Fresh Art International (Cathy Byrd)

Today, we introduce a few of the artists and activists energizing the 2023 Art Prospect & TRASH-5 Festival in Kyrgyzstan. They give voice to the issues, ideas, and intentions that shape their truly creative approaches to mitigate pollution. Their projects illuminate the potential for artists everywhere to build community and drive sustainable solutions to our global environmental crisis. 

From the city of Bishkek to the settlement of Altyn Kazyk, we discover myriad ways that socially engaged artists encourage awareness and action. They bring us together from around the world to experience, understand, and create true moments of beauty and meaning—giving us hope for a future that holds clean air, land, and water.

Acknowledgement: In Fall 2023, Cathy Byrd recorded the voices in this episode during her residency with CEC ArtsLink in Central Asia.

Sound Design and Engineering: Anamnesis Audio

Featured Voices: Sto Len, Ronja Roemmelt, Mishiko Solakauri, Begimai Zhunusova, Ellen Harvey, Bermet Borubaeva, Aimeerim Tursalieva

Special Thanks to the Bishkek Sanitary Landfill—Director Nurlan Djumaliev, Head of Municipal Enterprise Section Arzykulov Almaz Toktomukhanmedovich, Landfill Museum Co-Curator Samat Marso

Special Audio: Live musicians performance at the People’s Landfill Museum and the Bandistan Ensemble

Related Episodes: Public Water—with Mary Mattingly, Topical Playlist—Sustainability and the Environment 

Related Links: CEC ArtsLink, Art Prospect & TRASH-5 Festival 2023, Tazar, EU Compliant Landfill to Open in Bishkek

In February 2023, we travel to the Arab Emirates for the first time. We’re here to witness and celebrate Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Four years in the making, the exhibition is ambitious and expansive. More than 100 artists from 70 countries are presenting projects in 19 venues across the emirate. Seventy of those projects are new commissions.

 

The memory and influence of Nigerian born art historian, author, educator, and curator Okwui Enwezor is deeply felt, despite his physical absence. The Sharjah Art Foundation had invited Enwezor to curate this iteration of the biennial. He envisioned the exhibition title before his death in 2019.

 

Sharjah Art Foundation Director Hoor Al Qasimi was 22 years old when she met Okwui Enwezor and experienced his non-western curatorial model at documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany. Enwezor’s impactful perspective on postnational hybridity and global modern identity inspired Al Qasimi to lead the Foundation and the Biennial in new directions. 

 

On the 30th anniversary of the Biennial, we sit down with Al Qasimi to talk about the inclusive ethos that we find in the art experience of Thinking Historically in the Present.

 

Story: Cathy Byrd | Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

 

Special Audio: Hassan Hajjaj with Mestre Pastel, Open Capoeira Session, Arts Square, Sharjah 

 

Related Episode: New Point of View at Venice Biennale

 

Related Links: Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah Art Foundation, documenta 11, 2nd Johannesburg Biennial

 

Today’s story unfolds at the intersection of art, sports, and activism.

 

In 1968, Black American athlete Tommie Smith set a new world record. He became a gold medalist when he raced to win the 200-meter event at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

 

Yet Tommie Smith was only inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 2019. Why did it take half a century for the international sports organization to recognize his record-breaking performance? 

 

Because in 1968, at the height of the civil rights struggle in America, Tommie Smith took a stand on racism and human rights at the awards ceremony in Mexico City. As he stood on the podium to accept his medal, he bowed his head and raised his fist in a silent salute. That year, the Olympics were broadcast on television live and in color for the first time ever. The whole world witnessed his gesture. 

 

Tommie Smith’s respectful protest marked his life in the years that followed, while motivating generations to stand up for equality. He continues to inspire us, encouraging everyone to take part in the ongoing quest for global human rights and racial justice. 

 

In this episode, you’ll hear from the athlete and two creatives he inspired: Japanese-American artist Glenn Kaino and Iranian-born cinematographer Afshin Shahidi. They came together to create an exhibition, public programs and a documentary film to tell Tommie Smith’s story.

 

When artist Glenn Kaino sought out the legendary Olympic runner as a creative collaborator, he recognized the enduring value of art as a means to preserve a noble act. With Drawn Arms amplifies Smith’s courage, bringing history to reckon with our contemporary moment. 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Black in America, Franklin Sirmans on the Art of Futbol, Athi-Patra Ruga on Global Human Rights

Related Links: Tommie Smith, Glenn Kaino, Afshin Shahidi, Mexico 1968 Summer Olympics, Olympic Project for Human Rights, High Museum of Art, San José Museum of Art, Colin Kaepernick, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Fresh Art International at Untitled Art Fair

Watch the Film: With Drawn Arms

 

Our Current Moment

Since early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has held our planet in its grip. We have reckoned with isolation and the loss of friends and loved ones, and with the strange new normal of everyday life. The public health crisis has meant the delay or cancellation of cherished cultural and sports events. The 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and the Japan 2020 Summer Olympics, where the film With Drawn Arms was to be screened, were among thousands of casualties. 

In 2020, racial equity became a flashpoint on two fronts. The virus has been taking a greater toll on Blacks and people of color. Police violence against Blacks sparked a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, triggering massive protests across the U.S. and abroad. The quest for racial equity and human rights continues.

Today, we take you to Toronto. We’re here to meet a group of graduate students at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, also known as OCAD. For the Intro to Curatorial Practices course, their goal is to research, develop and activate an exhibition in the digital realm. Recorded in the first weeks of the semester, our conversation reveals how the students are defining their roles and designing their strategy for curating an online platform. 

In the months following our campus visit, the students forged an interdisciplinary curatorial collective. In December 2019, they launched the exhibition titled connection_found. Online now, works by seven artists illustrate the quirks of navigating intimacy on the web. “At the core of the exhibition,” writes the collective on their website, “connection_found simultaneously expands, individuates, and links the collective experience of existing on the internet.”

OCAD University—Curating in the Digital Realm is one of our 2020 Student Edition episodes.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photography: FreshArtINTL

Related Episodes: SAIC—Imagining Tomorrow, Wayne State—Designing for Urban Mobility

Related Links: Criticism and Curatorial Practice Program, Ontario College of Art and Design University, connection_found

Intro to Curatorial Practices, a graduate seminar in the Criticism and Curatorial Program at OCAD University, introduces students to the major critical texts, theories and debates in the burgeoning international field of contemporary curatorial studies. Simultaneously throughout the seminar, students attend public exhibitions, screenings, lectures, performances and events in Toronto's visual art and design worlds. An ongoing examination of contemporary art and design practices within public culture provides students with an eclectic and critical mapping of the layers and intersections of the visual arts, media and design in relation to their varied publics, audiences, markets, the mass media and the scholarly community. 

connection_found is an online group exhibition organized by feelSpace featuring works by Ronnie Clarke, Taylor Jolin, Leia Kook-Chun, Madeleine Lychek and Paula Tovar, Noelle Wharton-Ayer, and Becca Wijshijer. Together, these works trace and re-trace digital intimacy, touch, and the body as it moves and navigates towards the virtual realm. More literally, connection_found suggests the curatorial alignment of these works in a digital context which, in and of itself, requires finding connection. Source: feelspace.cargo.site.

Andrea Fatona, Associate Professor, Faculty of Art and Graduate Program Director, Criticism and Curatorial Practice, is an active curator. Her areas of focus are culture, cultural policy formation, cultural production, nation making, citizenship and multiculturalisms. In the classroom, she engages students in thinking about issues around equity and diversity in the context of art.

The Student Edition began in 2019, with visits to art schools and universities in the United States and Canada, where we began recording voices of the future. In 2020, we present the first episodes in our Student Edition—conversations about creativity with emerging makers and producers. Given opportunities to explore and experiment, students are discovering how they can shape the world they live in. What issues and ideas spark their creative impulse?

In 2022, members and guests of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art make their way to Kentucky, in the United States. Our first days are packed with urban experiences — museum, gallery, private collection, and studio visits, a symposium — and sunset tours of two outdoor sculpture collections. 

A small group continues the adventure on a road trip that takes us to the far eastern edge of Kentucky. As we cross the state, we learn firsthand the challenges of growing up and producing culture in the region. We bear witness to creative resilience and community in remote spaces and places in Appalachia. We bear witness to creative resilience and community in remote spaces and places where rich stories are told through art, film, music, and theater. 

Voices: Orlando Maiike Gouwenberg, Jessica Bennett Kincaid, Carolina Rubens, Jeff Chapman Crane, Sharman Crane, Kate Handslik

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Music: Danver County by Blue Dot Sessions

Earl Gilmore - This Little Light of Mine, on “From the Depths of my Soul,” 1977, June Appal Recordings

Nimrod Workman & Phyllis Boyens - I am a Travelin' Creature, on “Passing Through the Garden," 1974, June Appal Recordings

Pigmeat Jarret – Look at the People (Little Girl), on “Look at the People,” 1979, June Appal Recordings

Ralph Stanley – I am a Man of Constant Sorrow

Sarah Kate Morgan - Goodbye My Honey I'm Gone, on “Old Tunes & Sad Songs," 2022, self-released

Sparky Rucker – Come on in my Kitchen, on “Cold & Lonesome on a Train,” 1977, June Appal Recordings

Special Sound: Stranger with a Camera, Elizabeth Barrett, 2000 Appalshop; Shift Change, Higher Ground Theater, 2021

Related Episodes: Sounds of Berlin, Cultural Complexity in Miami’s Little Haiti, Key West: Creativity at the End of the Road, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies

Related Links: Association of International Curators of Contemporary Art, Great Meadows Foundation, Appalshop, June Appal Recordings, Higher Ground Theater, Valley of the Winds Gallery, Mine Portal 31

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami student Kristian Kranz heads to Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, for a conversation with Lynne Barrett, editor of the book Making Good Time, and two of the book’s contributors: author Les Standiford and poet-engineer Richard Blanco. Listen to hear a few ‘only-in-Miami’ stories about getting around South Florida.

Producers: Kristian Kranz/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Making Good Time, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide, Making Good Time in South Florida, Lynne Barrett, Les Standiford, Richard Blanco, Jai-Alai Books

Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do and Don’t Get Around South Florida —The city of Miami is renowned for her beauty and often imagined as paradise. Yet many locals and visitors find South Florida’s highways and byways a challenge to navigate. In the 2019 anthology Making Good Time, editor Lynne Barrett brings together thirty-one true tales inspired by transportation adventures in the southern realm of the Sunshine State.

 

Jillian Hernandez gives voice to girls and women of color in her 2020 book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment. In this episode, you’ll hear how she has been delving into the “aesthetic hierarchies” of femme culture for more than a decade. Research, critical writing, and personal experience come together to enrich this vividly illustrated book. Hernandez shares a few stories of her own fraught adolescence, along with those of Women on the Rise!, a community of teenage girls for whom she and local artists created opportunities to collide with art, through the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. 

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Chonga Girls, “Chongalicious,” Crystal Pearl Molinary, “Off the Chain”

 

Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Resisting Paradise, The Awakening, Topical Playlist—Art and Feminism

 

Related Links, Jillian Hernandez, University of Florida, Duke University Press, Women on the Rise!, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

 

Jillian Hernandez, a Miami native, is currently Assistant Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research at the University of Florida. She is a transdisciplinary scholar interested in the stakes of embodiment, aesthetics, and performance for Black and Latinx women and girls, gender-nonconformists, and queers. In 2020, Hernandez completed her first book, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, through Duke University Press. She is developing other book-length projects on the radical politics of femme of color art and performance and Latinx creative erotics, ontologies, and relationalities. Hernandez received her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and teaches courses on racialized girlhoods, Latinx sexualities, theories of the body, social justice praxis, and cultural studies. Her scholarship is based on and inspired by over a decade of community arts work with Black and Latinx girls in Miami, Florida, through the Women on the Rise! program she established at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, in addition to her practice as an artist and curator. via University of Florida

 

Aesthetics of Excess: Heavy makeup, gaudy jewelry, dramatic hairstyles, and clothes that are considered cheap, fake, too short, too tight, or too masculine: working-class Black and Latina girls and women are often framed as embodying "excessive" styles that are presumed to indicate sexual deviance. In Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how middle-class discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. At the same time, their style can be a source of cultural capital when appropriated by the contemporary art scene. Drawing on her community arts work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Hernandez analyzes the art and self-image of these girls alongside works produced by contemporary artists and pop musicians such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Nicki Minaj. Through these relational readings, Hernandez shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship. via Duke University Press

For the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro challenges the norm. Rather than explore an overarching theme, he invited seven artists to curate exhibitions featuring their own art. Likewise, the twelve solo projects that he curated suggest we look closely at individual creative practices. Purposefully choosing not to direct our gaze, this biennial allows us to explore freely, to discover for ourselves the power of contemporary art.

Biennial programming builds on this notion in a free audio guide, a digital publication that proposes viewing exercises and an international, public symposium. The three-day event brings together artists, scientists, critics, writers, and scholars for a deep dive into one of the major issues of our time: attention. Who controls it, why and how are just a few of the questions to be considered…

Voices: Claudia Fontes, Sofia Borges, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

Sound Editor: Laura Spencer-Morris | Special Audio: Sebastián Castagna, Ex Situ, Tal Isaac Hadad, Récital pour un masseur, Mame-Diarra Niang, 11:11, Tamar Guimarães, The Rehearsal

Related Episodes: Live from 32nd São Paulo Biennial, Sep 6, Sep 7, Sep 8, Anawana Haloba on Vanishing Cultures, Donna Kukama on Unfinished Stories, William Pope.L on Endurance, Jochen Volz on Living Uncertainty

Related Links: 33rd São Paulo Biennial, Claudia Fontes, Sofia Borges, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Mário Pedrosa, Goethe

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami student Luz Estrella Cruz makes her way to the Third Horizon Film Festival at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex in Miami. She’s there to meet filmmakers Diana Peralta (De Lo Mio, 2019) and Michael Lees (Uncivilized, 2020), whose work she’s been researching. Interviewing them and watching their films, Cruz discovers the passion behind their stories and immerses herself in two diasporic experiences from the Caribbean. 

Producers: Luz Cruz/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux and Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes Miami Moves Me/Third Horizon, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Miami's Caribbean Arts Remix

Related Links Miami Moves Me Podcast, De Lo Mio, Uncivilized, Third Horizon Film Festival, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide

 

“In a way, I've always been working on the edge of both a larger dominant society engagement and a deep engagement with my communities. My focus is really digging deep into blackness.”

Andrea Fatona, 2021

 

Toronto-based curator and scholar Andrea Fatona has been addressing institutionalized racism on her own terms since the 1990s. Our conversations across time reveal the depth of her commitment to making visible the full spectrum of Black culture in Canada. Engaging with Black communities to build an online repository while addressing algorithmic injustice, she and her collaborators are illuminating the work of Black Canadian cultural producers on the global stage.

 

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio 

Special Audio: Hogan’s Alley (1994), courtesy Vivo Media Arts, Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden and Whitewash (2016), Nadine Valcin, courtesy the artist

 

Related Episodes: The Awakening, New Point of View at the Venice Art Biennale

 

Related Links: The State of Blackness, Andrea Fatona/OCADU, Vivo Media Arts, Okui Enwezor, All the World’s Futures/56th Venice Art Biennale, Cornelia Wyngaarden

What is The State of Blackness?

The State of Blackness website shares digital documentation of a 2014 conference that took place in Toronto, Canada. The State of Blackness: From Production to Presentation was a two-day, interdisciplinary event held at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Harbourfront Centre for the Arts. Artists, curators, academics, students, and public participants gathered to engage in a dialogue that problematized the histories, current situation, and future state of Black diasporic artistic practice and representation in Canada. The site is now expanding to serve as a repository for information about ongoing research geared toward making visible the creative practice and dissemination of works by Black Canadian cultural producers from 1987 to present. 

 

What is Algorithmic Injustice?

Algorithms come into play when you do a search on the internet, taking keywords as input, searching related databases and returning results. Bias can enter into algorithmic systems as a result of pre-existing cultural, social, or institutional expectations; because of technical limitations of their design; or by being used in unanticipated contexts or by audiences who are not considered in the software's initial design.

With American-born artist Mary Mattingly, we delve into her collaborative environmental interventions over time. We remember the 2015 Havana Biennial when rainwater nourished Pull, a pair of geodesic dome eco-systems through which she engaged locals. We follow her rising interest in water to Swale, a co-created edible landscape on a barge that navigated New York City’s waterways, offering free fresh food to visitors when docked at public piers. And we contemplate the Year of Public Water that Mattingly launched with More Art in 2020. Emblematic of water issues that challenge public health the world over, the New York City story reminds us that clean water is a shared responsibility—a basic human right that we must invest in and protect. 

 

Related Episodes: The Awakening, Mary Mattingly on Human Relationships with Nature, Topical Playlist: Sustainability and the Environment 

 

Related Links: Mary Mattingly, Pull, Swale, Public Water, More Art

Mary Mattingly is a visual artist based in New York City. This episode explores three of her eco-sensitive projects. 

Pull was co-created for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, two spherical ecosystems that were pulled across Habana to Parque Central and the museum.

Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City, docked at public piers for public engagement. Following waterways common laws, Swale circumnavigated New York's public land laws, allowing anyone to pick free fresh food. Swale instigated and co-created the "foodway" in Concrete Plant Park, the Bronx in 2017. The "foodway" is the first time New York City Parks is allowing people to publicly forage in over 100 years. It's currently considered a pilot project.

Public Water (2020-2021) is a multiform project and installation that brings attention to New York City’s intricate drinking water system and the communities who steward upstate watersheds and drinking water sources. With this project Mattingly emphasizes the human care that goes into having access to clean water and calls for more reciprocal relationships among our neighboring communities and the planet. The project includes a digital campaign, education initiatives, and a large-scale, public sculpture installation taking place June 3 – September 7, 2021 at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. In addition, to keep this essential conversation going with park visitors into the future, the Prospect Park Alliance has commissioned Mattingly and More Art to produce a walking tour through the Park’s watershed, designed in connection with the launch of ecoWEIR, a natural filtration pilot project for the Park’s manmade watercourse. NYC-based More Art, a non-profit organization that generates socially engaged public art projects, commissioned Public Water.

Today’s story takes place at the intersection of art and the First Amendment. This vital element of the United States Constitution protects our right to freedom of expression, by prohibiting lawmakers from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. 

 

Artist Sheryl Oring took up this cause célèbre in 2004. In conversations across time, we trace her synthesis of art and free speech in a public performance project that quite naturally, has no end in sight. As long as there is democracy in the United States, there will be opportunities to voice opinions about the U.S. presidency, about social justice, the economy, public health, globalization, climate change, education, and more. 

 

What would YOU wish to say to the U.S. President?

Let us know on Instagram: @freshartintl #iwishtosay

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, 2004; Sheryl Oring at Washington and Lee University, 2018; I Wish to Say with University of Michigan and Wayne State University students, 2020; Lisa Bielawa, Voters’ Broadcast, 2020

 

Related Episodes: Where Art Meets Activism, Topical Playlist: Art and Politics, Charles Gaines on Philosophy and Politics in Conceptual Art, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens

 

Related Links: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, Activating Democracy (the book), The First Amendment Project, Oakland, CA, Creative Capital Foundation, W&L Quick Hit: Sheryl Oring Performs I Wish to Say, Sheryl Oring on ABC World News Tonight, I Wish to Say Archive, University of Michigan, Democracy & Debate Theme Semester, Stamps Gallery, Lisa Bielawa, Voters’ Broadcast, Mauer Broadcast with Lisa Bielawa, The Berlin Wall

Now, more than ever, culture transcends geographic boundaries. In this episode, we explore the impact of that global phenomenon on the visibility of contemporary diaspora art.

From Jamaica, Rosie Gordon-Wallace is a globally recognized curator, arts advocate, and community leader based in Miami, Florida, since the 1970s. In 1996, Gordon-Wallace launched a transformative enterprise, now known as Diaspora Vibe Culture Arts Incubator.

DVCAI is a creative laboratory—promoting, nurturing, and cultivating the vision and diverse talents of artists from the Caribbean Diaspora, artists of color, and immigrant artists through public programs, residencies, exhibitions and more. In 2021, the organization will be 25 years old. We sit down with Gordon-Wallace to contemplate the significance of this moment. 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound from The Philosopher's Stone, with permission of artist Asser Saint-Val

Related Episodes: Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, New Caribbean Cinema, Miami's Caribbean Arts Remix

Related Links: Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inter|Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City, Donette Francis, Rosa Naday Garmendia, Evelyn Politzer, Chantal James, Asser Saint-Val, Michael Elliott, The Windrush Generation, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, Miami Design District

A traveling exhibition that celebrates DVCAI’s 25th year, Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City is a multidisciplinary curatorial collaboration and exploration of the emergence of the “Creole City” as a local, regional and global phenomenon. Internationally recognized curators Sanjit Sethi, President, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and former director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, and Rosie Gordon-Wallace, founder and curator of Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI), designed this collaboration to provide a lens through which communities and community leaders internationally can begin to better understand themselves, their diversity and their unlimited possibilities.

In 2019, Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City was presented in our nation’s capital at a time when diaspora artists and voices were challenging social justice, celebrating identities—reactivating and bridging communities through contemporary art and scholarship. The complexities and diversities represented in this exhibition are emergent and, in many cases, ascendant across the world.

In 2020, the exhibition travelled to the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2021, Inter | Sectionality came home to the Design District, in Miami, Florida.

In 2022, members and guests of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) travel from around the world to Kentucky, in the Appalachian region of the United States. The uninitiated might consider this a remote context for conversations around international contemporary art. Instead, we find Appalachia a nuanced cultural and geographic space.

 

The third episode in our IKT Kentucky series explores the evolving and inclusive concept of “Global Appalachia” presented during IKT’s 2022 gathering. Generations of curators, poets, and artists from a world of cultures have found their way across time and space to build communities in this region. Here and now, Global Appalachia is where their 21st century contemporaries continue to shape a boundless future, with a diverse array of perspectives on the meaning of home and tradition.

 

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Music: 

Delving the Deep by BlueDot Sessions, 

Gettie's Wash by Blue Dot Sessions,

Tan Mountain by Blue Dot Sessions

 

Voices, in order of appearance: Rebecca Adkins Fletcher, Frank X Walker, Elizabeth Mesa-Gaido, Vian Sora, Ceirra Evans, Anissa Lewis, Hannah Drake, Karlota Contreras Koterbay, Erin Lee Antonak

 

Related Episodes: Curators Declare Independence at IKT Kentucky, The Lure of Local Arts in Appalachia

 

Related Links: Rebecca Adkins Fletcher, Frank X Walker, Elizabeth Mesa-Gaido, Vian Sora, Ceirra Evans, Anissa Lewis, Hannah Drake, Karlota Contreras Koterbay, Erin Lee Antonak, IKT Kentucky Global Appalachia Symposium, International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, Speed Museum, Great Meadows Foundation

 

In 2019, we recorded the first part of this story about the history of Miami's contemporary art scene inside Locust Projects, the longest running alternative art space in the city. Locust Projects director Lorie Mertes and artists from a collaborative known as FeCuOp—Jason Ferguson, Christian Curiel, Brandon Opalka, and Victor Villafañe, remember the raw energy of the 1990s. When we meet, the collective is in the midst of building out an immersive environment for Antenna, their first major project in Miami since 2003. The performative and interactive installation aimed to create a social experiment around communication.

In early 2021, we reach out to FeCuOp to talk about how much has changed since they collaborated on the highly interactive, live, and in-person experience at Locust Projects. Only months after they realized Antenna, the global coronavirus pandemic shut down the world for most of a year, profoundly altering how we encounter art.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound featured with permission of FeCuOp 

Related Episodes: Where Art Meets Sand and Social Behavior, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity

Related Links: Locust Projects, FeCuOp, Christian Curiel, Jason Ferguson, Brandon Opalka, Victor Villafañe, Miami Light Project

FeCuOp is a contemporary art collaborative established in Miami in 1997, by Jason Ferguson, born in Trinidad and Tobago, lives in South Carolina; Christian Curiel, born in Puerto Rico to Cuban parents, lives in New Haven, CT; Brandon Opalka, born in Virginia, lives in Colorado. The name constitutes an amalgam of the three founding artist’s names. FeCuOp along with new Miami-based member Victor Villafañe, are like the periodic table of elements; each member’s unique characteristics bring a unique variable property to every collaboration.

 

Locust Projects is an alternative art space founded by artists for artists in 1998. The arts incubator produces, presents, and nurtures ambitious and experimental new art and the exchange of ideas through commissioned exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, summer art intensives for teens, and public programs on contemporary art and curatorial practice.

Today, we’re talking about symbolic statues and monuments. In this moment, many are demanding the removal of memorials believed to perpetuate a legacy of systemic racial and ethnic injustice. Recent acts of violence against Blacks in the United States have brought these memorials to the center of a nationwide debate.

                                                                       

On Memorial Day, in the year 2020, Minneapolis police killed a Black man named George Floyd. The public incident ignited the resurgence of a 21st century civil rights movement known as Black Lives Matter. In 2013, with use of the hashtag BlackLivesMatter, thousands responded on social media to the acquittal of a white man, George Zimmerman. He had been charged with the shooting death of Black teen Trayvon Martin.

 

Black Lives Matter is now the leading force behind massive protests across the U.S. and abroad. Crowds are toppling statues honoring colonizers, slaveholders, and Confederate heroes. The controversial figures have become a cultural flashpoint.

 

Social justice advocates have contested these iconic sculptures for decades. Let’s look back to 2014, for one example, when artist william cordova and his collaborators staged an unannounced public declaration of liberty and justice. They chose to make their statement at the site of a towering statue of confederate leader Robert E. Lee in New Orleans.  

 

Born in Lima, Peru, and based in Miami, New York and Lima, cordova is known as a cultural practitioner. We call him to hear the story behind this prescient intervention. 

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: silent parade, 2014 

 

Related episodes: Black in America, Modern Black Portrait of Florida, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives,  Sanford Biggers on Time and the Human Condition, Fahamu Pecou on Art x Hip-Hop, Theaster Gates on Meaning, Making and Reconciliation, Jefferson Pinder on Symbols of Power and Struggle

 

Related links: silent parade, The Soul Rebels, william cordova, now's the time:narratives of southern alchemy, Perez Art Museum, Miami, 2018, Prospect New Orleans, Headlands Center for the Arts, Black Lives Matter

Today, we take you to Motor City. Once a symbol of the dynamic U.S. economy, Detroit, Michigan, has gone through a major economic and demographic decline since the 1960s. The drastic drop in population created acres of emptiness—vacant lots, abandoned buildings and food deserts. 

Detroit’s art scene is known for countering negative growth with a resilient DIY attitude. While locals respect and sustain the history of innovation in the place they call home, the gritty urban landscape has begun to attract newcomers. Creatives from other cities are heading here to seek affordable studios and fresh opportunities. 

Education is evolving along with Detroit’s cultural character. At Wayne State University, degree programs are increasingly geared toward next generation art and design. Students taking the course Design for Urban Mobility work with local entrepreneurs to solve design problems. Past clients have been Detroit Bikes and the Detroit Department of Transportation with the Rehab Institute of Michigan. In fall 2019, juniors and seniors majoring in Industrial Design join forces with Dazmonique Carr, founder of Deeply Rooted Produce.

In our conversation with these emerging designers, we discovered firsthand the impact of an educational opportunity that invites students to make a difference. Responding to the call, they are enabling and supporting mobility throughout the city—with actionable ideas that promote self-sufficiency and health literacy.

Wayne State—Designing for Urban Mobility is one of our 2020 Student Edition episodes.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photography Monica McGivern, except where noted

Related Episodes: SAIC—Imagining Tomorrow, OCAD University—Curating in the Digital Realm

Related Links: Industrial Design, Wayne State University, Deeply Rooted Produce

Design for Urban Mobility is a course offered through Wayne State University’s James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History. Students taking the course consider a variety of questions of how products, spaces and experiences enable and support our mobility through urban space. Each semester—often through client-based projects—they explore four distinct but interrelated concepts of urban mobility: mobility and community, mobility and discovery, mobility and economic vitality, and mobility and social justice.

Deeply Rooted Produce, founded by Dazmonique Carr, is a mobile market with a mission: to provide fresh fruits and vegetables sourced locally and support Detroit’s economy towards self-sufficiency and health literacy. The market’s purpose is to Increase access to healthy foods without sacrificing quality for affordability. DPR Promise: Provide H.E.L.P. (Health Education Literacy for People of Color) 

Siobhan Gregory, a senior lecturer at Wayne University, an industrial designer and applied anthropologist, living and working in Detroit. Her research focuses on the progress of a more human-centered design practice. In the business sector, she pulls from anthropological theory and methods to help organizations.

The Student Edition began in 2019, with visits to art schools and universities in the United States and Canada, where we began recording voices of the future. In 2020, we present the first episodes in our Student Edition—conversations about creativity with emerging makers and producers. Given opportunities to explore and experiment, students are discovering how they can shape the world they live in. What issues and ideas spark their creative impulse?

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami students Ben Vinarski and Reese McMichael venture to an abandoned hotel in Miami Beach to go behind the scenes of an immersive theater production. Inside a room designed as the well-equipped kitchen of an upper-class home, actress Maggie B. Maxwell has just rolled out a pie crust while introducing her visitors to the city’s Black history. 

Producers: Reese McMichael and Ben Vinarski/Miami Moves Me, Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Maggie Maxwell’s Motel Story, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Black in America

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide, Juggerknot Theater Company, Miami Theater Review

In this episode, we consider the role that teaching artists play in shaping the art school experience. How does an artist in academia cultivate expressive opportunities for students while making time to deepen their own creative practice? 

New Orleans based artist Cristina Molina invites us to consider this challenging dynamic at the art school where she teaches—Southeastern Louisiana University's Department of Visual Art and Design. Research and observation, architecture and the environment, memory and motherhood, music and movies, intuition and uncertainty are a few of the forces that drive the artmaking we discover at the edge of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.

Voices, in Order of Appearance: Garima Thakur, Kate Baczeski, Luisa Hernández, Vanessa Centeno, Dale Newkirk, Tom Walton, Ben Diller, Eric Huckabee, Lily Brooks, Rachel Harmeyer, Cristina Molina

Sound Design: Patrick Davis, with Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio: Garima Thakur, Bioscope, 2022; Luisa Hernández, What Matters Now, 2023; Chad Serhal, The Great American Motion Picture Rotoscope Animation, 2021; Ken Haskett, Morse Code message, 2021; Lily Brooks, We Have to Count the Clouds, 2012; NASA, recorded sounds of the sun, via Cristina Molina, 2022.

Related Episodes: Student Edition

Related Links: Southeastern Louisiana University Contemporary Art Gallery, FreshArt.Education, Fresh Art International Research Guides

Where in the world can you express yourself freely, share cultural knowledge, test inventive art practices, and build a transnational creative community in only 10 days time?

During an intensive CEC ArtsLink program in Kazakhstan, 23 artists and curators from across the region and the U.S. seize the moment to think deeply about their socially engaged projects. Our home base for talks, workshops, field expeditions, and performances is the bULt Collective rave space.

 

Paying attention to inclusion and access, issues and ideas, concept and creation, they begin to imagine new possible futures for collective art practices in Central Asia and beyond.

 

Acknowledgement: In Fall 2023, Cathy Byrd recorded voices and sounds for this episode during her CEC ArtsLink residency in Central Asia.

 

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

 

Featured Voices: bULt Collective, Lydia Matthews, Nara Bikinna, Zilïa Khansura, Laura Nova, Will Owen, Kristine Diekman

 

Special Audio: Bandistan Ensemble, DJ Nemezida; DJs inspired by traditional Kazakh music/Almaty, Kazakhstan; Nara Bikinna recording of a Tatar gathering/Tyumen, Siberia; recording of felting workshop with Zilïa Khansura/Oak Gallery, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Collective Soundwalk Mixdown/Almaty

 

Related Episodes: Poetic Interventions Point to Pollution in Kyrgyzstan, When Art Sparks Social Engagement

 

Related Research Guide (downloadable hyperlinked pdf for learning and teaching): Creating Connections/Sparking Engagement—Research Guide Issue 4

 

Download ALL Free Research Guides HERE

Related Links: CEC ArtsLink, bULt Collective

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami students Gretchell Cano and Luz Estrella Cruz explore the work of Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. They, along with the rest of the Miami Moves Me team, visit Duval-Carrié’s studio in the Little Haiti district. Listen to find out why the artist chose to call Miami home, and hear his views on how the Caribbean influences the city’s art and culture.

Edouard Duval-Carrié was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1954. He was educated at the University of Loyola Montreal, Quebec, in Canada; and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris in France. Duval-Carrié moved to Miami in 1992 and swiftly established himself as an integral factor in the city’s cultural fabric.

Duval-Carrié’s work explores the social and historical dimensions of Haitian culture. His imagery includes very often Voodoo gods combined with aspects of classical mythology and Haiti’s national heroes. His images are visual examples of Magic Realism, portraying a world in which reality and mythology are intertwined. (biographical source: panamericanprojects.com)

Producers: Gretchell Cano/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Little Haiti, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Little Haiti

The Toronto-made film RISE embodies the creative force of a local youth-led spoken word movement known as RISE Edutainment. A subway station serves as the set where the collective’s poets, rappers, and musicians voice their experiences as first and second generation immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

Emelie Chhangur, curator of The Art Gallery of York University, sparked the film project in 2017, by inviting Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca to Toronto. Based in Recife, Brazil, the two artist filmmakers are known for examining cultural change in the making. Through film and photography, they document popular performance genres as they adapt to post-colonial economies and geographies. 

The experimental film that Wagner and de Burca created with the RISE community in Toronto hybridizes fiction and documentary to establish a third language-territory—a space where rhythm and poetry are employed as catalysts to explore the complex diasporic and multi-cultural city.

RISE challenges us to consider what might constitute the creation of new traditions in and for Toronto. The story demonstrates how creative expression empowers the past, present and potential future of an extended, evolving community. By showcasing the film in the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, artistic director Candice Hopkins and her collaborators follow through on their commitment to showcase local culture and history.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio from the film RISE, in order of appearance: Randell Adjei, Borelson, Kevin Braithwaite, Shahadda Jack, Laurette Jack-Ogbonna, Kwazzi, Michie Mee, Duke Redbird | RISE Audio Track, courtesy Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca Studio

Related Episodes and Posts: Views of the Toronto Biennial of Art, Art and Film Illuminate the Black Imagination, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity

Related Links: RISE Edutainment, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto Biennial of Art

Art with a sense of place is at the center of our show. To set the stage, hear about art throughout the magic city of Miami. We start with Franky Cruz’s butterfly project at Spinello Projects. Next, Hattie Mae Williams‘s use the Miami Marine Stadium as the backdrop for her Tattooed Ballerinas. Finally, we focus on Project 305  which invites people across Miami to submit sounds and images that will become part of an ambitious multimedia orchestral portrait of the city to premiere in October 2017.

With us in the studio at Jolt Radio, Miami are New World Symphony’s Director of Community Engagement Cassidy Fitzpatrick and Project 305 Project Manager Joy Lampkin-Foster. Jonathan David Kane, Filmmaker/Project 305 Lead Artist calls in.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

Today, we take you to Paris for a studio visit with French artist ORLAN. Surrounded by her books, sculptures, paintings and photographs, we talk about her evolving relationship with technology.

 Sound Editor: Alyssa Moxley | Voice Over Translation: Emilia Garth | Special Audio Track: ORLAN

With filmmaker Alla Kovgan, we spark a conversation to find out why and how she realized CUNNINGHAM. The 2019 documentary traces American choreographer Merce Cunningham's artistic evolution over three decades.

Kovgan directed the immersive film that took seven years to make. She and her collaborators channel the spirit and image of Merce Cunningham—from his early years as a struggling dancer in postwar New York to his emergence as one of the world’s most visionary choreographers. With new technology, Kovgan creates the film in both 2D and 3D versions. She frees Cunningham’s oeuvre from the constrictions of the stage, projecting his work into an infinite realm of the senses.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio and Photography courtesy Magnolia Pictures

About CUNNINGHAM

2019 marked the centenary of legendary American choreographer Merce Cunningham. The film CUNNINGHAM traces his artistic evolution over three decades of risk and discovery (1944–1972), from his early years as a struggling dancer in postwar New York to his emergence as one of the world’s most visionary choreographers. The 3D technology weaves together Merce's philosophies and stories, creating a visceral journey into his innovative work. Sharing archival footage of Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, CUNNINGHAM is a tribute to one of the world’s greatest modern dance artists.

About Director Alla Kovgan 

Alla Kovgan is a New York-based filmmaker, born in Moscow (Russia). Her films have been presented worldwide. Since 1999, Kovgan has been involved with interdisciplinary collaborations, creating intermedia performances (with KINODANCE Company), dance films and documentaries about dance. With CUNNINGHAM, she created a film that is neither a straightforward biopic nor a traditional concert film. Cunningham was conceived as a 93-minute art piece that would tell the master’s story through his work. 

About Merce Cunningham: Merce Cunningham, considered the most influential choreographer of the 20th century, was a many-sided artist. He was a dance-maker, a fierce collaborator, a chance taker, a boundless innovator, a film producer, and a teacher. During his 70 years of creative practice, Cunningham's exploration forever changed the landscape of dance, music, and contemporary art. Visit Merce Cunningham Trust to explore his history.

Related Episodes: Filming Rhythm, Stories and Soul in the Toronto Subway, Akosua Adoma Owusu on Her Film Kwaku Ananse, Inside Miami’s Sound Chamber, Erika Hoffmann on the Hoffmann Collection, Stephen Vitiello on Cultural Soundscapes

Related Links: Alla Kovgan, CUNNINGHAM, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg

In February 2023, we travel to the United Arab Emirates for the first time. We’re here to witness and celebrate Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Four years in the making, the exhibition is ambitious and expansive. More than 100 artists from 70 countries are presenting projects in 19 venues across the emirate. 

 

One afternoon, we wander through Sharjah’s heritage area to Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, the personal residence of a local pearl merchant and his family from the mid-19th century until the 1970s. In a small courtyard outside his multi chambered installation, we meet artist Shiraz Bayjoo to talk about how his project engages history—a pervasive theme in this Biennial.

 

The artist shares the storied past of the Indian Ocean and the island archipelagos of Mauritius and Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Keep listening to hear the orientalist tropes that he disrupts in Searching for Libertalia, a project that recovers the history of a purported pirate colony founded in the late 17th century.

 

Our conversation with Shiraz Bayjoo reveals one artist’s approach to Thinking Historically in the Present. Searching for Liberatalia materializes a cultural narrative that might come closer than real history to showing us the way through rupture, dislocation, and uncertainty to a place of growth and renewal.

Story: Cathay Byrd

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio: Searching for Libertalia, Sharjah Biennial 15

 

Related Episodes: Sharjah Biennial 15—with Hoor Al Qasimi

 

Related Links: Shiraz Bayjoo, Sharjah Biennial 15, Searching for Libertalia

Edra Soto is a Puerto Rico born, Chicago based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator whose architectural projects connect with communities. Soto's temporary modular SCREENHOUSE pavilions are evocative symbols of her cultural assimilation that we can enter and share. Each free-standing structure functions as both sculptural object and social gathering place. Couched in beauty, her ongoing OPEN 24 HOURS project offers a different visceral encounter — with evidence of displacement and want. The aesthetic display of cast-off liquor bottles culled from steadily accumulating detritus in the historically Black neighborhood she now calls home suggests that we consider the personal and communal impact of poverty and racism. During a studio visit with the artist in Northwest Chicago, we talk about recent iterations of these projects.

In concert with the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Millennium Park Foundation commissioned the artist to produce a temporary gathering place in one of the park’s outdoor galleries. Only steps from Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, she worked with a team to construct SCREENHOUSE. The 10-foot high pavilion made of 400 charcoal-hued, 12-inch cast concrete blocks is part of an ongoing project, an architectural series inspired by iron grills and decorative concrete screen blocks found throughout the Caribbean and the American South.

New versions of OPEN 24 HOURS are on view in two 2020 exhibitions. One appears in Open House: Domestic Thresholds at the Albright-Knox Museum, in Buffalo, New York. Cognac bottles carefully arranged on shelves with decorative panels reveal the artist’s connection to two places she calls home. More liquor bottles command attention in the three-part installation she designed for State of the Art 2020. Featuring work by artists from across the United States, the exhibition celebrates the opening of The Momentary, a new contemporary art space at the Crystal Bridges Museum, in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio 

Related Episodes and Photo Features: Architecture with a Sense of Place, Views—Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Fresh VUE: Chicago Art and Architecture 2017

Related Links: Edra Soto, The Momentary, State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Knox-Albright Museum, Millennium Park, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019

About Edra Soto: Born in Puerto Rico and based in Chicago, Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. She is invested in creating and providing visual and educational models propelled by empathy and generosity. Her recent projects, which are motivated by civic and social actions, focus on fostering relationships with a wide range of communities. 

Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include Chicago Cultural Center (IL), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Pérez Art Museum Miami (FL), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (PR), Hunter EastHarlem Gallery (NY), UIC Gallery 400 (IL), Smart Museum (IL), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (NE), DePaul Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (IL). Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the DCASE for Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago, the 3Arts Make A Wave award, and 3Arts Projects grants, and the Illinois Arts Council grant. 

Soto holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. She teaches Introduction to Social Engagement at University of Illinois in Chicago and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

About SCREENHOUSE: Decorative screens, known as rejas and quiebrasoles, are ubiquitous in Soto’s birthplace in Puerto Rico. In her SCREENHOUSE series, Soto transforms the quiebrasol form from a planar screen that divides public from private into a nearly fully enclosed, free-standing structure that functions as both sculptural object and social gathering place.

About OPEN 24 HOURS: Witnessing the excessive accumulation of litter and detritus in the historic African American neighborhood of East Garfield Park where she lives motivated Edra Soto to initiate this ongoing project. Since December 2016, Soto has been collecting, cleaning and classifying cast-off liquor bottles to create installations that display the impact of racism and poverty on this marginalized community in Chicago. Bourbon Empire, the book quoted below, recounts the historic connection between African Americans and cognac from its genesis in the 1930s to contemporary repercussions instigated by hip-hop and rap culture.

“Cognac’s relationship with African American consumers started later, when black soldiers stationed in southwest France were introduced to it during both world wars. The connection between cognac producers and black consumers was likely bolstered by the arrival of black artists and musicians... France appreciated these distinctive art forms before the U.S. did, continuing a French tradition dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville of understanding aspects of American culture better than Americans did. For African Americans, the elegant cognac of a country that celebrated their culture instead of marginalizing it must have tasted sweet ... During the 1990s, cognac sales were slow, and the industry was battling an image populated by fusty geriatrics. Then references to cognac began surfacing in rap lyrics, a phenomenon that peaked in 2001 with Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy’s hit “Pass the Courvoisier,” causing sales of the brand to jump 30 percent. During the next five years, other rappers teamed up with brands, and increased overall sales of cognac in the U.S. by a similar percentage, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.”

—Reid Mitenbuler, author of Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey

Today, we take you to the Everglades, a region of South Florida once entirely covered in a shallow, slow-moving sheet of water. Established as a National park in 1947, the subtropical wilderness of endless marshes, dense mangroves and towering palms is a habitat for rare and endangered species—including manatees, the American crocodile, and the Florida panther. 

Since 2001, the wild world of the Everglades has been a temporary habitat for artists and writers who spend a month here as fellows in the program known as AIRIE, Artists in Residence in Everglades. New York based photographer Adam Nadel was a past resident. In this podcast episode, he introduces Getting the Water Right an expansive exhibition project he produced with Jessica Cattelino, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles. Together, they tell the human story of South Florida’s iconic eco-system.

“This Persian Garden Project will be providing visitors with a private, yet public environment in which to engage important social and cultural issues by gathering and gardening through conversations, screenings, readings, and communal performances. I’m imagining it as a hub for activism and healing—a home for all marginalized, mediated, untold, and less celebrated stories.”

Bahar Behbahani, 2021

The art of Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahani responds to the history and character of the complex landscapes that surround her—reflecting on her cultural origins and immigrant experience. Conversations with the artist across time reveal how she has immersed herself in the form, poetry, and politics of the Persian garden. Now, her vision extends to designing and programming a public environment for activism and healing where she aims to engender a communal sense of hospitality, resistance, and resilience. When Behbahani reaches her goal, a new Persian garden will flourish in Manhattan—cultivated by the hands and minds of artists and historians, thinkers and doers from cultures around the world that call New York City home.

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Bahar Behbahani, Suspended (2007) and All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2019), courtesy the artist

Related Episodes: The Awakening, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens

 

Related Links: Bahar Behbahani, Ispahan Flowers Only Once (2019-ongoing), All Water Has a Perfect Memory/Wave Hill Public Garden, 9/11 Memorial

Alba Triana, a Colombian-born composer and sound artist based in Miami, Florida, introduces three of her exquisite sound and light installations: Music on a Bound String questions whether or not the act of listening is indispensable to the musical experience. Microcosmos animates a cymbal to create an immersive vibrational experience. The interactive Electronic Gamelan invites visitors to perform one of the artist's compositions. Listen to discover her trans-disciplinary approach to the ever-evolving field of sound art.

This radio show about Architecture with a Sense of Place features conversations with artists and architects whose work responds to cultural, historical, sociopolitical and environmental influences on our built environment. Featured: Jack Sanders, Design Build Adventure, Austin; Jaya Kader, KZ Architecture, Miami; David Hartt at Graham Foundation, Chicago; Sarah Dunn, Urban Lab, Chicago; Bijoy Jain, Studio Mumbai, India; Marshall Brown, Marshall Brown Projects, Chicago; Jimenez Lai and Joanna Grant, Bureau Spectacular, Los Angeles; and Gerard & Kelly at Farnsworth House.

Listen in to hear the energy and creativity that our team and guests brought to our live streaming Breakfast and The Beat show on Jolt Radio this week. We thank you, our listeners and invite you to support our efforts to bring the voice of international contemporary art, design and film to our global community.

Click HERE to collect contemporary art by Miami artists and donate! www.freshartinternational.com/breakfast-…portunity/

Become a Member HERE! www.freshartinternational.com/supportus/

Activism has long been a way for artists and curators, writers and filmmakers to engage with global flashpoints, inspiring new perspectives on visible and unseen causes. Over the last century, public interventions, performative protests, and works created for public marches and events have led communities to participate in art experiences and make art themselves.

The Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter, Dreamers and Climate Change Activists expose sexual harassment and assault, race-based violence, immigrant rights violations, and the impact of sea level rise. The issues have energized today’s culture production. Contemporary artists and curators increasingly lead and invite calls to action in response to these vital concerns.

Voices in this conversation: Andrea Bowers, Ralph Rugoff, Catherine Morris, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Manolis D. Lemos, Tania Bruguera, Maria Elena Ortiz, Maria Alyokina

Sound Editor: Julien Borrelli | Special Audio: Andrea Bowers, Manolis D. Lemos, Pussy Riot | Photography: Credits in captions

Related episodes: Andrea Bowers on Environmental Activism, Ralph Rugoff on the 13th Lyon Biennial, Catherine Morris and A Year Of Yes, Tania Bruguera on Art Activism, Maria Aloykhina on Political Art

Related links: Agora, The Highline, New York; Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminism Art, Brooklyn Museum; Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, Sala de Arte Público Siquieros

Enter the world of art activism through the recent Rauschenberg Residency on Rising Water, listen to conversations recorded on Captiva Island in Florida, and learn about Activating Democracy with artist Sheryl Oring, about her I Wish To Say project. Finally, hear about Miami’s very own Common Field convening.   In the Studio: Artist Naomi Fisher, Director of DimensionsVariable Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, and Stephanie Sherman.   Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

How do contemporary art and film illuminate the Black Imagination? This segment from our archive explores some of the issues and ideas behind creative practices that re-imagine the Black experience.

To begin, we share a conversation recorded with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver from 2013, while she was working at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Cassel Oliver is now Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she's expanding the representation of African American and African-diasporic artists in the Museum's collection.

On November 2, 2016, artists, filmmakers and curators joined us to consider this topic during the Fresh Art International show on Jolt Radio, Miami. Since then, curator Natalia Zuluaga continues to edit [NAME] publications and co-edits the bilingual online journal Dispatches. In summer 2019, Zuluaga curates Materia Abierta, a program on theory, art and technology in Mexico City. Artist Domingo Castillo has been working under the radar since visualizing the complexities of Miami’s future in his 2017 video Tropical Malaise. In 2019, among other recent projects, artist Jamilah Sabur presented a five channel video installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and showed a commissioned video at Hudson Yards, New York. Amir George, co-founder of the touring visual shorts program Black Radical Imagination, continues to engage in cinema culture. Mikhaile Solomon, founding director of the annual PRIZM art fair, is preparing for the Fair’s seventh year in Miami, scheduled for December 2019.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan 2016; Anamnesis Audio 2019 | Special Audio: courtesy Jamilah Sabur and Oolite Arts

Related Episodes: Valerie Cassel Oliver on Black Performance in Contemporary Art and Jean-Ulrick Désert and Trenton Doyle Hancock on Radical Presence, Black in America, Contemporary Black Portraiture

Related Links: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, [NAME] Publications, Hammer Museum, Black Radical Imagination, PRIZM Art Fair, Oolite Arts

 

In the world today, many consider capitalism a fraught economic system. Some believe that capitalism is the cause current international trade wars, accelerating student debt, the bankruptcy of entire countries, the growth of virtual currencies and the reason for coded security systems.

Artist Hilary Powell and filmmaker Dan Edelstyn, an inventive couple based in London, have decided to wreak a bit of havoc with the capitalist system in their home country by opening their own bank. Hoe Street Central Bank, AKA HSCB, is open in the former Co-Op Bank on Hoe Street in the London suburb of Walthamstow.

Powell and Edelstyn have been printing their own bank notes and selling them to buy up debt in their community. This fall, they begin producing and selling bonds—a new initiative in the orchestration of their collectively owned and distributed debt explosion. The Optimistic Foundation demonstrates what Powell refers to as pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. In the collective act of abolishing local debt, they're staging a timely intervention in the name of economic justice.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound: Bank Job/Optimistic Foundation

Related Episodes: The Art of Capitalism, Occupy Museums on Artists and Debt

Related Links: Bank Job, Optimistic Foundation

Globally engaged curators introduce IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, and talk about themes we'll explore during the 2019 IKT Congress in Miami. Ground zero for sea level rise, Miami is the ideal context for our conversation on how art and visual culture are changing public perception of today's climate crisis.

Recorded in the studio of Jolt Radio, Miami, on April 10, 2019, during our weekly web streaming radio show.

Voices: (alpha order) Daniela Arriado, Susan Caraballo, T.J. Demos, Julia Draganović, Vanina Saracino

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Cara Despain, Sea Unseen; Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, Forest Law; Oliver Ressler, Code Rood; Enrique Rámirez, Tidal Pulse; Band of Weeds, Underground Root Movement | 

This episode is supported, in part, by IKT Miami.

Related Episodes: Live from the Everglades, Part One, Robert Chambers on Art, Ancient Plants and New Technologies, Gustavo Matamoros: Inside Miami’s Sound Chamber, Deborah Mitchell: The Artist as Guide to the Everglades, Jenny Larsson on Searching for Arctic Winter, Adam Nadel on Getting the Water Right, Artist Residency in Everglades, Art and the Rising Sea,  Jorge Menna Barreto on Environmental Sculpture, Rauschenberg Residency on Rising Water, Andrea Bowers on Environmental Activism

Related Links: IKT, Screen City Biennial

Episode Participants:

Daniela Arriado is Director and founder of Screen City Biennial in Stavanger, Norway. Based in Berlin since 2012, she explores new curatorial approaches towards expanded borders of cinematic experiences and the audio-visual through projects concerning urban screens and online streaming platforms for video art.

Susan Caraballo is a Miami-based arts consultant, producer and curator working at the intersection of curating and directing to explore global issues including the ecological crisis and contemporary social conditions. A member of IKT's Miami constituency, Caraballo organized the symposium for the 2019 Congress around the subject of environmental sustainability and creative resilience.

T.J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics and ecology.

Julia Draganović is a curator whose focus is time based and collaborative art and new artistic strategies. She has curated projects in Germany, Italy, Spain, the USA and Taiwan. Currently Director of Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany, Draganović has served as President of IKT since 2014.

Vanina Saracino is an independent curator and film programmer based in Berlin. She is the co-founder of OLHO, an international curatorial project about contemporary art and cinema initiated in 2015 in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, also shown at Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (Venice, 2017) and Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2018). Saracino is co-curating the 2019 Screen City Biennial.

About IKT: German curators Eberhard Roters, Eddy de Wilde and Harald Szeemann and others founded IKT in 1973, to stimulate and extend debate concerning curating. Convening each year in a different city, IKT brings together curators from around the world, to meet, share knowledge, exchange ideas and broaden their professional networks.

 

About IKT Miami: A group of twelve Miami-based curators organized a three-day program for IKT's 2019 Congress in Miami. More than 100 international curators and art professionals participated, along with local curators, cultural producers, artists and other members of Miami’s cultural community. IKT Miami brought international attention to area artists and cultural producers, including those addressing global issues of sustainability and resilience in South Florida. The symposium and five related community events introduced Miami’s rich cultural landscape.

 

What happens outside the art scene inspires many of today’s curators, filmmakers and artists. They mine the conceptual depth of personal and communal rituals and routines. Community gardens, shared ride systems, public processionals, weathervanes, home improvement projects, live streaming radio and selfies on the internet are just a few of the subjects and sites of their research, commentary and engagement. Projects that elevate our view of the everyday reveal life as an art form—translating the mundane into the extraordinary.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Camionnette Chérie,  original sound by Claudette et Ti Pièrre; TET CHAJE, mix by Michelange Quay; David Walters, Mesi Bondye; Yosvany Terry, Conga Reversible

Related Episodes:

Marcus Gammel (2107), Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, Sounds of Miami Art Week (2016), New Performance Art (2016), Cesar Cornejo (2015), Jllian Mayer (2014)

Related Links:

Giscard Bouchotte 

Tap-Tap Chéri  

Sculptors of Grand Rue, Haiti 

Ghetto Biennale 

Jeremy Deller 

Jeremy Deller, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007/2017 

Cesar Cornejo 

rootoftwo

Whithervanes 

EN MAS’

Tide by Side 

Clair Tancons

documenta 14 Public Radio

Jillian Mayer

400 Nudes

Today’s conversation continues our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, writers, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to introduce episodes from our archive.

Based in the United States, art historian and curator Deborah Barkun is Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Director of Museum Studies at Ursinus College, outside Philadelphia. Her research centers on the social dynamics of artistic collaboration. Barkun is contributing to our stories from the 58th Venice Art Biennale. Here, she introduces our conversation with Ivorian artist Joana Choumali, first released on April 30, 2018.

Deborah Barkun writes: I am excited to introduce this reprise of “Joana Choumali Embroiders Empathy.” I feel especially connected to this episode, as I was present for Cathy’s first interview with Choumali in the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Choumali spoke poignantly about African emigration and the emptiness it leaves in the hearts of loved ones left behind. Her hand-embroidered and collaged photographic diptychs depict this global migration. Loose threads left dangling from the works speak to a sense of ongoing longing.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photography: Deborah Barkun

Related Episodes: Joana Choumali Embroiders Empathy, Sounds of the 57th Venice Art Biennale, Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief, Lisa Reihana on Reversing the Colonial Gaze, Monument to Decay: Israeli Pavilion in Venice, Mark Bradford Connects Art with the Real World

Related Links: Joana Choumali, Ivory Coast Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale, Dak’Art 2018

What does it mean to make art collectively? How does art speak to our shared destiny? Where does sand intersect with art and community?

In the studio at Jolt Radio, with Miami-based curators and artists, we speak of art at the intersection of sand, smells and social behavior. Curator Quinn Harrelson and artist Troy Simmons introduce Collectivity, a site-specific exhibition at the Bakehouse Art Complex that explores the power of the individual and the collective. Curator Marie Vickles and artist Geovanna Gonzalez talk about the role of destiny and poetry in the exhibition Visions of the Future at Little Haiti Cultural Complex. Artist Misael Soto, the first-ever Art in Public Life resident for the City of Miami Beach, explains how he's curating and activating Sand, just steps from the shore in Collins Park.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound: Domingo Castillo, Tropical Malaise, Martin Jackson, It's really very easy, Misael Soto, Flood Relief 

Related Episodes: 2018 Creative Time Summit in Miami, Art and the Rising Sea, Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti, Where Art Meets Activism, Where Art Meets Cultural History

Related Links: Bakehouse Art Complex, Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Sand, ArtCenter/South Florida, The Bass Museum of Art, Creative Time

Today, capitalism, aka the free market, is linked to trade wars, suffocating student debt, entire countries gone bankrupt, burgeoning virtual currencies and coded security systems. What role can art and artists play in this wildly unbalanced economy? In abandoned bank buildings, failed urban development projects and public squares, we discover artists and their communities in the U.S., Western Europe, South America and Greece, taking on the challenge—as whistle blowers, catalysts, educators, money makers, evangelicals and documentarians.  

Featured in this episode: Occupy Museums/Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fisher; Fictilis/Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau; Museum des Kapitalismus/Julian and Janosz; Musée du Capitalisme/Samuel Hus and Chloé Villain; La Torre de David/José Luis Blondet, Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría; Bank Job/Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn; Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound: Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría; Bank Job; Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir; Contributing Producer: Anamnesis Audio for Reverend Billy Segment

Related Episodes: Art and the Rising Sea; Art Sparking Social Engagement; Where Art Meets Activism; Art of the Everyday; Occupy Museums on Artists and Debt Related Links: Occupy Museums; Museum of Capitalism: Fictilis; Museum des Kapitalismus; Musée du Capitalisme; Bank Job; Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir; SITE Santa Fe SITElines: Casa tomada

The Art of the Eclipse celebrates the phenomenal event that unfolded before our eyes on August 21, 2017, and explores the connection between art and science at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, in Miami, Florida. Dr. Jorge Perez-Gallego, Curator of Astronomy at the Frost Science Museum calls in to tell stories of his eclipse-viewing adventure outside Madras, Oregon. We share the conversations we recorded that day at the Frost with museum president Frank Steslow and team members Monique Gonzalez and Everett Fraser Ford, journalists Andrea Yanez and Patricia Herrera, and Carl Hildebrand and Evelyne Zapata from the Miami art community. A special feature of this show: sound tracks from films by Delphino Huang, John Akre and Michael J. Ruiz-Unger screened at the Science Art Cinema Film Festival on August 31, 2017.

We broadcast this live streaming program from the studio at Jolt Radio on September 6, 2017, just days before Hurricane Irma made landfall on Florida’s west coast.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

 

This July, NASA invites us to celebrate the historic 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission. Looking up to the sun, moon and stars, we revisit a radio show designed to revolve around the 2017 total solar eclipse. Listeners will learn that the weather threw our program slightly off course. That's because the first time we streamed The Art of the Eclipse on Jolt Radio was September 6, 2017, four days before Hurricane Irma hit Florida. The southern coast was in evacuation mode.

 

Our show begins with a flashback to 2013, in Berlin, when we recorded a conversation at the intersection of art and science in the control tower at the abandoned Tempelhof airport, in Berlin. German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis demonstrates one of her gravity experiments and explains how she raises moon geese.

 

We share our field recordings and interviews from August 21, 2017, when thousands of people came together to experience the solar event at Miami's Frost Museum of Science. Dr. Jorge Perez-Gallego, then curator of astronomy at the Museum, calls in to tell stories of his eclipse-viewing adventure outside Madras, Oregon. For the finale, we introduce a selection from the short films screened at the Frost's Science Art Cinema Film Festival in summer 2017.

 

Sound Editors: 2017 Guney Ozsan, 2019 Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Frost Science Museum, Delphino Huang, John Akre, Michael J. Ruiz-Unger

 

Related Episodes: Studio Drift Drones Send Up Swarming Ode to Apollo at 50, Art and Our Uncertain Future, Art of the Eclipse, Agnes Meyer Brandis on Science and Creativity

 

Related Links: NASA, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, Delphino Huang, John Akre, Michael J. Ruiz-Unger, Science Art Cinema Film Festival

 

On this live streaming radio program, we consider how artists, curators, architects and writers are responding to climate change in South Florida. King tides, flooding and eroding beaches are now part of everyday life. Our guests reveal how the rising sea has inspired two artist residency programs and an upcoming exhibition.

Natalia Zuluaga, Artistic Director at ArtCenter/South Florida, introduces the Center’s new Art in Public Life residency, a year-long opportunity for the selected artist to participate in shaping in the City of Miami Beach resiliency plan. She also talks about the exhibition Intertidal that imagines Miami's intertidal zone future, as a city above water at low tide, and flooded at high tide. 

 Also in studio, Ombretta Agro, Simon Faithfull, Will Rey, and Gustavo Oviedo share their roles in ARTSail, an ArtCenter residency exploring the Miami waterways, the South Florida coastline and the Keys. Our field recordings with recent ArtSail residents Blanca de la Torre and Mark Lee Koven to complete the picture of the floating residency's first year.

Special audio features: Archival Feedback, Stormtrack and Gustavo Oviedo, Boatski Tours

Art with a Sense of Place considers creative projects that respond to a physical space and those that react to or embrace a historic moment, a cultural environment, a socio-political tension, or a psychological space.

Emerging in the 1960s, site-specific art sought to transcend what was perceived as the over-curated, almost clinical context of the art museum. Artists rebelled by creating their own exhibition sites (Agnes Denes brought a Wheatfield to a New York City landfill). Some flaunted the rules of museum installation with live interventions (Joseph Beuys lived in a Soho gallery with a live coyote).

Our series of episodes on site sensitivity brings a broader range of cultural production into the conversation, exposing new ways of seeing place, space, and site in contemporary art.

Art with a Sense of Place, Part I, highlights conversations featured in the second issue of the Fresh Art International Smart Guide. We produce the guide as a series of downloadable pdfs. Each issue delves into a different theme—through select episodes, transcriptions and links to research that informs our podcast.

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

 

Related episodes: Joan Jonas, Jason Moran, Janet Biggs, Sarah Hobbs, Tameka Norris, Stephen Vitiello

Related link: Smart Guide

Art with a Sense of Place considers creative projects that respond to a physical space and those that react to or embrace a historic moment, a cultural environment, a socio-political tension, or a psychological space.

Emerging in the 1960s, site-specific art sought to transcend what was perceived as the over-curated, almost clinical context of the art museum. Artists rebelled by creating their own exhibition sites (Agnes Denes brought a Wheatfield to a New York City landfill). Some flaunted the rules of museum installation with live interventions (Joseph Beuys lived in a Soho gallery with a live coyote).

Our series of episodes on site sensitivity brings a broader range of cultural production into the conversation, exposing new ways of seeing place, space, and site in contemporary art.

Art with a Sense of Place, Part II, highlights conversations featured in the second issue of the Fresh Art International Smart Guide. We produce the guide as a series of downloadable pdfs. Each issue delves into a different theme—through select episodes, transcriptions and links to research that informs our podcast.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related episodes: Agustina Woodgate, Louis Grachos, Adam Schreiber, Tania Bruguera

Related link: Smart Guide, Issue 02 Art with a Sense of Place

Curators and artists whose passion is social engagement share their experiments in relational aesthetics—participatory performances, interactive installations, community events, and inside/outside exhibitions—invite viewers to become co-creators, to take ownership in the creative process.

Curators Jochen Volz (São Paulo Biennial, Live Uncertainty, 2016), Susan Cross (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Material World, 2010-2011, The Workers, 2011-2012), James Voorhies (Bureau of Open Culture, MASS MoCA, The Workers) and Stephanie Smith (SMART Museum of Art, FEAST, 2012, and Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, Declaration, 2018) share their perspectives, as do artists William Pope.L (Baile, 2016), Theaster Gates (Soul Food Pavilion, 2012) and Marinella Senatore (Estman Radio, ongoing).

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio:

William Pope.L, Baile, São Paulo Biennial There Is Only Light (We Do Not Know What To Do With Other Worlds) performance-reading, July 2011, MASS MoCA. Produced by Bureau for Open Culture Theaster Gates, FEAST, SMART Museum of Art, University of Chicago Marinella Senatore and Estman Radio recording, courtesy Marinella Senatore and Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Contemporary Art

Related Links:

Live Uncertainty, Material World, The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility, FEAST: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Declaration, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Exhibition Award, Exhibitions on the Cusp

Are we the last real humans? We consider this question in a conversation about art as a speculative science. Join us to ponder our uncertain future.   Laura Randall, scholar in residence at the Rubell Family Collection, shares the dark side of the exhibition Still Human, introducing artists who imagine a world where we never die and wonder if mayonnaise is alive. With curator Joey Orr (now at the Spencer Museum of Art), artist Andrew Yang contemplates our place in the cosmos and talks about how much sand it takes to build an homage to Carl Sagan inside the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Listen for the sound of your possible future in audio tracks from projects by artists Jon Rafman, Cécile B. Evans and Andrew Yang.   Related exhibitions: Post Human, 1992, Deitch Projects; In the Holocene, 2012, MIT List Center, What Absence Is Made Of, 2017-2018, Hirshhorn   Featured Sound: Jon Rafman, Poor Magic, courtesy the artist and the Rubell Family Collection; Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, courtesy the artist and Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Andrew Yang, White Noise, courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago  

Jamaican-born artist Nadine Hall introduces Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, a personally significant episode from her Fresh Art playlist. First published on July 26, 2017, this segment reveals the complex and diverse influence of the Caribbean on contemporary art.

Franklin Sirmans, director of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, talks about the pivotal role of art from the Global South in the triennial art exhibition known as Prospect New Orleans. Prospect returns to the Crescent City in November 2020.

Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator founder and curator Rosie Gordon Wallace and Miami-affiliated artists describe how the Caribbean is embedded in their work. In November 2019, DVCAI spotlights the region’s cultural impact in the collaborative exhibition Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City, at George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, in Washington, DC.

Nadine Hall writes: The Diaspora Vibe episode from the Fresh Art archive is my favorite—a dream-come-true story to share. Cathy Byrd recorded a conversation with me in summer 2017, just before I traveled outside my homeland Jamaica for the first time. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator had invited me to Miami, to spend one month at Fountainhead Residency. Two years later, I’ve returned to South Florida. I’m here to pursue an MFA in sculpture at the University of Miami, with a three-year scholarship. In this episode, you’ll hear my voice, and the story behind the first step in my incredible journey.

 

Sound Editor: 2019 Anamnesis Audio, 2017 Guney Ozsan | Special Audio: Los Jaichackers, Jorge Martillo, Ashley Teamer

 

Related Episodes: Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, Live from Trinidad: Where Digital Culture Thrives, Live from Dominican Republic with Tilting Axis, Miami’s Caribbean Arts Remix, Art of the Everyday, Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots

 

Related Links: Franklin Sirmans, Perez Art Museum, Miami, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Asser Saint-Val, Gerard Caliste, Ashley Teamer, Nadine Hall, Los Jaichackers, Jorge Martillo

 

Today’s episode is part of our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to share episodes from their Fresh Art International playlists.

Born and based in Miami, Eddie Arroyo is a landscape painter who documents residential and commercial structures that urban development will soon erase. He chronicles the loss of a community's cultural, social, and economic fabric. In his photo-based practice, Arroyo hopes to spark conversations about prosperity and accountability within the American social system. He’s a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. Here, he introduces The Art of Capitalism, a 60-minute segment released in 2018.

Arroyo writes: Over the years, Fresh Art International has contributed to Art World discourse through an informative, relevant and challenging podcast. One notable episode, The Art of Capitalism, was posted in August 2018. Right now, in what is being framed as a period of economic prosperity, this episode invites meditation regarding “the free market,” with projects such as the Occupy Museum collective which explores the financial consequences of debt - even going so far as hosting a “Debt Fair.” In London, an artist couple opened their own bank to print money, with plans to blow up a van filled with loan debt as a part of their “Bank Job” series. And there is Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping who preaches the word to his growing congregation and anyone who wishes to join.

About The Art of Capitalism: Today, capitalism, also known as “the free market,” is linked to trade wars, massive student debt, entire countries going bankrupt, burgeoning virtual currencies and coded security systems. What does art have to say about our careening global economy?

In abandoned bank buildings, failed urban development projects and public squares, we discover artists and their communities in the U.S., Western Europe, South America and Greece, taking on the challenge—as whistle blowers, catalysts, educators, money makers, evangelicals and documentarians.

Featured in this episode: Occupy Museums/Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fisher; Fictilis/Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau; Museum des Kapitalismus/Julian and Janosz; Musée du Capitalisme/Samuel Hus and Chloé Villain; La Torre de David/José Luis Blondet, Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría; Bank Job/Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn; Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound: Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría; Bank Job; Reverend Billy | Contributing Producer: Anamnesis Audio for Reverend Billy Segment

Related Episodes: Poetry, Art and Community Justice, The Art of Breaking the Bank, The Art of Capitalism, Where Art Meets Activism, Occupy Museums: Artists and Debt

Related Links: Decolonize This Place, Occupy Museums, Museum of Capitalism: Fictilis, Museum des Kapitalismus, Musée du Capitalisme, Bank Job, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, SITE Santa Fe SITElines: Casa tomada

 

This episode is part of our Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, cultural producers and other listeners to share favorites from the archive.

Based in Lisbon, German born artist Regina Frank has shown her work in New York, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo, among other cities globally. In recent projects, she explored environmental issues in performative installations at the Museum of Art Architecture and Technology, Lisbon, and BioArt 2018, Seoul, South Korea.

Here, Regina Frank introduces our conversation with renowned video and performance artist Joan Jonas, an episode first released on June 5, 2012.

Revisiting this episode is a moment to celebrate the latest chapter in Joan Jonas’s remarkable career. She represented the United States at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. In 2019, Jonas returns to Venice with an immersive, multimedia installation. Moving Off the Land II is the first public project in Ocean Space, a new global oceanic center in the restored Church of San Lorenzo.

Regina Frank writes: I have been listening to Fresh Art since Cathy Byrd launched the podcast in 2011. One episode that I love features Cathy’s conversation with artist Joan Jonas. In 1991, I met Joan Jonas for the first time. She gave a lecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin. What a wonderful artist! I am fascinated and inspired by her creative approach to combining video, performance and drawing. She saw my work and suggested that I speak to the new museum of contemporary art in New York. They gave me their window and the cover of their newsletter and catalogue a few months later, which marked the beginning of my own career, in 1992. While I was in Venice for the 58th Art Biennale, I spent hours exploring Joan Jonas’s great project in the Church of San Lorenzo. I watched every video from beginning to end.

Sound Editor 2019 Anamnesis Audio | 2012 Leo Madriz

Special Audio: Jason Moran, “He Takes His Coat and Leaves”

Feature photo: Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II, Ocean Space, Venice, 2019, courtesy TBA21 Academy

Related Episodes: Joan Jonas on The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, Art with a Sense of Placed, Part One, Regina Frank on Performing at the Intersection of Art and Technology

Related Links: Joan Jonas, Ocean Space

 

Join us as we explore South Florida residency programs. We begin with conversations recorded during our 2015 visit to the Studios of Key West. Learn about the Knight Arts Challenge grants for residency programs and more, from Director of Arts Bahia Ramos. Executive Director Deborah Mitchell introduces Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE). Meet past fellow and musician Jose Elias and hear our field recording with photographer Adam Nadel, co-creator of the exhibition Getting the Water Right.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition,  University of Miami students Diana Borras and Kurt Gessler discover sacred land hiding in plain sight at the heart of Miami’s business district. Carib Tribal Queen Catherine Hummingbird Ramirez has come to meet them at the  sacred Native American site known as the Miami Circle. Ramirez has come to share her concerns about the ongoing impact of urban development.

The Miami Circle: In 1998, an archaeological investigation at the mouth of the Miami River uncovered evidence of a 2,000 year-old Native American site on land once occupied by the Brickell Point Apartments.  Now known as the Miami Circle, the Tequesta site consists of a circle over 35 feet in diameter with about 20 basins and hundreds of smaller postholes. Many consider the Miami Circle a North American “Stonehenge.”

Producers: Diana Borras and Kurt Gessler/Miami Moves Me, Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Miami Circle, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Culture Making in Downtown Miami

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Tequesta Artifacts, Miami Circle, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide

Artist Bill Fontana has a long-time relationship with sound and space. He's known for relocating sounds to create site-specific installations around the world.

Fontana describes his practice as "composition by listening." In this episode, we talk about what has inspired and informed his public art projects through the decades—from his 1981 Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns in San Francisco, to his 2018 Sonic Dreamscapes in Miami Beach.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Bill Fontana

Related episodes: Inside Miami's Sound Chamber; Stephen Vitiello on Sound Art

Related links: Bill Fontana, City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places

What does it mean to be Black in 21st century America? The expression of Blackness in art has a history of intricate connections to civil rights and social movements. In the United States and abroad, painting and drawing, filmmaking and photography, performance and protest have long represented diverse creative perspectives on the volatile subject of race and identity in this country.

Today, we hear from curators and artists whose work directly engages with race and American identity. Individually and collectively, they generate “freestyle” expressions of Blackness—revealing that no matter how history influences the Black cultural space, identity remains a fluid form in the hands of contemporary artists.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photos courtesy of featured artists and the Renaissance Society

Featured Audio: Thelma Golden at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Hamza Walker, Black Is, Black Ain't Symposium, Renaissance Society, Johanne Rahaman field recordings in South Florida, Theaster Gates at Katzen Arts Center, American University, Theaster Gates performs at Huguenot House in Kassel, Germany, for documenta 13, Sanford Biggers, BAM (For Michael), Fahamu Pecou, All that Glitters Ain't Goals, Amy Sherald at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago 

Related Episodes: Modern Black Portrait of Florida, Jefferson Pinder on Symbols of Power and Struggle, Theaster Gates on Meaning, Making and Reconciliation, Sanford Biggers on Time and the Human Condition, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Fahamu Pecou on Art x Hip-Hop

Related links: Thelma Golden, Studio Museum of Harlem, Freestyle, Hamza Walker, Black Is, Black Ain't, Johanne Rahaman, Jefferson Pinder, Theaster Gates, Sanford Biggers, Amy Sherald, Fahamu Pecou, Deborah Roberts

The BLCK Family, a Miami-based creative collective, fosters opportunities for individual artists to share their original music and poetry in intimate settings. They organize roving cultural experiences that range from occasional 'family dinners' to the monthly performance events they call Freedom Sessions. Motivated by the desire to connect communities, The BLCK Family manifesto is to encourage collaboration, foster creativity and manifest love—giving artists the chance to use sound to set themselves free.   Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: James Klynn, Frankie Midnight, Va, Inez Barlatier | Photography by Passion Ward and video documentation by Rashaud Michel courtesy The BLCK Family   Related Episodes: Borscht Film Festival, Buskerfest Miami, Miami's Caribbean Arts Remix Related Links: The BLCK Family, Najja Moon, James Klynn, Inez Barlatier, Frankie Midnight Freedom Session, Vá Freedom Session

On this live streaming show, we hold a post-mortem review of Borscht Diez (AKA Borscht 10), the Borscht Corporation‘s tenth film festival in Miami, Florida. Our conversations introduce the collective energy behind the city’s homegrown film culture and explore a selection of the 2017 festival screenings and special events.

With us in the studio at Jolt Radio, Miami, are local filmmakers Lucas Leyva, Jonathan David Kane and Nayib Estefan of the Secret Celluloid Society. The show also features a skype conversation with New York-based filmmaker Alexa Lim Haas whose newest animated short premiered at Borscht 10.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

In 2018, two years after Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, Dominica and St. Croix, Art in America published an exposé by San Juan born and based curator Marina Reyes Franco. Journalists were “comparing Puerto Rico to Greece, Detroit, and New York of the 1970s,” she wrote, “prompting myriad articles about its economic woes and the population’s resilience.” Central to many of these stories were inspiring narratives about artists and entrepreneurs responding to the crisis. In 2019, we journey to the island to record voices from the cultural scene. 

 

The artists we meet in San Juan convey the promise and pathos of this Caribbean island. In this segment of our Puerto Rico Rising series, four Puerto Rican creatives offer insight into how art can join forces with the strength of community to contemplate beauty and the paradoxes of everyday life. 

 

Voices in the episode: Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Michael Linares, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Llaima Sanfiorenzo

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio in Order of Appearance: Fabián Wilkins Vélez, Listening Session, 2019; Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Celaje (2020); Florian Dombois, Triple Instrument, 2019; Llaima Sanfiorenzo, Let the Beast Breathe, 2020 and 1 sq foot of freedom, 2007

Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Resisting Paradise, Puerto Rico Rising—Radical Leaders, The Awakening, Juan Botta Makes One-Minute Movies in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto on the Architecture of Connecting Communities, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies

Related Links: Beta-Local, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Michael Linares, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Llaima Sanfiorenzo/Self Portrait Factory, Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, Marina Reyes Franco, ATLAS SAN JUAN: TROPICAL DEPRESSION, Art in America, Oct 1, 2018.

Today, we take you to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also known as SAIC. We’re here to meet participants in Imagining Tomorrow. The yearly experiential learning opportunity brings together students from schools in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Pakistan.

During each two-week seminar, they gather in a different host community to envision possible futures through design thinking. The clients are local organizations who ask the students to imagine solutions to real-life challenges—such as environmental sustainability and immigrant integration. 

Chicago-based artists Kirsten Leenaars and Laura Davis co-created this international project. A lecturer at SAIC, Leenaars introduces us to three students who have experienced Imagining Tomorrow in Utrecht, Netherlands and Karlsruhe, Germany. Their studies range from film, animation and video to architecture and fashion.

In our conversation, you’ll hear how in a range of cultural contexts, students and educators alike forge meaningful relationships and learn to navigate business and government protocols. Crossing international borders to collaborate and innovate, students bring creativity outside the classroom—engaging with communities and learning to lead. 

Related Episodes: Wayne State—Designing for Urban Mobility, OCAD University—Curating in the Digital Realm

Related Links: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Imagining Tomorrow, International Red Cross/the Netherlands, ZKM Center for Art and Media/Germany

Imagining Tomorrow is a two-week international seminar in which students from schools in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Pakistan come together to collaboratively address questions about future design thinking. They work with clients from international public and private organizations to propose interdisciplinary solutions to real-life issues. Participating schools: HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; SAIC, Chicago, USA; Karlshochschule International University, Karlsruhe, Germany; Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago will host the 2020 seminar.

Kirsten Leenaars, an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago, lectures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. She engages with individuals and communities to create participatory video and performance work. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through shared authorship, staging and improvisation. 

Laura Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in objects and craft. Her works both present their own histories but easily adapt to how Davis recontextualizes them. She wields and contradicts assumed archetypes of gendered roles, reimagining new relationships by creating handcrafted metal sculpture combined with gender specific readymade objects. Her interactions disrupt notions of value at the intersections of art, design and craft.    

The Student Edition began in 2019, with visits to art schools and universities in the United States and Canada, where we began recording voices of the future. In 2020, we present the first episodes in our Student Edition—conversations about creativity with emerging makers and producers. Given opportunities to explore and experiment, students are discovering how they can shape the world they live in. What issues and ideas spark their creative impulse?

Today is January 27, 2021. One week ago, we inaugurated new leaders in the United States. Many hope that President Joseph. Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris will cultivate an era of unity, democracy, and truth in this country. 

Multiple flashpoints complicated the year 2020. The relentless coronavirus pandemic, accelerating discrimination against people of color, heightened climate emergencies, and the imploding global economy had a intense polarizing effect on the electorate.

Kamala Harris, the first African-American and Asian American to become Vice President, is also the first woman to be given this tremendous opportunity. As she steps into a crucial role of responsibility, Harris inspires this episode. 

What part can creativity play in such turbulent times? 

We speak to six women artists and curators responding to the challenges of the past year with renewed resolve. Strengthening their engagement with vital issues and ideas, each one positions herself in service to social justice. Future episodes will reveal more about their individual awakenings.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: When We Gather, courtesy Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and collaborators; Whitewash, courtesy artist Nadine Valcin; Celaje, courtesy artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente; All water has a perfect memory, courtesy artist Bahar Behbahani; Drip in water tunnel, New York City, courtesy artist Mary Mattingly; "This Earth,” by Susan Griffin, courtesy Andrea Bowers and performance participants 

Related Episodes: International Curators Champion Creative Resilience, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, Where Art Meets Activism, Creative Time Summit Miami 2018, Bahar Behbahani on Politics and Persian Gardens, New Point of View at Venice Art Biennale, Mary Mattingly on the Art of Human Relationships, Andrea Bowers on Art and Activism

Related Links: Bahar Behbahani, Andrea Bowers, This Earth, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, When We Gather, Mary Mattingly, Public Water, Andrea Fatona, The State of Blackness, Marina Reyes Franco, Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Featured Voices in Order of Appearance

 

Born in Cuba and based in Nashville, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons teaches at Vanderbilt University. A dream led her to invite collaborators to celebrate all that Kamala Harris represents. Performance and poetry in the new art film When We Gather embody their collective hope and imagination.

 

Dr. Andrea Fatona is a Toronto-based curator and scholar who teaches in the graduate program at Ontario College of Art and Design University. For decades, she has sought to remedy the absence of Black visual art from critical writing, art archives and other avenues of representation. Whitewash, Nadine Valcin’s performance video about the history of slavery in Canada, is featured on Fatona's website: The State of Blackness.

 

Born and based in San Juan, Marina Reyes Franco is curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. She talks about the Museum’s powerful new partner and introduces the metaphoric exhibition she will present this spring. In 2020, Reyes Franco took the time to support artist friend Sofía Gallisá Muriente in her creation of a new film. Sited on the southwest coast of Puerto Rico, Celaje is an elegy to the death of the Puerto Rican colonial project and the sedimentation of disasters on the island.

 

Water channels, fountains, roses and pools are elemental to the legendary Persian garden. Iranian-American artist Bahar Behbahani has been investigating the garden’s histories for years. In 2019, she created her first garden-inspired public art project at Wave Hill in the Bronx. In 2021, the artist aims to break ground on a purposeful Persian garden in Manhattan.

 

New York-based artist Mary Mattingly has always been concerned with sustainability, creating lyric environments that meet the basic needs of water, food, and shelter. Her latest project concerns the invisible infrastructure of public water in the city she calls home. Mattingly is diving deep—her urban case study exposes inequities that limit access to clean drinking water everywhere. 

 

Early 2020 found Los Angeles based artist Andrea Bowers joining other women to read and record the poem “This Earth,” by Susan Griffin. Studying the spiritual origins of eco-feminism was among her solitary pursuits last year. When the pandemic slowed her activist projects, Bowers turned to re-examine how and why she makes art. 

American artist Charles Gaines has been delving into philosophy, abstraction and mathematics to address politics and race since the 1970s. In August 2019, Gaines receives the 60th Annual Edward MacDowell Medal, an award celebrating his high achievements in visual art, musical composition and performance, and his influence as a teacher, writer and curator. An artist whose work is described as formulating the DNA of the conceptual movement, Gaines is a key figure in contemporary art history.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Gaines was the first African American accepted into the School of Art and Design MFA program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He now lives and works in Los Angeles. He’s been a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts, for more than three decades.

As Charles Gaines prepares for high profile exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, through 2022, we reflect on what his art says to the world. Resolutely abstract in his practice, Charles Gaines refuses traditional representation—resisting both dominant racial stereotypes, and pressure from within the black community. His gridworks and manifestos deliberately counter deep-seated assumptions about the forms that nature and culture, art and music should take. Gaines shows us how art can embody conceptual, aesthetic, and personal freedom.

This episode features conversations recorded with Charles Gaines in 2015, 2017 and 2019.

About the MacDowell Medal: A Haven for Artists since 1907, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, was the first artist residency program established in the United States. Each year, the MacDowell Medal recognizes one individual for outstanding contributions to American arts and culture. Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Sonny Rollins, and Toni Morrison are among past honorees.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Charles Gaines, Manifestos performance, 56th Venice Art Biennale

Related Episodes: Mark Bradford Connects Art with the Real World, Contemporary Art and the Black Imagination

Related Links: Charles Gaines | MacDowell Honors Visual Artist‎, Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, Charles Gaines, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Charles Gaines, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Biennale Arte 2015, All the World's Futures

Here's one of the art talk shows we hosted during UNTITLED, Art on Miami Beach, December 2016, via Wynwood Radio. We’re thrilled to add our energy to an art fair that’s more of an international exhibition than any other we’ve encountered. In this segment, you'll hear host Cathy Byrd in conversation with Christie van der Haak, Sharon Aponte Misdea, and Silvia Barisione.  

Christie van der Haak is from The Hague, the Netherlands, studied design and fashion before becoming a painter interested in high color and decorative patterns. Her intricate and colorful patterns and designs are translated into tapestries and wall coverings, often creating immersive environments.

Sharon Aponte Misdea is Deputy director of collections and curatorial affairs at the Wolfsonian, dedicates herself to the preservation and interpretation of the modern design museum’s collection.

Silvia Barisione is a curator at The Wolfsonian whose research focuses primarily on 20th century design and prewar Italian architecture. She is curator of the Modern Dutch Design exhibition at The Wolfsonian.

The Commuter Biennial aims to activate unseen margins of metro Miami. Local curators Laura Randall and Courtney Levine have organized a set of art experiences for those who spend hours navigating the city in cars, busses and trains. Over the span of four months, ten public art projects will pop up around this suburban landscape.

Two of the participating artists join Randall and Levine to introduce us to The Commuter Biennial. Artist Lily Martina Lee lives and works in Boise, Idaho. Lee’s art juxtaposes intimacy and anonymity—pointing out how forensic crime scene investigations have become embedded in our everyday reality. For her commuter-centered project, she creates public memorials in locations throughout Miami Dade County, where unidentified human remains were found. Since 2005, New York based artist Marie Lorenz has navigated waterways in her handmade boats designed to optimize tidal currents. Her passengers are privileged with intimate experiences on the water. For the roving biennial, she brings her Tide and Current Taxi to Miami.

Listen to this episode to hear the voice of positive thinking. Optimistic about the potential for art to transform the grind of suburban life, the tedium of public transit and the boring daily drive, the Commuter Biennial aspires to draw our gaze from the center to the fringe—suggesting that art belongs to everyone, everywhere, across metropolitan Miami. 

Related Episodes: Public Art Meets Poetry, Public Art Hopscotches Across Buenos Aires, Art of the Everyday, Creativity in Miami’s Public Realm

 

Related Link: Commuter Biennial

Miami Marine Stadium inspires this tale of modernist architecture and Biscayne Bay, of speedboats and rock stars, of skateboarding, street art and a storm named Andrew. Advocates and artists, architects and restoration specialists tell the story. 

We begin with a flashback to our 2016 episode with dancer choreographer Hattie Mae Williams. Her creative intervention at the stadium is just one example of how the site has beckoned artists for decades. Fast forward to 2018. Miami’s International Boat Show has come the marine stadium’s home on Virginia Key for the third year in a row. The stadium is now in the first phase of a complete restoration. Don Worth, one of the founders of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, talks about the ten years of activism that led to this moment. The stadium's original architect Hilario Candela, restoration architect Richard Heisenbottle, conservation specialists Rosa Lowinger and Kelly Ciociola explain the restoration process. Among local artists behind the 200 layers of paint that now cover the concrete venue, Hox and Abstrk voice their support for the stadium's face-lift. Over the next three years, the legendary venue will come back to life, reclaiming its identity as a top destination for cultural experiences in Miami.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio from Concrete Paradise exhibition at Coral Gables Museum, courtesy of Little Gables Group | Feature photograph by Diana Larrea

Bringing local creatives into the studio at Jolt Radio, Miami, we dig into contemporary art and the black imagination. Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver sets the tone in a conversation we recorded about her exhibition project: Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. We expand the dialogue to include introduce artists, filmmakers and curators working with black art, film and collecting in Miami.

In the Studio: Filmmakers Jamilah Sabur, Founding Director of Prizm Art Fair Mikhaile Solomon, ArtCenter/South Florida Artistic Director Natalia Zuluaga and Artist Domingo Castillo. Call in: Amir George, filmmaker and co-founder of Black Radical Imagination.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

Our radio show on contemporary black portraiture explores The Dandy Lion Project, a traveling exhibition project featuring the images of emerging photographers and filmmakers from various regions around the African Diaspora. You’ll hear from Amy Sherald on Black Art and New Racial Narratives before a live audience at moniquemeloche gallery in Chicago. In studio, The Dandy Lion Project Founder and CuratorShantrelle Patrice Lewis and visual artist Kia Dyson talk about the Dandy Lion exhibition now on view at the Lowe Museum, Miami. Calling in from Atlanta, artist and scholar Fahamu Pecou joins our conversation about black portraiture.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

Philadelphia-based art historian Deborah Barkun talks about the pleasure and critical thinking that she discovers each time she explores the Venice Art Biennale and collateral events. Through her eyes, we understand that the venerated exhibition never fails to create a constellation of art encounters—always stimulating the senses and challenging the mind, always offering a glimpse into our contemporary psyche. 

58th Venice Art Biennale:

For the 2019 international art exhibition, London-based American curator Ralph Rugoff chose the title May You Live in Interesting Times. This is a phrase of English invention that has long been mistakenly cited as an ancient Chinese curse. The words ‘interesting times’ invoke periods of uncertainty, crisis and turmoil. Rugoff invited 79 artists from around the world who, in his words, “challenge existing habits of thought and open up our readings of objects and images, gestures and situations…entertaining multiple perspectives…holding in mind seemingly contradictory and incompatible notions, and juggling diverse ways of making sense of the world.”

The 2019 exhibition includes 89 National Participations in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the historic city center of Venice. Four countries are participating for the first time: Dominican Republic, Ghana, Madagascar, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Twenty-one Collateral Events taking place across the city widen the diversity of voices that characterizes the Biennale.

Read Deborah Barkun’s posts from the 58th Venice Art Biennale on instagram @freshartintl.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio recorded in Venice May-June 2019

Romani Embassy performance by Delaine Le Bass, Music by Santino Spinelli

Related Episodes: Art Historian Playlist: Deborah Barkun Listens to Joana Choumali, Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief, Mark Bradford Connects Art with the Real World, Lisa Reihana on Reversing the Colonial Gaze, Monument to Decay: Israeli Pavilion in Venice

Related Links: Venice Art Biennale 

Related Images: Fresh VUE: 58th Venice Art Biennial, Fresh Vue: Venice Art Biennale 2017

Conversations with contributors to the book: Artist as Culture Producer

 Today’s conversations expand on the definition of the word ‘artist.’’ During Miami Art Week, artist and educator Sharon Louden, with her frequent collaborator Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic, introduce the second book in Louden’s trilogy dedicated to Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. Inside New York’s Strand Bookstore, we meet a few of the artists who contributed essays to The Artist as Culture Producer. In their first-hand stories, they share the personal and professional value of creativity. 

We recorded this episode inside the tent of Untitled art fair during Miami Art Week, and at the Strand Bookstore in New York, we catch up with a few of the artist contributors. In their first-hand stories, we hear the personal and professional value of expanding the practice of contemporary art.

Related episodes: Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Brigada Puerta de Tierra, Theaster Gates, Marinella Senatore, Koki Tanaka.

Related Links:

Chloe Bass  Michael Scoggins  Shinique Smith Brett Wallace 

Today, we take you to meet the creative hive that's transforming the cultural landscape of Tampa, Florida. While the coastal city may still be best known for its cigar-making history and vulnerability to rising sea levels, we discover an animated art scene. This is where new and established studios, public art projects, dynamic DIY galleries, avant-garde festivals, and networked community hubs are inventing fresh opportunities for public engagement with contemporary art.

Voices (alpha order): Janina Awai, Wendy Babcox, Neal Bender, Carrie Boucher, Devon Brady, Warren Cockerham, Liz Dimmit, Bridget and Henry Elmer, Rebecca Flanders, Mitzi Gordon, Sarah Howard, Noelle Mason, Tracy Midulla, Margaret Miller, Libbi Ponce, Jenn Ryan Miller, Gary Schmitt, Bosco Sodi, Jake Troyli, Christian Viveros-Fauné

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio Courtesy of Wendy Babcox, Meghan Lock and Noisy Womxn; Kalup Linzy and FMoPA; JaTovia Gary, Kristin Reeves and FLEX FEST; Devon Brady and The Echo Quilt

Tempus Projects supported, in part, this episode.

Related Episodes: Live from the Everglades, Part One and Part Two, Art and the Rising Sea, Modern Portrait of Black Florida

Related Links: Tempus Projects, The Echo Quilt, University of South Florida Institute for Research in Art, Bosco Sodi, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Parallelogram Gallery, Quaid Gallery, Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, St. Pete Women's Collective, SPACEcraft

About Tempus Projects: Tempus Projects is an alternative space situated in a storefront on Florida Avenue in the South Seminole Heights district of Tampa, Florida. A nonprofit organization operates the space as a way to nurture established and emerging local, national and international artists working in all media. Tempus originates, organizes and hosts exhibitions, events and special projects, to engage the Tampa Bay community through the visual arts. This home-grown cultural initiative has energized the district’s emergence as a unique and creative destination.

In Miami, Florida, we take you to meet cultural producers leading the way in local collaborative place making. Five Miami-based artists and an art archivist have come together to energize Dimensions Variable (DV), a new contemporary art space they're animating with artist studios, exhibitions, events and special projects. In this gathering place for art and culture, they aim to spark a dialogue about collective creativity as a way of life.

Voices: Dimensions Variable founders Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova and Frances Trombly, DV collaborators Juan Pablo Garza, Laura Marsh, Anita Sharma and Magnus Sigurdarson, and DV's first 2019 visiting artist Luz Carabaño

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Public Art Meets Poetry in O, Miami, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity, Miami's Caribbean Arts Remix, Culture Making in Downtown Miami, Sharon Louden on The Artist as Culture Producer

 

Related Link: Dimensions Variable

In 2018, when the annual Creative Time Summit unfolds in Miami, we’re thrilled to participate. On Archipelagoes and Other Imaginaries: Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World brings together artists, thinkers, activists, and cultural producers whose practices stimulate change through planetary thinking.

The nearby Caribbean Archipelago serves as the perfect context within which to question colonial and postcolonial ways of seeing and thinking. The Summit delves into Miami’s historical connection to the Caribbean and, by extension, to Latin America and the entire world.

Voices, in order of appearance: Justine Ludwig, Fredo Rivera, Edwige Danticat, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Daniela Ortiz, Colibrí Sanfiorenzo-Barnhard, Brigada Puerta de Tierra, Houston Cypress, Roc LaSeca, Edwige Danticat

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Live Performance Audio, in order of appearance: Drag en la Frontera, Samuel Tommie, Daniela Ortiz, Krudas Cubensi

Related Episodes: Where Art Meets Activism, LIVE from Dominican Republic with Tilting Axis, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies

Related Link: Creative Time

Creative Time, the force behind ambitious public art projects in New York City and beyond, takes its annual summit to Miami in 2018. We invite Creative Time director Justine Ludwig to talk about the focus of this year's convening.

On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World is the poetic title and subject of the 2018 Summit, with the idea of coalition as a central theme. Thinkers, dreamers and doers working at the intersection of art and politics gather to consider issues ranging from immigration and borders to climate realities, notions of intersectional justice, gentrification and tourism as an enabler for neocolonialism.

A portal to the Caribbean, Latin America and the entire world, Miami is the perfect context for such conversations. The City's creative community is ready—not only to share local challenges and their own site-sensitive initiatives, but also to welcome fresh perspectives on how art and activism might address these global concerns.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Krudas Cubensi, Mi cuerpo es mio, Haus of Shame via Amal Kiosk, Brigada Puerta de Tierra, Nástio Mosquito, Hilário

Related Episodes: Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti, Art and the Rising Sea, The BLCK Family of Miami, Modern Portrait of Black Florida, Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, Caribbean Arts Remix Miami, Tania Bruguera on Art Activism, Cesar Cornejo on Architectural Intervention, Mary Mattingly on Human Relationships, Glexis Novoa on Cuba's Past, Live from Dominican Republic with Tilting Axis, Live from Trinidad: Where Digital Culture Thrives, Public Art and the Underline, Artist Residency in the Everglades, Art and the Environment at Deering Estates

Related Links: Creative Time, Creative Time Summit 2018, Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Creative Time Summit Miami is co-presented with Art in Public Places of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, with leading support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Come with us to explore creativity in the public realm through the lens of Miami’s Public Space Challenge, an annual grant opportunity that invites residents to propose creative projects for their neighborhoods. You’ll hear how art installations, architectural interventions, and inventive public performance projects can transform a parking space, a building, a park, and more.

Joining us in the studio at Jolt Radio, Miami: The Miami Foundation’s Stuart Kennedy, Principal of Plusurbia Design Juan Mullerat, Buskerfest Miami founders Amy C. San Pedro and Justin Trieger. Call-in: NEWT co-founder, Dejha Carrington.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

In this conversation, we talk about how the island country of Haiti has long inspired contemporary art, books and films and how the cultural complexity of immigrant communities is a creative force in South Florida. Come with us to the heart of Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood for a walk about with Carl Juste, a local cultural activist, photojournalist and artist whose family comes from Haiti and Cuba. Haitian-born writer Edwige Danticat introduces Foreigner's Home, a new film to premiere at the 35th Miami Film Festival. Miami-based curators Marie Vickles, Edouard Duval-Carrié and Tosha Grantham (with family ties to Greece and Africa, Haiti, Asia and America, respectively) talk about connecting cultural history to contemporary art in exhibitions at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex and share what sparked Visionary Aponte: Art & Black Freedom, the traveling exhibition that recently premiered in Miami. Cuban-born Lissette Mendez and Carl Juste share some of the stories behind the collective exhibition and book project Havana, Haiti and the annual Little Haiti Book Festival.

In this live streaming talk show on Jolt Radio, we explore the ways that Downtown Miami sparks creative interventions—how the city's cultural landscape inspires artists, curators and city developers based here.

In studio: Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Art + Design, Miami Dade College, on Living Together film and performance series and the Museum without Boundaries initiative, with sound tracks introducing upcoming performances by Carrie Mae Weems and Samora Pinderhughes.

Field Recordings: -Tour of the Cradle of Miami Civilization with artist writers Franky Cruz and Nathaniel Sandler, The Miami Rail Block By Block Initiative 2016 (with audio track excerpt from Dara Friedman's film Ishmael and the Well of Ancient Mysteries, 2014) -Conversation in Bayfront Park with Fabian De La Espriella, Miami Downtown Development Authority, and the creative team behind the January 2017 Biscayne Green Project

What does it mean to be a contemporary art curator in the 21st century? Perhaps subconsciously, it's about living up to the legacy of Harald Szeemann, a legendary art historian—acting on the impulse to experiment and introduce new ways of engaging with art. Follow us to Norway, where you'll meet a few of the curators gathering for the 2017 Congress of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, also known as IKT (Szeemann was a founding member in 1973). In conversations on how the environment, design technology, consumer culture and geopolitical histories inspire art, they reveal a shared interest in exposing artists’ site specific perspectives through collective exhibitions and publications.

Thale Fastvold and Tanja Thorjussen, the two Norwegian artist curators of Locus Publishing in Oslo tell us about a collective artist book project that investigates how we relate to nature. They introduce their newest venture: “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” Freek Lomme, director of Onomatopee Projects explains why he stages public interventions in the shopping district of Eindhoven, in The Netherlands. The sonic thread that connects these voices is the sound art of Norwegian artist Margrethe Pettersen.

Sound Editing: Anamnesis | Special Audio: Margrethe Pettersen, Living Land—Below as Above 

What does "creative resilience" mean for curators in the year 2019? 

One evening, we decide to find out. Setting up a temporary recording studio in a poolside cabana, at a Miami Beach hotel, we sit down with a dozen curators and cultural producers to document their stories. In this marathon recording session, you’ll hear curatorial strategies for engaging new communities, increasing the visibility of underrepresented artists, and addressing some of today's most pressing social, political and environmental challenges.

We recorded this special program when the annual Congress of the Association of International Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) took place in the United States for the first time. Curators from the U.S., Europe and the Caribbean gathered in Miami, Florida, to explore the contemporary art scene and participate in a symposium about art and resilience in the climate crisis.

Voices in the episode: (alpha order) Eva Asp, Bayardo Blandino, Aldeide Delgado, Yucef Merhi, Thale Fastvold and Tanja Torjussen, Michele Fiedler, O'Neil Lawrence, Lorie Mertes, Najja Moon, Marina Reyes Franco, Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: (in order of appearance) Spectres in Change: FoAM / Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney; The Quilt Performing Arts Group for Beyond Fashion exhibition, National Gallery of Jamaica; Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (Hacked!) 2000-2004; The BLCK Family Dinner

Related Episodes: Art and the Climate Crisis with IKT Miami, Art and the Rising Sea, Curating in a Time of Global Change: IKT Norway, Sounds of Contemporary Art in Norway with IKT

 

Related Links: International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, FoAM Spectres in Change, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (Hacked!) 2000-2004, National Gallery of Jamaica, Resisting Paradise, Locust Projects, The BLCK Family, Gävle Konstcentrum, International Cities of Refuge Network, SALA MAC / Contemporary Visual Arts Center of Women in the Arts in Honduras, Women Photographers International Archive, Locus Art

Today’s conversation is the first in our new Playlist series. We’re inviting artists, curators, architects, writers, filmmakers and cultural producers to introduce their favorite episodes from our archive.

From the Netherlands, curator, writer and arts producer Sasha Dees works internationally. An advisor to numerous festivals and arts venues, she’s known for encouraging artists to experiment with classical art forms. Her practice centers on creating new dialogues and forging collaborations across cultures, traditions, genders and art disciplines. Here, she introduces my conversation with Remy Jungerman, first released on September 18, 2014.

The Surinamese-Dutch artist talks about the influences of European modernism and Afro-religious aesthetics on his practice, and describes a public art he created in Morengo, his home town. A participating artist in Prospect.3, the 2014 international contemporary art exhibition in New Orleans, Jungerman showed his work a the Joan Mitchell Center from late October 2014, to January 2015. His art will be on view in the Dutch Pavilion at the 58th Venice Art Biennale.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Chris Quinlan, drum set and Evan Dyson, toad mating call

Sasha Dees writes: There are many podcasts I have enjoyed over the years since I was introduced to Cathy Byrd by [artist] Amy Sherald in 2012, but the episodes she made during her residency in Amsterdam are dear to my heart. My choice from the archive is the episode with artist Remy Jungerman. Five years after the podcast, he is selected for the Dutch Pavilion in the Venice Biennale. It has been a lot of work in Europe for non-white artists to conquer their rightful space within the art field. I am extremely proud of Remy, who worked consistently with great determination and passion, who kept investing in his own practice, and never veered off the path of being a professional artist or wavered from his artistic urgency. In 2019, presenting his work in the Venice Biennale is well deserved.

Related episodes: Franklin Sirmans on Prospect New Orleans, Remy Jungerman on European Modernism and Afro-Religious Aesthetics, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, Sasha Dees on Miss T — My American Dream

Related links: 58th Venice Art Biennale, Dutch Pavilion 2019

With six independent curators, we explore a growing trend in the field of contemporary art. We discover that the covid epidemic and a global economic recession have not weakened their resolve to navigate the field on their own terms. Viewing challenges as opportunities, these women are channeling their creative freedom into projects that maximize resources and engage new communities.

What sparked this story: In September 2022, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art welcomed more than 40 new members during IKT’s annual Congress in Kentucky. Most are independent curators. Listen to find out what motivated this shift.

Featuring: Monique Long, Juste Kostikovaite, Lindsey Cummins, Amethyst Rey Beaver, Sarah Burney, Claire Schneider

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Music: Danver County by Blue Dot Sessions

 

Related Episodes: International Curators Champion Creative Resilience, Curators Consider Climate Change, Curating in a Time of Global Change

Related Links: International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, Great Meadows Foundation, Monique Long, Juste Kostikovaite, Lindsey Cummins, Amethyst Rey Beaver, Sarah Burney, Claire Schneider, KMAC Museum, Benham School House Inn

Puerto Rico is an island steeped in contradictions—the idyllic tourist mecca is where unpredictable forces of nature, a stagnant economy, and a corrupt government complicate everyday life for locals.

 

After Hurricane Maria devastated Dominica, St. Croix and Puerto Rico in 2016, journalists compared Puerto Rico to Greece, Detroit, and New York of the 1970s, prompting myriad articles about its economic woes and the population’s resilience. The art scene became more visible as Puerto Rican artists stepped into the frey with their creative projects. Some institutions stepped up, too. Notably, El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC).

 

Sitting in the heart of the Santurce district of San Juan, the Museum of Contemporary Art became a beacon of hope for the surrounding community in the wake of the storm, serving as an educational resource and offering space for the performing arts, and channeling life-sustaining resources to residents.

 

In 2019, when we venture to Puerto Rico, we head to the Museum to meet Director Marianne Ramirez Aponte. She led MAC’s pro-active role following the hurricane. Early in 2021, the Museum’s contemporary art curator Marina Reyes Franco shares an update—revealing MAC’s sustained commitment to generate cultural opportunities for local artists and residents of all ages.

 

In this segment of our Puerto Rico Rising series, two community leaders share a few of the creative projects they generate to enable others to rise—both emotionally and physically—above the challenging everyday circumstances that limit opportunities for Puerto Ricans to survive and thrive.

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Sound:  Live Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, September 27, 2019

Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Radical Leaders, Puerto Rico Rising—Resilient Artists, The Awakening, Juan Botta Makes One-Minute Movies in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto on the Architecture of Connecting Communities, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies

Related Links: El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), Marina Reyes Franco, ATLAS SAN JUAN: TROPICAL DEPRESSION, Art in America, Oct 1, 2018.

Today, we take you to St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States of America. Home of the Gateway Arch, an Emblem of Manifest Destiny, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Emblem of Manifest Destiny. St. Louis is nicknamed “‘Mound City”’ because of the number of earthworks built by Indigenous peoples there, before the westward expansion of colonizers conspired to flatten them. Where caves beneath the city sheltered freedom seekers traversing the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s. Where, from 1959 to 1972—in the span of less than 20 years—residents of the historically Black neighborhoods Mill Creek Valley and Pruitt-Igoe Homes were displaced in the name of urban development and public safety. 

Where, in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement coalesced. Nearly a decade later, in the year 2023, current events reveal that in this city and this state, the sanctity of civil and human rights remains tenuous on every level. 

What role can a public art triennial play in such a troubled context? 

A microcosm of the disruptive forces at play in cities across the United States today, St. Louis offers fertile ground for creative interventions that are healing—restorative in nature.

The civic exhibition Counterpublic takes on the challenge. To prepare for the 2023 event, the triennial’s home team committed to a year of listening sessions with a range of public constituents. A report integrated into the exhibition catalogue outlines local interest in holistic engagement with public memory, commemoration, and acknowledgement; the rematriation of Indigenous land; and reparative futures. In response, for three months, thirty projects animate the urban landscape along six miles of Jefferson Avenue. 

In this episode, we follow that throughway from south to north to share healing elixirs healing we discover at the heart of seven Counterpublic projects along the way. Listen to the ways they honor and amplify strength, beauty, and hope at the core of reemergent cultural histories in St Louis.

 

Story: Cathy Byrd

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio courtesy Nokosee Fields, X, Raven Chacon, Stefani Jemison, Griot Museum of African American History, Torkwase Dyson, Mendi and Keith Obadike, SlowDrag audio "Joy and Everything," remixed by K Kudda, and Counterpublic, Mood Unit by  by Blue Dot Sessions

Related Episodes: Model Behavior—New Orleans Art Triennial Inspires Other Cities, Where Art Meets Activism, Unsettled Landscapes at SITE Santa Fe

Related Links: Counterpublic, Fresh VUE: Counterpublic St. Louis 2023

Artist Dara Friedman and curator Rene Morales talk about Perfect Stranger, Friedman's mid-career survey at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. The exhibition features seventeen major film and video works shot in Miami, New York, and Germany. Intertwined with our conversation, you’ll hear some of the sonic encounters that lie waiting behind thick velvet curtains in the multi-chambered show. It’s through these curtains that you enter Dara Friedman's Theater of the Mind.

Meet fresh voices from Miami! With educators Giselle Heraux and Jahné King, we talk about art, storytelling, and the next generation of creative podcasters. Heraux and King will set the stage for each episode in our Fall 2020 Student Edition.

 

The Student Edition

In 2019, we initiated the Student Edition with visits to art schools and universities in the United States and Canada. Recorded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago/Chicago, Wayne State University/Detroit, and Ontario College of Art and Design University/Toronto, episodes in our Spring 2020 Student Edition revolve around how students engage communities.

 

During the Spring 2020 semester, Fresh Art founder Cathy Byrd introduced podcasting to a group of University of Miami students. As a team, they explored the City’s cultural landscape to record and produce the Miami Moves Me podcast. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, field expeditions came to an abrupt halt and classes went online mid-semester. More than a few Miami Moves Me stories convey before-and-after perspectives. A set of eighteen episodes represents their research, field recordings and interviews. Our Fall 2020 Student Edition  features a selection of episodes from the Miami Moves Me archive.

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Miami Moves Me podcast

Today, we take you to meet to artist Deborah Mitchell in her studio on Miami Beach, to talk about the ways that Florida’s southwest coast inspires her. The contested landscape, endangered by encroaching urban development and sea level rise, is where she engages as an artist and an advocate for North America’s only subtropical wilderness: The Everglades. Mitchell’s mindful practice expresses her affinity for this fragile ecology, and her desire to learn, share and preserve its science and history.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Deborah Mitchell | Photographs courtesy the artist and Fresh Art International

Related links: The Everglades, Big Cypress, Deborah Mitchell, Artists in Residence In Everglades (AIRIE)

Today, we take you back to the month of April, in the year 2012. That’s when we set out on a road trip from Austin, Texas. We’re aiming to find out how remote wide open spaces of the American Southwest inform and inspire art and design, curating and filmmaking.

 

Lubbock, Texas, birthplace of musician songwriter Buddy Holly, is our first stop. In a warehouse at the edge of town, we meet architecture professor Chris Taylor. He introduces us to students from Texas Tech University who took his course in Land Arts of the American West. The course involves a 6,000-mile road trip that culminates each time in an exhibition such as the one on view during our visit.

We drive on to Roswell, New Mexico, home to the Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Museum, to spend the night in one of the ranch-style houses that accommodate the Roswell Artists in Residence Program, known as RAIR. Established in 1967 by artist and art collector Don Anderson, the program is off the beaten path for residencies, offering visual artists the unique opportunity to spend an entire year concentrating on their work. The voices you’ll hear are five of the current residents at the time of our visit:  Sarah Bostwick, Jon-Paul Villegas, Brian Villegas, Brian Kluge, and Sioban McBride.

A three hour drive from El Paso, Texas, Marfa has become a destination for art tourism. Home of the ghostly Marfa Lights (unexplained lights sometimes seen along the horizon in the night sky), the tiny town sits in the high desert, between the Davis Mountains and Big Bend National Park.

Renowned minimalist artist Donald Judd came here in the 1970s to escape New York City’s commercial art scene. With the help of the DIA Foundation, he acquired a former Army base. Before Judd died in 1994, he transformed the 400-acre expanse into a faceted art experience. The Chinati Foundation is a contemporary art museum designed to connect art to the surrounding landscape. Year round, visitors can explore Judd's signature boxes and installations by Dan Flavin, Rebecca Horn, Ilya Kabakov and more. We spend a few days to track down some of the artists, curators, designers and producers expanding on Judd’s singular vision.

 

Professional filmmakers Jennifer Lane and David Hollander moved to Marfa from Los Angeles. CineMarfa, the film festival they founded there, will celebrate its tenth year in 2020. We visit their home for a conversation about the genesis of CineMarfa and plans for the second annual event.

 

Ballroom Marfa is a key site of cultural production in this remote art mecca. Arts pioneers Fairfax Dorn and Virginia Leh-bermann founded the contemporary cultural arts space in 2003. Ballroom’s gallery is a converted dancehall that dates to 1927. We sit down with Ballroom’s creative team to learn more.

 

In 2019, we reach out to curator Laura Copelin to find out what happened next. Ballroom Marfa continues commissioning site specific artworks and installations—responding to the environmental, social and political ecology of the landscape that extends to the border of Mexico. One recent example is Haroon Mirza’s massive Stone Circle in the grasslands east of town. This is Ballroom’s most ambitious public commission since Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa was completed in 2005. The stone circle will remain in the landscape for the next several years.

 

Leaving the high desert, we drive northeast through the Texas hill country, passing endless fields of bluebonnets. In East Austin, we meet designer architect Jack Sanders in his studio. Sanders talks about how the legendary architect Sam Mockbee influenced the evolution of his own life’s work.

 

Sound Editing and Special Audio Credits:

 

Destination American Southwest Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

 

Land Arts of the American West Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | Special Audio: 45 rpm record found by Land Art 2011 participants

 

Program Director: Chris Taylor

Students: Alexander Bingham, Luis Bustamante III, Will Cotton, Winston Holloway, Richard Klaja, Celeste Martinez, Zachary Mitchell, Carl Spartz, Rachael Wilson, Bethany Wood. Program Assistant: Adrian Larriva

 

Roswell Artists in Residence Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | RAiR acoustics: Sarah Bostwick

 

CineMarfa Sound Editor: Jay Agoglia | Sound Track: Harmony Korine, TRASH HUMPERS, 2009

 

Ballroom Marfa Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | Special Audio: Brian LeBarton, The Wind, 2010. New Year’s Film/Score Series. January 2, 2010. The Crowley Theater, Marfa

 

Jack Sanders Sound Editor: Leo Madriz | Music: Ross Cashiola, “Trains in the Grass”

Related Episodes: Fresh Talk: Joan Jonas, Fresh VUE: Austin, Land Arts of the American West, Roswell Artists in Residence, CineMarfa 2012, Ballroom Marfa Imagines a Drive-In, Jack Sanders on Slow Architecture

 

Related Links: Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Sarah Bostwick, Jon-Paul Villegas, Brian Kluge, Corwin Levi, Sioban McBride, Chinati Foundation, CineMarfa, Jack Sanders, Sam Mockbee/Rural Studio

 

Tags: architecture, Austin,, Design Build Adventure, El Cosmico, Jack Sanders, Marfa, Rural Studio, Sam Mockbee, Texas, New Mexico, art podcast, Fairfax Dorn, Virginia Lebermann, Roswell, artists in residence, Chinati Foundation, Texas Tech University, Donald Judd

 

Art with Caribbean roots inspires this episode of our radio show. Franklin Sirmans, Director of Perez Art Museum, Miami, sets the tone, in his conversation with Cathy Byrd about art from the Global South. We’ll introduce the role of Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc., in nurturing the work of artists of the Caribbean diaspora in Miami and beyond. You’ll hear from Rosie Gordon-Wallace, founder of DVCAI, Haitian-born artist Asser Saint-Val who lives and works in Miami, and artists in residence Gerard Caliste (Houston, by way of New Orleans) Ashley Teamer (New Orleans) and Nadine Hall (Jamaica).

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

Today, we explore the sounds of the international contemporary art exhibition documenta 14, in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany. 

Featuring violinist Ali Moraly performing at opening ceremonies and projects by Nigerian Emeka Ogboh, Pakistani Rasheed Araeen, Norwegian Joar Nango, American Rick Lowe, Nigerian  Otobong Nkanga and American William Pope.L.

How does your art engage the world? How do you speak to the issues and ideas of our time? What do you hope others will remember about your life, your beliefs, your work?

The exhibition Teresita Fernandez / Robert Smithson, SITE Santa Fe opens a portal for us to consider our place in the landscape and explore the legacy of two significant artists. Their vibrant visual exchange feels both time sensitive and timeless.

This dialogue with artist Teresita Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, deepens our appreciation of resonant and divergent perspectives. Embracing change, they show us the way to and through a few of the entanglements that come with being an artist and being human. 

Host: Cathy Byrd Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

Special Audio featured with permission, as follows:

Recordings on site at Spiral Jetty, Salt Lake, Utah, 2013, courtesy Anamnesis Audio. 

Extracts from Teresita Fernández, Cuajaní (2024), directed by Teresita Fernández and Juan Carlos Alom; 16mm film converted to digital video, black and white, sound; duration 20 minutes, 9 seconds.

Extracts from Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970); 16mm film; duration 35 minutes; © Holt/Smithson Foundation 2024. Blister Creek by Blue Dot Sessions

Related Episodes: Unsettled Landscapes at SITE Santa Fe, Louis Grachos, Land Arts of the American West

Related Links: Teresita Fernández, Holt/Smithson Foundation, SITE Santa Fe

Today, we take you to Miami Beach, Florida, for a conversation with British-born artist Ellen Harvey.

In 2002, the art fair known as Art Basel traveled here from Switzerland, to set up a winter home. While the South Florida metropolis has grown into an international contemporary art mecca, this coast has also become recognized as ground zero for sea level rise. 

Despite increased flooding from high tides, the population keeps growing. Public and private investments continue to pour in. In 2015, the City of Miami Beach allocated 620 million dollars to renovate and expand the Convention Center where the Art Basel fair takes place every December. Seven million dollars of the budget were dedicated to public art. Six new site works are adding star power to the City’s permanent collection.

Selected for one of the high profile commissions, Brooklyn-based artist Ellen Harvey seized the moment, to create what she describes as “a hopelessly romantic call to action.” We sit down with her to talk about the endangered eco-system that informs Atlantis, her shimmering glass wall installation.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio 

Related Episodes: Art and the Climate Crisis with IKT Miami, Curating and Creative Resilience with IKT in Miami, Whithervanes: The Art of Anxiety, Where Art Meets Activism, Art and the Rising Sea

Related Links: Ellen Harvey, Art in Public Places

Ellen Harvey’s Atlantis joins other public art projects to be realized in and around the Convention Center. Accessible to visitors and locals, the full set will include a vivid painted mural by Franz Ackermann (Berlin), a bent swimming pool sculpture by Elmgreen & Dragset (Berlin), a neon global positioning installation by Joseph Kosuth (London/New York), whimsical park seating by Joep van Lieshout (Rotterdam), and an expansive patterned tile wall by Sarah Morris (New York).

Cathy Byrd, Fresh Art International Founder and Artistic Director, participated in the review and selection process from 2015-2016 as a member of the City of Miami Art in Public Places Committee.

Join us for our latest Destination Fresh Art adventure to Flagler Arts & Technology Village aka FAT Village Arts District! To set the stage, listen to our conversation with artist and editor Sharon Louden about the role of artists in creating communities. In the studio, we speak to Neil Ramsay, Director of ArtsUp! Concepts, a not-for-profit space dedicated to presenting experimental art concepts, and Ingrid Schindall, Owner/Director/Organization Visionary of IS Projects, a public access printmaking and book arts studio. You’ll also hear field recordings from a recent FATVillage Art Walk and our conversations with architect Maria Fasano, opera singer Shanna Nolan Gundry and choreographer Jenny Larsson.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

Today, we’re in Miami, to introduce you to Don and Mera Rubell, art collectors since 1964. We recorded with the Rubells in December 2019. Since then, the coronavirus pandemic has shaken our planet. We recognize the very real sense of before and after as we share these conversations about creativity.

Today’s episode conveys the excitement that surrounded the opening of the Rubell Family’s new museum. From March 17, 2020, the collection has been closed until further notice, as South Florida awaits the all clear to safely resume public life.

The Rubells started collecting when Don was in medical school and Mera was a preschool teacher. The first work they collected was by Ira Kaufman. They paid for it in weekly installments of $25. Collecting art ever since, they’re joined by their son Jason, who became a collector himself as a teenager. They’ve become known for supporting the work of emerging and overlooked artists. Pursuing their passion in person, they visit studios, museums, fairs, galleries and biennials across the globe. Research and relationships are vital to each acquisition. 

In 1993, they opened the Rubell Family Collection in Miami’s Wynwood District. Over the next two decades, the value of real estate in the neighborhood soared. The collection outgrew their 40,000 square foot space, a former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse they had turned into an art venue. The Rubells started looking for storage nearby. An abandoned food-processing plant by the railroad tracks less than a mile away sparked the idea of creating a museum.

The 100,000 square foot warehouse complex in the Allapattah district became the spacious new home for their collection. Architects transformed the seven buildings into an epic space for more than 7,000 works by over 1,000 artists. 

On the eve of the museum opening, we join a private tour with Mera, Don and Jason…A wall-sized painting by Kehinde Wiley, two of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms, and Keith Haring's Statue of Liberty are just a few of the large-scale works that have room to breathe here.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Paint and Pixels Power the Art of Allison Zuckerman, Art and Our Uncertain Future, The Art of Collecting—with Erika Hoffmann

Related Links: Rubell Museum, Yayoi Kusama, Kehinde Wiley, Keith Haring, Amoako Boafo, Allison Zuckerman, Ira Kaufman

Today, we take you to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, for our first experience of the yearly gathering known as March Meeting. The Sharjah Art Foundation designs these programs to resonate with issues and events of the moment. March Meeting 2024 is no exception. Across three days, artists, curators, educators and writers from near and far converge to consider the power and purpose of collective creativity.

 

Here, we bear witness to diverse artistic energies behind grass roots initiatives in the Global South. Finding strength in numbers, creative activists collaborate on initiatives that bring positive change to the vulnerable communities where they live and work. All embrace multiple voices. None are unafraid of messy entanglement. They give us hope, they show us the way— to a more inclusive, sustainable, and livable future. 

 

Sound Design: Anamnesis Audio

 

Special Audio: Alex Pierce and Zoe Annesley, “Beneath a Tent, a Performance for Strings and Voice”; Bint Mbareh, “Lentil Soup as an Antidote to Rampant Wildfires”; dhaqan collective “Camel Song” and “House of Weaving Song”; La Revuelta YouTube channel; Episodio 7 - El podcast de Anamá Rojas, June 2021; Vela Vela; Stanza for Lumi

 

Related Episodes: Sharjah Biennial 15—with Hoor Al Qasimi, Searching for Libertalia—with Shiraz Bayjoo, Creating Community in Kazakhstan—with CEC ArtsLink, The BLCK Family of Miami on Collective Creativity

 

Related Links: Sharjah Art Foundation, Topsoil, Sakiya, dhaqan collective, La Revuelta

In Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood, we meet poet Aja Monet, legal justice advocates Meena Jagannath and Alayah Glenn, and artist Eddie Arroyo to talk about how art and poetry are giving voice to urban communities fractured by gentrification.

Arroyo's paintings reference photographs he takes to capture the character of vanishing cultural landmarks. Monet is founder of Smoke Signals Studio, a music space that's become a transformative gathering place in Little Haiti. Jagannath and Glenn are two of the activists that run the local Community Justice Project, a young grassroots initiative focused on addressing issues ranging from women’s and immigrant rights, to race and economic justice.

These individuals represent the growing momentum of civic engagement across the United States. In the ways they animate their vision for Miami's possible future, we see infinite potential for creative interventionists to empower disenfranchised communities around the world.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Arsimmer McCoy Early

Related episodes: Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti, Where Art Meets Activism, The Art of Capitalism, Andrea Bowers on Environmental Activism, Marinella Senatore on Modern Life, Tania Bruguera on Art Activism, Maria Alyokhina on Political Art

Related Links: Smoke Signals Studio, Community Justice Project, Dream Defenders, Maroon Poetry Festival, Eddie Arroyo

Today we take you to the intersection of nature, art and technology to meet Amsterdam-based artists Ralph Nauta and Lonneka Gordjein of Studio Drift. They design their creative applications of new technology to make us question the lines we draw between humanity and nature, chaos and order. Presented during Miami Art Week 2017, Studio Drift's flying sculpture made of 300 lighted drones was especially provocative and poetic. The artists leave us believing in the unexpected potential for technology to feel natural.

Piano solo: Joep Beving

In today’s prologue to our Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami senior Melissa Huberman tells the story of Art in the Time of Corona. She recorded with Fresh Art International founder Cathy Byrd, local artist Dana Musso, and team members from the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, to find out how some artists, curators, and educators are responding to the impact of the global coronavirus pandemic. Listen to hear some of the ways they are creating and implementing meaningful art encounters for their communities. 

 

The Story Behind The Story

In 2020, hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and around the world have been sickened and forced into quarantine by the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. The pandemic continues to affect us profoundly—both physically and economically. All of us have had to adjust how we live and work, teach and learn. 

 

In January 2020, Fresh Art founder Cathy Byrd began to introduce a group of University of Miami students to podcasting in a course titled Once Upon a Time in Miami. With Byrd, a team of nine students explored cultural sites across the city to record and produce the Miami Moves Me podcast. Due to the pandemic, at mid-semester, field expeditions came to an abrupt halt and classes went online. A set of eighteen episodes represents the UM student team’s research, field recordings, and interviews. Art in the Time of Corona is the prologue to our Fall 2020 Student Edition. 

 

Producers: Melissa Huberman/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux and Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

 

Featured Voices: Cathy Byrd, Dana Musso, Leilani Lynch, Julia Rudo, Kylee Crook

 

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Art in the Time of Corona, Fresh Voices Miami

Related Links: Miami Moves Me, Fresh Art Distance Learning Resources, Fresh Art Student Edition, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Locust Projects, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Lowe Art Museum

In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, the struggle to survive is real. Natural disasters, a failing economy, corrupt leadership, and the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean are among forces that challenge sustainability and sovereignty. Outside investments in tourism have had the effect of disenfranchising locals and fragmenting the island’s creative community. San Juan born and based, curator Marina Reyes Franco has a lot to say on this subject. Her research, writing, and curating illuminate the powerful impact of the burgeoning visitor economy.

 

In 2019, three years after Hurricane Maria, we venture to Puerto Rico for the opening of Resisting Paradise, an exhibition Reyes Franco organized with the support of Apex Art, New York. Jamaica born artists Leasho Johnson and Deborah Anzinger, and artist Joiri Minaya, from the Dominican Republic, show work engaging at the intersection of tourism, sexuality, gender, music and the internet. We record this episode inside Espacio Pública, a newly established culture space, in San Juan’s Santurce district. 

 

This segment of our Puerto Rico Rising series revolves around creative resistance to foreign fantasies of ‘paradise.’ The conversation exposes a few of the complex histories and current conditions that inform contemporary art in Puerto Rico and the greater Caribbean. 

 

Voices in the episode: Naima Rodriguez, Marina Reyes Franco, Leasho Johnson, and Joiri Minaya

 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

 

Related Episodes: Puerto Rico Rising—Radical Leaders, Puerto Rico Rising—Resilient Artists, The Awakening, Juan Botta Makes One-Minute Movies in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto on the Architecture of Connecting Communities, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies

 

Related Links: Resisting Paradise exhibition, Espacio Pública, Deborah Anzinger, Leasho Johnson, Joiri Minaya, apex art, Marina Reyes Franco, ATLAS SAN JUAN: TROPICAL DEPRESSION, Art in America, Oct 1, 2018.

The 2019 documentary Pahokee is a landmark project for filmmakers Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan and a sign of hope for the rural South Florida community whose story they tell. An official selection in 2019 Sundance and South by Southwest Film Festivals, Pahokee won the Miami Film Festival’s 2019 Knight Made in Miami Award.

Perched on the Southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades, forty miles west and a world apart from affluent West Palm Beach, Pahokee is named after the Seminole word meaning "grassy waters.” In the film, we follow four students as they navigate the hope and heartbreak of their senior year at Pahokee High School. All eyes are on the rituals of football, prom and graduation in the town these teenagers call home.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Film Audio and Photography courtesy Otis Lucas

Related Episodes: Women Writers on Cuba in Film, Introducing Miami Film Festival GEMS 2017, Alexa Lim Haas on Animating Daydreams, Borscht 10 Film Festival

Related Links: The Film Pahokee, Otis Lucas, Miami Film Festival 2019

 

In 2018, Puerto Rico based actor, composer and filmmaker Juan Botta left job security behind to center on his creative life. That’s when he launched Freelance, an inventive Instagram film series that empathizes with the challenges of living and working in Puerto Rico today. Botta’s determination to make films where he lives—despite economic, political and environmental conditions—suggests creativity as a way forward. Freelance expresses a sense of hope, demonstrating that it's possible to find poetry, humor and beauty in the most unlikely situations.

The backstory: In 2019, we head to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to immerse ourselves in the island’s creative life. Now more than ever, residents are faced with a mountain of adversity. Two years after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, this place still awaits reconstruction. Puerto Rico’s 2019 summer uprising protested against politics as usual. Residents gathered en masse, to transform the political landscape. Nonstop street demonstrations led to the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. New actors and forces are emerging that resist the island’s colonial subordination.

Despite ongoing unstable conditions, cultural work continues, with renewed energy. One night in San Juan, we meet Argentina born Juan Botta, an award winning actor, composer and filmmaker who grew up in Puerto Rico. He left his job in the tourism industry one year ago, to center on creative pursuits.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Juan Botta

Related Episodes: Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, Filmmaking in Pahokee Holds Hope for the Future, Akosua Adoma Owusu on Her Film Kwaku Ananse

Related Links: Juan Botta on Instagram, on YouTube

Get inspired by our conversations on Fourth Wave Feminist Art. We begin with a flashback to a past conversation with artist Jillian Mayer on her project 400 nudes. Filmmaker Robert Adanto and artist Leah Schrager discuss the F Word Film: a look at radical, 4th wave feminist performance art. You’ll also hear about Adanto’s new documentary titled Born Just Now on artist Marta Jovanovic.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan

Art and Sports? Curator Franklin Sirmans brings them together in The World’s Game exhibition at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. Immersive installations, paintings, sculptural objects, photographs and videos by forty artists reveal how the universal language of this transnational game can define beauty, make social statements, create a sense of community and express a shared passion. Timed to coincide with the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, the exhibition celebrates soccer as the portal to a world of contemporary art.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special audio: Stephen Dean, Volta and Perez Art Museum, Miami