Alabamaland

Deep in the backwoods of rural Alabama, Herbert Jones, a 94-year-old black man, clings to his 688-acre farm--a farm that was passed along to his slave ancestors from the family’s former slave master. Despite the farm’s unique history and place in the Jones family, urbanization and the lure of the city threatens this way of life. Alabamaland is a documentary that chronicles the day-to-day life on Herbert’s farm, explores the history of small-scale black farmers in the South, and examines the overall state of American farming. 

Are there creative ways for this farm to survive? Are Southern communities interested in preserving this way of life, or do the economic struggles of Southern states like Alabama overshadow the preservation of local farm life? What does the future hold for small-scale farmers who have survived so much to keep their land and preserve their way of life? Alabamaland poses these questions and more as it investigates the state of farming in the South.

Extra Virgin Press

Extra Virgin Press will preserve the art of letterpress by creating a space where the community can learn and practice this hand printed form of communication. After learning, teaching and printing for forty years in South Florida, I received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for EVP. The Knight Arts Challenge Grant in the category of literature will bring writers to the press. Sensuous, handmade, multicolored, embossed, press printing will bring artists. EVP will work with arts organizations, writers, poets, artists, and institutions to create hand printed, small editions of books and art on paper. Common forms are chapbooks, prints, broadsheets, invitations, postcards, and posters. 

These forms will allow a full spectrum of individuals or collaborators to produce modestly priced, small format multiples in editions of 25-100 copies. It will also gather creative professionals around a small press to promote and document their work, in addition to creating conversations around local issues. Classes and press time will be available for students and community members. Artists/writers will also work with professional educators to bring small portable presses into schools and institutions, to give a voice to the young writers and artists in Miami.

Pilgram 2.0

Pilgram 2.0 is a conceptual work that explores the boundaries between data visualization and art made from data collection, creating a link between scientific infovis & data sublimation. Pilgram 1.0 first iteration was made in the recently opened hotspots in Havana. This new iteration will show the invisible structures that tie the U.S. (Miami) and Cuba, monitoring and analyzing the packet data traffic. The naked links iteration will be a reflection of the existing communication infrastructure. We will display how the flow of communication between the two cities and the two countries is taking place now a days. We will document in an immersive and sublimated digital form how this communication might change through the month applying same action (acceding to a .cu domain names) during a specific period of time from different points in US (Miami-Florida). The final outcome will be the visibility of the links and infrastructure, and it will be a metaphor of the change (or not), some of these, expected changes between the two countries that in other cases wouldn’t be possible to see with the naked eye.

Dragan: Interviews on Drawing

Dragan*: Interviews on Drawing takes the form of a monthly, cross-disciplinary online publication that archives interviews and drawings from drawing practitioners in South Florida and beyond. Interviewees will be culled from a variety of fields, including (but not limited to): fine arts, architecture, archaeology, medicine, cognitive science, education, and mathematics. After a one-year Research and Development phase, I will leverage the relationships formed through interviews and cultivating readership both in South Florida and in the international drawing community to organize an international conference on drawing practice in Miami. 

*"To draw,” means to pull, deriving from the Old English dragan, meaning to drag.

Fall Semester

Fall Semester is an ongoing independent initiative for public discussion on contemporary society and culture. Through a series of public lectures, open conversations, and select online contributors, Fall Semester seeks to introduce new discourse into Miami and effect change through a cross-pollination of ideas across fields. 

Testing what can be achieved in a sped-up production of discourse, Fall Semester invites noted artists, theoreticians, critics, curators and cultural practitioners, to discuss ideas, then in turn calls on the participants to, in the format of a dialogue, develop a conversation from their respective positions. This initiative is in many ways an experiment in what can happen when new material—like a bomb-drop of new data—is rapidly introduced into local rhetoric. 

Founded in Summer 2013, Fall Semester was envisioned as an ongoing series and flexible, critical platform. The second iteration of Fall Semester will focus on identity, through discussion and overviews of the post-human, new aesthetic, capital consumption, and performativity. Public participation in Fall Semester is not limited by profession, status, merit, or income. It is a free and open forum to any who desire to contribute to or observe.

FELIZX

FELIZX performance-styled video on the life and work of deceased artist Felix Gonzalez Torres, during the last phase of his life, spent on Miami Beach in the early '90's using advice and archival material made available by his roommate of his last years, and best friend since 8th grade at San Jorge School in Puerto Rico, Claudio Gonzalez. 

Our focus is the relationship between Felix's highly personal art and his last 6 years spent here in Miami Beach during the peak of the AIDS Epidemic, which claimed his life in 1996, not long before life-saving anti-viral drugs, became available.

The emergent scene on Miami Beach in the late 80's and early '90's, where so many young men gathered to live out there last years, is as inseparable from the death sentence an AIDS diagnosis meant then, as it is from the work Felix created then, before the the anti-viral drugs appeared. 

Our mode of constructing the Piece include choreographed performative vignettes and original music based on the club music of the time and elements that refer directly to his work and South Beach at the time: strung lights, candy, billboards, beaded portieres, Drag Queens and Go-Go Dancers.

The Cuba Project

The Cuba Project (tentatively titled) is a platform for artists, curators and scholars about art from Cuba and the Cuban diaspora. Organized by independent curator/producer Susan Caraballo, it will engage numerous institutions ranging from museums and arts organizations to galleries and artist-run spaces across South Florida including ArtCenter/South Florida, Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Dimensions Variable, Fountainhead Studios, Pan American Art Projects, Perez Art Museum Miami, The Screening Room, among others. Each will present thematically linked exhibitions and programs about Cuban contemporary art. This collaborative initiative was born out of several projects that have been in the works by Miami-based curators and producers prior to the December 17, 2014 announcement of the easing of relations between the US and Cuba. These developments have proven the timeliness of this initiative. It will comprise large-scale and smaller exhibitions and events including a symposium. A curatorial committee will oversee the selection of projects. Funding is sought to research and develop the project for implementation in 2017.

Balalaika

Balalaika is a slightly-larger-than-life spiritual duplicate of a Soviet era MiG-21 jet fighter. It can be viewed as an impermanent paper airplane made by a child. As a sculpture made by an adult, it is a solution incorporating all the elements of limitless imagination while retaining the refinement of age and experience. The project seeks to address the complex problems inherent in science, technology, and geopolitical realities. 

The project speaks to the temporary nature of life and objects. The airframe itself is approximately 52'x28'x18'. It will weigh approximately 3,200 pounds. Every switch functions—as do the landing gear, flaps, and rudder. To adhere to another element of its conceptual origin, it is all made entirely from paper (much of it custom fabricated on-site) and Elmer’s glue. The airplane is built to a 1.0588:1 scale to fit my frame. 

Port to Port

Dwelling Projects is an itinerant residency program that develops opportunities for Miami-based practitioners to travel to Latin America and the Caribbean using Miami’s existing and historical trade routes and transient space, supporting exchange between both sites. In 2016, DP’s founder and director, Sofia Bastidas, and artistic director, Guillermo Gomez, will travel to Port of Balboa, Panama, with the intention of developing Port to Port, a traveling research program to Latin American and Caribbean port cities for Miami based researchers, architects, urban planners, and artists. Port to Port research program will facilitate in the research of regional port cities in relation to Port of Miami. Current global cities are being built on Free Trade Zones, with standardized architecture and city planning existing within them. Miami exists to be the next global economic power player, with an expanding port that will change its current global position. It is important to give an opportunity to Miami based artists, practitioners and researchers interested in urban ecologies to expand their current practice abroad, while still connecting and contributing to local issues. After 2017’s first iteration to Port Balboa, residents will return to Miami to present their findings in a public conversation and publication or exhibition.

Alliance of the Southern Triangle

AST (Alliance of Southern Triangle) is an experimental initiative exploring the ramifications of a speculative secession of South Florida from the State of Florida, in light of current and projected State policy relating to climate change. We are an independent collaborative of artists and architects interested in how extrapolative line-drawing through Florida might be a catalyst towards the creative investigation and leveraging of networks, forces, ruptures and flows already in play. 

Miami and the South Florida region of which it is part, frame a unique matrix of land use, trade patterns, borderline legality, immigration porosity, mixed ecologies, contemporary art, real-estate development and various instruments of financial exchange. Viewed globally it represents, perhaps, the shape of things to come. 

AST aims to be a platform where geospatial, political, urban, ecological, cultural and artistic possibilities, in light of climate change and political volatility, can be reimagined, visualized, and materialized in ways that leverage the dynamics already in process. 

Through collaborative efforts we hope to develop artistic strategies and practices that envision alternative trajectories for Miami and the South Florida region in a global context; as well as speculate on the possibilities for what an art practice might become in this historical moment.

the sight of sound for Fringe Projects

the sight of sound uses simple sound displacement to create an alter-environement that looks backward and forward. Situating small, wireless speakers in 3-5 storm drains (with the co-operation of the City), I want to bring lost or out of place sounds into part of the (unlikely) built environment that will naturally amplify them. By using sound rather than sight, I hope people will be able to experience their surroundings in a different way, using different sensitivities. For the astute listener, this may conjure larger ideas, such as the loss of silence, of habitat, the approaching sea, industrialization. However, I hope it also creates a magical, uncanny encounter with art. There is the set, and then there is the soundtrack. 

LOT

LOT is a process-driven and research-based project located in Miami, FL that investigates the legacies and possibilities of the fenced vacant lot. Co-curated by Erin Elder and Felecia Carlisle, the project includes 3-5 artists in an address of these unique spaces with temporary site interventions as one of several possible outcomes.

Miami is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. It is home to a wealthy paradox of influences, histories, personas, agendas, fantasies, exploits, economies, languages, cultures, and dreams. LOT highlights the city’s vacant lots as a point of departure for a considered, complex, and creative investigation of current trends in development, land use, speculation, space, and power.

Moving Parts

Moving Parts will assemble 4-5 collaborators from varied disciplines to conceive and produce an original work of theater for a compact, portable stage (approx 4’ x 4’ x 4’). Through a series of meetings and workshops, the company will share ideas and develop set architecture/scene changes, a libretto/text, figurines/props, video/film projections, sound/music/voice and performance. The resulting work will be presented free of charge to the public at venues including public libraries, museums, and non-profits, especially targeting underserved community venues. Meetings will take place at Available Space in Little River, my new studio/exhibition space opening Feb 1. As Artistic Director of Moving Parts, I envision a new production annually, involving different collaborators from all possible disciplines. Moving Parts will present a unique theater of objects, architecture, sound and image using modest economic means. We will develop our own techniques and intimate mechanics, our own stagecraft, to experiment with figuration and abstraction, pictures and language, space and time, narrative and transformation. In a condensed, concentrated way, Moving Parts will expand the art and performance scene here, and be a new platform for artists to express themselves.