Category: Miami

Miami, Florida

in Public Places

digLeave a comment

Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places celebrates its 50 year anniversary.

Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places, a program of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, is one of the first public art programs in the country. The program was established in 1973 with the passage of an ordinance allocating 1.5% of capital costs of new local government buildings for the purchase or commission of artworks, educational programs and collection maintenance. The Art Trust Fund is administered by a County Commission-appointed citizens board, the Art in Public Places Trust, in consultation with its Professional Advisory Committee. 

www.miamidadepublicart.org features a searchable archive.

The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council develop cultural excellence, diversity, access and participation throughout Miami-Dade County by strategically creating and promoting equitable opportunities for artists and cultural organizations, and our residents and visitors who are their audiences. Through staff, board and programmatic resources, the Department, the Council and the Trust promote, coordinate and support Miami-Dade County’s more than 1,000 not-for-profit cultural organizations as well as thousands of resident artists through grants, technical assistance, public information and interactive community planning. The Department directs the Art in Public Places program and serves its board, the Art in Public Places Trust, commissioning, curating, maintaining and promoting the County’s art collection. The Department receives funding through the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, The Children’s Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, the State of Florida through the Florida Department of State, Florida Division of Arts and Culture and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation, and the Taft Foundation. Other support and services are provided by TicketWeb for the Culture Shock Miami program, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, the South Florida Cultural Consortium and the Tourist Development Council.

The City of Miami Beach, in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA) and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau (GMCVB), is pleased to announce the return of No Vacancy, Miami Beach — a juried art competition that supports and celebrates local artists, provokes critical discourse and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as art destinations. For the fifth edition of the competition, No Vacancy, Miami Beach 2024will include 12 participating artists and collectives that will present site-specific works at 12 different hotels around Miami Beach. The works will be displayed from November 14 to December 12, 2024.

Credit Line: Presented by the City of Miami Beach and with the support of the Miami Beach Visitor Convention Authority

My life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides
Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
On the side of me which you in the village could see.
From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!
Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
Who do not know the ways of the wind
And the unseen forces
That govern the processes of life.

Serepta Mason, Edgar Lee Masters

Do language, the measure

digLeave a comment

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

Speaking the Unspeakable, Anahid Nersessian. A review of Fady Joudah’s […] in New York Review.

Still, even as it insists upon the poem’s acoustic dimension, that “[…]” hints at what exceeds or baffles speech and therefore, as Abrams might say, reckons with what cannot be reembodied or returned to life. Joudah belongs to a poetic tradition for which the unpronounceable mark—the ellipsis, the bracket, a large space on the page—has an intimate relationship to historical violence. It’s a tradition that includes Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel), a Holocaust survivor whose prolific ellipses, em dashes, and colons suggest the incommunicability of severe collective trauma, and M. NourbeSe Philip, whose 2008 masterpiece Zong! repurposes the text of an eighteenth-century legal case involving the murder of over 130 captive Africans, creating a fragmented work whose large white spaces signify the gaps and silences in the official record.

These typographic gestures draw attention to what poetry can and cannot do, and to its always abortive attempts to make sense of what is beyond moral comprehension.

…

There is the threat of subordinating ethical concerns to artistic ones, or else of turning the work of art into a newsreel, in which case we might ask: Why shouldn’t we just watch the newsreel? Besides, what would it mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide?


The poems in […], while occasioned by death, are poems that insist upon life.

AG2024AG2024_imgscan20240928_11435900a
feel, the light

Stripped Bare

digLeave a comment
The Mack Stripped Bare, 2002

Source: The Mack Stripped Bare, 1999 – Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), Marcel Duchamp, 1915-1923. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), Marcel Duchamp, 1934. Box containing collotype reproductions on various papers. Edition: 112/300 from a deluxe edition of 20 + regular edition of 300. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Artist Stripped Bare. Review of Duchamp’s Leg, exhibition at the Center for the Fine Arts and Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, to the Art Museum at FIU, by Judy Cantor-Navas, Miami New Times, February 8, 1996.

The Band Stripped Bare. Article on the C60, grunge band, by Georgina Cardenas. Miami New Times, July 10, 1997.

The Mack, a 1973 American blaxploitation crime drama film directed by Michael Campus, starring Max Julien and Richard Pryor. Wikipedia. IMDB. Brother’s Gonna Work It Out (The Mack/Soundtrack Version), Willie Hutch.

Stripped, Christina Aguilera, 2002.