UP FRONT | ART
ART EXHIBIT GIVES PLACE A FRESH NEW PERSPECTIVE
The work of artists in the heart of Miami's building boom is featured in a
new show opening Wednesday at the Miami Art Museum.
Published by
The
Miami Herald
on Sunday, April 23, 2006, Page 1A (Miami, FL)
CHARLES TRAINOR JR./MIAMI HERALD
STAFF
SNAPSHOTS: Photographs from Xavier Cortada's
'Absence of Place,' reflecting on scenes of Miami, are included in
the Miami Art Museum's new show called 'Miami in Transition.' The
exhibition opens Friday.'
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BY LYDIA MARTIN
Who but artists, traditionally short on green but in need of work space and
community, would appropriate derelict buildings and menacing streets?
True, the gentrification they help ignite when they open studios and
galleries in down and out 'hoods -- SoHo, South Beach, Wynwood -- is the very
thing that eventually pushes them out. But that's progress.
On Wednesday, the Miami Art Museum previews a show dedicated, you could say,
to progress. Miami in Transition, which officially opens Friday, features
the work of 21 artists who live and work in the dust of Miami's bulldozers and
the shadows of its building cranes.
Among them: Spanish-born Vicenta Casañ, whose dreamlike digital images depict
steel and glass towers floating in the clouds; Argentine-born Patricio Cuello,
whose mixed-media installation, 24-inch House, speaks to the scarcity of
space; and Cuban-American Xavier Cortada, whose Absence of Place uses
snapshots to convey the disorientation that ensues when all of your landmarks
vanish.
As the building boom hustles their city toward a new, if still unresolved,
identity, these 21 artists couldn't help but muse -- about impermanence, about
sense of place, about both the vision and shortsightedness inherent in concrete
and steel campaigns.
Some are for change. Some against. Many seem driven to document the past as a
way of deciphering the future.
''What they have in common is that they are all witnesses,'' said Lorie
Mertes, MAM's assistant director for special projects, who curated the show with
assistant Rene Morales. ``More than that, they have played a role. Artists
become the catalyst for change in neighborhoods that go from funky to fabulous
after they move in.''
A DISAPPEARING MIAMI
Michael Loveland, a Miami native and New World School of the Arts graduate,
is one to value the funky over the fabulous. He collects discarded traffic
markers, billboards and shop signs that stand as relics of a disappearing Miami.
His Development Opportunity for Sale, commissioned for the MAM show,
features an old hand-painted billboard for Everglades airboat rides that came
down in one of last year's storms.
''It's a design sensibility that seems lost in the age of the digital
printout,'' said Loveland, who lives in the gentrifying Upper Eastside. ``There
is another old sign from a beauty shop on Northeast Second Avenue painted by a
street sign painter named Serge, who paints all the sandwiches and dripping beer
bottles on neighborhood bodegas. It's the simplicity of it. Now that creativity
is being swept away by higher rents. That color palette is disappearing.''
What Leila A. Leder-Kremer laments most about disappearance is that Miamians
don't lament it more. Landmarks fall and nobody flinches, she learned when she
began documenting the demolition of the Everglades Hotel and the Dupont Plaza
with fellow artist Thomas Brian Virgin.
''There are a lot of people in Miami who are not from here. They lack a
connection to the city's past. Buildings go and it doesn't mean anything to
them,'' said Leder-Kremer, who moved to Miami from Buenos Aires seven years ago.
``Immediately, nobody remembers what used to stand there.''
She and Virgin crafted a zoetrope -- a 19th-century optical device that
creates a movie-like effect with a rotating set of still images -- to tell the
story of the Everglades Hotel implosion.
Except, they tell it in reverse, with the 1926 Mediterranean Revival building
rising like a felled giant ready to reclaim its place on Biscayne Boulevard.
''We started with the idea of a flip book,'' said Leder-Kremer. 'The zoetrope
was initially Thomas' idea. It's a device that disappeared when motion pictures
arrived. It's about the past making way for the future.''
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova's Home glorifies his own past much the way
developers glorify the promise of a new glass-and-steel future. The
architectural model of his family's modest Kendall house has no zenned-out pool
deck, no glam rooftop party space.
''It's incredible what a big deal is made about new constructions. But
everybody is engaged in creating their space,'' Rodriguez-Casanova said.
``My parents were lower middle class. They could barely afford to buy the
house. They improved things as they could.
``One of the best examples is the tile in the back patio. It's a mosaic of
hand-me-down tiles, from people who had a few tiles left over from different
jobs. My father would run out of one tile and keep going with a different
tile.''
It's been five years since MAM last devoted a show solely to Miami artists --
a period of explosive growth. Condo developers have relied on the promise of a
flourishing arts scene to lure buyers, and artists, in turn, have found a
burgeoning market for their works among the city's monied new residents. Many of
the fresh faces that emerged from that mix are represented in the show.
''When I went away to college, I wanted to get out of this town so badly,''
Loveland said.
``If you had told me I would come back and buy a house a block off Biscayne,
I would have said you were crazy. I went to New York. But I moved back because I
felt much more inspired to work here.''
SEEING WITH NEW EYES
Rodriguez-Casanova tries to see Miami with new eyes, too.
''The city has really changed. But there are some things that make it feel
like the same old provincial place,'' he said. 'Like driving down Biscayne and
seeing the ugly yellow lines that were drawn over the new brick work in front of
the Performing Arts Center. I guess it takes time to mature. But the art world
definitely is growing. We seem to be moving out of the dead Cuban painters'
shadow.''
Slideshow | Works from the MAM exhibition Miami In Transition
