this exhibition particular poignancy is Ebersole’s current circumstance—once again living as an expat, this time in Mérida.
“Finding these paintings after so many years felt like receiving a message from my younger self,” Ebersole says. “There’s something powerful about revisiting creative work from a formative period, especially when you find yourself once again in circumstances that echo that earlier time.”
While in Mérida, Ebersole has been working on a novel that fictionalizes aspects of his current expatriate experience, drawing on the same sense of dislocation and discovery that fueled his creative output in Spain all those years ago.
Together, these exhibitions offer complementary perspectives on artistic identity and cultural translation. Ebersole’s paintings represent a young American’s response to the European expat experience, filtered through literary inspiration. At the same time, Hughes’ photographs playfully reimagine Mexican masculinity through the artificial construct of Hollywood glamour photography.
For Ebersole and Hughes, who have built careers documenting the lives and creative processes of others, these exhibitions represent a turn of the lens—an opportunity to share personal artistic explorations that reveal their sensibilities while highlighting their shared fascination with cultural narratives and aesthetic transformation.
The exhibitions run through March at Taste Restaurant at Lou’s. Opening reception 5-7 p.m. Thursday, March 6.
Lee Steele is the founding director of Mérida-based Roof Cat Media S de RL de CV and has published Yucatán Magazine and other titles since 2012. He was Hearst Connecticut’s Sunday Magazine creative director and worked in New York City for various magazine publishers, including Condé Nast and Primedia, for over 20 years.
