Miami artist Adler Guerrier’s dramatic double billboard mural “claimed for living, for love and trouble” was commissioned for the exterior of the Design District’s Moore Building, where it will remain for the next several months. The work combines poetic text with graphics and subtropical flora to explore the uncomfortable issues of race and class while evoking comfort and communion in the shelter of natural beauty.
A Photographer’s Quiet Reflections on Climate Change. (Hyperallergic)
Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone continues through September 14 at Dot Fiftyone Gallery (7275 NE 4th Ave, Miami, FL), open by appointment. The exhibition was curated by Verónica Flom, and can be explored virtually here.
A work composed of text, design, and images, assembled to configure a place of everyday Miami textures, rendered to hold an apt imaginary in support of the ranges within Black social life.
Here is a place claimed for the purpose of living, fashioned to engender love, fortified to protect its inhabitants and to withstand the spectres of trouble.
We live here.
We live informed by the poetics of immigrant culture, Caribbean tendencies, Black diasporic experience, and strengthened by the forcefulness of radical traditions that prepared us to imagine, and to claim the conditions we need to live with dignity.
I grew up here. This is a formative place, where I learned how to be, to imagine, and even how to cut a figure. I am grateful for all I was given, especially the encouragement to embrace the possible. I was placed in ideal conditions, in a bright and favorable position, that I shared with my siblings.
I blossomed. I became who I am, grounded and raised in a tended cultural plot. I was afforded a southeasterly view, of the world!? We could not help it–we have lived in other places, have known other conditions, have learned to participate in the ecosystem that we are in, and always remembered what dreams are for.
Here still works for me. It is a place of imaginings and comfort. It cultivates warm memories, and unfurled reflections. I prefer to thrive in full sun.
Dresses hung to dry in the sun is the leading indicator as to where we are. A working class neighborhood, with neighbors who endure the brightness summer morning sun and have preference for how washed and dried fabric should feel against one’s skin.
Campaign sign tucked in between tree and pole is another indicator. Iron bars on the windows is supposed to be one, but I suspect it might be dated.
This is the site we should try to read the city’s architecture responding to its inhabitants’ desires for security, affordability, infrastructure — water quality, fire and police service, more green and shade covering, alternative energy use — gas and solar, water reclamation, biodiversity and for a wider range aesthetic vocabulary.
Everyday life is already developed from the points of affect, of desire, and of reverie. We claim as much as we can to satisfy the manner in which we want to live. There are always pushback, when our manners hit the limit of private space, or when our plans abut the plans of others, but hopefully we can come to an understanding, that aiming for civility is just and ideal.
Image was featured in Burnaway’s article Miami Dérive.
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