Normando Ismay – A Loving Trickster

Normando Ismay was born in the city of All the Saints of the New Rioja in northwest Argentina. As a young adult, he came to the United States, settling in Atlanta to pursue a career as a visual artist. Since then, he has worked in a variety of media including metal, painting, sculpture and installation art.

He built a barn-like structure in his backyard and began the operation of the Little Beirut Art Space, a gallery/performance venue for visual art exhibits, poetry readings, storytelling, film, music and dance.

At this time, he also began an integration of visual and performing art, combining Andean flutes, drums and stories of magical realism into large- and small-scale performances and performance installations. Normando creates work in Spanish, English and in a bilingual blending. Some of his works include “The Last Inca”, about Pedro de Bohorquez who passes as an Inca and controls northwest Argentina; “Contralabias”, about a North American smuggler, the invention of lipstick and the birth of Argentina.  

Normando’s large-scale performance installations accommodate other performing artists and combine paintings, signage, sculptures, video projections, masks, seating, lighting and a stage. Café Bizzoso, Café Cultural de Chamblee, The Condor’s Next Hotel, Bannaland, The Mattress Factory Lounge and Dumpsite, to name a few. 

Normando’s work has been presented throughout Atlanta and the southeast, as well as in New York, Argentina and Europe. The New York Times, High Performance, the Atlanta Constitution, Art Papers, Mundo Hispanico, and other publications have written about his work. He has received grants from the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Fulton County Arts Council, Georgia Council for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1991 he received the Paul Robeson award in Cultural Democracy.

Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

What is Cafe Bezzoso?

Well, Cafe Bizzoso, it was a traveling performance space, an art installation specific to the site where I was creating it. Bizzoso came out of a proposal that I made to the Arts Festival of Atlanta. They had invited me to perform in this huge stage. … And it's like me and my solo storytelling act and my public is like twenty feet away from me like no intimacy possible because of that. So, I made him a proposal to build a small performance venue for storyteller’s poets. and like that, and they liked the idea

Was the Crack Attack an art exhibition?

And then two or three nights after that, Steve Seaberg hanging with me, and he was like uh, "We have to do something." You know, and we started making art about it. And we started filling up the lot and between my house and the crack house with art. And we kept working empty lot, and we'd turn it into a, do an art show. We called it the Crack Attack Show.

Who was the Last Inca?

Oh it's, it's, an amazing story straight out of history. And The Last Inca is the story of a Spanish soldier who ends up in Peru and he gets in trouble with the Viceroy and they banish him and to, send to a fort Copiapo in Chile, that they know, is about to fall to the indigenous people from there. And this young man goes there, and he builds a cannon out of wood. That was only good for like a couple of explosions. And then the Canon fell apart, but it wasn't enough to signal to...