Sunday Painter

Sunday Painter began in 2016 as a platform to shine a light on local talent and peer into their sacred creative process. Weekly interviews have granted access to inspiring creatives working across multiple mediums. This podcast is a collage of sound that mirrors their current motivations, ongoing projects and upcoming shows; allowing artists to story-tell through various selected tracks. Artists are encouraged to invite a guest to collaborate with them on a show, forging new connections in the creative community.

Group exhibitions at the end of each season of recording promote awareness of the program and encourage local engagement in the community. Listeners are invited to a physical manifestation of the project. Seeing these works in relation to these episodes allow the viewer a unique insight into the intention and craftsmanship of the artwork. Site specific performances, panel programming and live broadcasting from local businesses encourage interaction during the run of the program.

Miami Women's Artist Archive

In the last three decades, Miami’s art activity has proliferated but where are the records, archives and documentation of this activity located? At present in Miami, there is no comprehensive support for the documentation and preservation of artist archives. The handful of traditional archives that exist in Miami while fulfilling an important objective are not focused primarily on the visual arts. And archives that are tied to institutions often have selection criteria that are founded on the historic principles that conceptualize the process of preservation as a measure of the monolithic past and often ignore the complexities of archiving as a dynamic, post-custodial and culturally sensitive practice.

My project will bring the practices of women artists to the forefront by offering them democratic technologies to document their art making process and archives. The Miami Women’s Artist Archive (MWAA) will be a participatory user driven platform that will enable users to upload their content to a user friendly website.

The digital archive will be available to diverse audiences. The mission of the MWAA will be to facilitate the preservation and documentation of artist archives of women of diverse artistic backgrounds and nationalities. Learn more

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the artist’s writing on the blog.

Tai Crane

Tai Crane is a proposed large-scale public performance, where two commercial tower cranes are choreographed to the traditional poses of tai chi. The cranes will weave around each other as if they were set to the deliberate pace of human hands, resulting in mechanical, flowing gestures 200 feet high. I will be stationed below the cranes, orchestrating the machines as they follow my movements. The performance will public; captured on video and to increase access to the citizens of Miami, will be broadcast live, projected onto a nearby video screen. The audience will witness the machines’ attempt to replicate the fluidity of organic motion as we move in tandem through a sequence of gestures.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.

We Got the Beat: Art Talk Radio Inspires Miami's Creative Community

Fresh Art International’s weekly talk show on Jolt Radio has the beat of Miami’s art scene. Live streaming with host Cathy Byrd, our conversations with culture makers—artists, curators, architects, writers and filmmakers—inform and inspire creative communities in our region and introduce South Florida to the world. 

We’re in this for the long haul! Launched in 2011 from a park bench in Brooklyn, Fresh Art International is now a Miami based, globally engaged, live streaming talk radio show, podcast and free online audio archive. In 2017, we received a Knight Arts Challenge Grant to support the growth and outreach of the inventive audio program that transports 20,000 monthly listeners to sites of creativity at the center and fringe of art scenes in Florida and across six continents. Infusing art talk radio about today’s art, design and film with unique sonic experiences and incisive conversations, our mission is to make contemporary art and culture relevant, fresh, inspiring and educational for the cognoscenti and the curious. We aim to stimulate listeners for decades to come! Learn more

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.

Public Hives

Public Hives promotes community pollinators by placing beehives in neighborhoods and parks in Miami. By creating greater access to educational opportunities, and presenting with the arts in mind , Public Hives inspires community members to learn alongside one another while observing and learning from other communities: bees! 

Programming encourages discourse about pollinators from an arts & culture standpoint, with a specific focus on visual arts, poetry, and sound installations. Funding will support artistic workshops and commissions.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.

The Flagler Ecobarge

The Flagler Ecobarge will serve as a mobile decentralized food source and education center for the homeless living along the Flagler Canal system from NW 57th ave to NW 72nd ave. The barge functions as a floating garden made from trash collected from the canals with plants bearing fruits and vegetables along with an aquaponics/ irrigation system using water directly from the lake. Free workshops revolving around DIY agriculture will be held directly on the site. The goal of this work is to lay the foundation for these individuals living under the canal bridges to engage in sustainable practices with minimal resources to be fed organically and, ultimately, survive.

Experiment .001: FocusCoin and CryptoSymphonics by LCHN

.001: FocusCoin and CryptoSymphonics is an experiment focused on cryptocurrencies and their power. This experiment is aimed at finding new ways to work with and disseminate cryptocurrency, and how cryptocurrencies and the decentralized communities surrounding them shape our world today. This experiment includes three components. The first being the development of a new cryptocurrency as the central unit for the experiment called: FocusCoin. The second involves using OpenBCI (an open source Brain-Computer Interface) to translate synchronized EEG waves to generate and mine for the token of exchange that we have built. The final component is an auto generated score, with an accompanying performance, utilizing the fluctuations in price of cryptocurrencies in real time as the source for the sounds.

Levels and Bosses

Funds are requested for the development of Levels and Bosses: a digital game deconstructing the binaries and hierarchies that pervade not only video games, but also the mythologies and social structures of our globalized world. Subverting the boundaries between antagonist and protagonist, environment and individual, abstraction and representation, fine art and video game design, Levels and Bosses challenges understandings of sequential order, progression, and time that govern our late-capitalist imaginations.

White Noise: When Raindrop Whispers and Moonlight Screams in Silence

The body of work developed at the African Heritage Cultural Center residency program in Miami, FL would be an extension of an ongoing series titled "White Noise." White Noise examines the relationship between the living and malleable in coral reef bleaching, nostalgia as a reconstituted memory, and the socio-environmental experience of the African diaspora, particularly Afro-Caribbean’s, through ecological metaphors of black fragility, skin bleaching, and colorism. My goal for this solo exhibition is to develop a holistic body of work where communities of color are the keystone in conversations about seawater rise, climate change, and emergency preparedness.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.

OCR: Lincoln Memorial Park

OCR: Lincoln Memorial Park, a cemetery in Brownsville, and burial site of black luminaries like D.A. Dorsey, Gwen Cherry, Father John Culmer and countless others whose lives and narratives may illuminate our understanding of Brownsville and of Historic Miami.

OCR will mount an exhibition and publish a book featuring on the research, findings and newly commissioned texts in the 1st Quarter of 2019.

“Alosúgbe: remembering (as far as the sun)”

“Alosúgbe: remembering (as far as the sun),” focuses on colonial era and contemporary ethnobotany of the Caribbean region as material source for understanding the migrations of both humans and plants during those periods.

Today the resultant botanicals and food traditions of the Caribbean regional societies provides a long overdue opportunity for discussion of a greater Caribbean culinary heritage now fully integrated, but whose African contribution is still not yet fully appreciated.

Miami as a regional community comes from various parts of the Caribbean and the historical relationships through forced and voluntary migration, both people and food, are part of the region’s legacy.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.

SIDE X SIDE

PageSlayers, a 2016 Knight Arts Challenge winner, is dedicated to cultivating the next generation of artists- and writers-of-color in South Florida. We are partnering with EXILE ooks to produce SIDE X SIDE, a dynamic, interactive correspondence art project that will engage with young artists and writers in Opa-Locka and Little Haiti. We aim to bridge our respective Miami-Dade neighborhoods together by means of mail art, highlighting their unique experiences and neighborhoods. Inspired students between the ages of 8 to 10 years old living and attending public school in Little Haiti and Opa-Locka will be paired with each other as pen pals, creating correspondence art – stamps, envelopes, and other snail-mail memorabilia – while learning about life in another diverse community through the lens of a new friend. By the end of SIDE X SIDE, the not-so-long-distance pals will finally meet IRL and create their own zine together! Separate then together, separate and together, these students will both expand their literary horizons beyond community borders and instill in themselves a civic sense of pride from where they read, write, live and play.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.

This is Little Haiti

"This is Little Haiti" is a multimedia exploration of the people, history and culture of Miami’s fastest gentrifying neighborhood, Little Haiti. Through a new film by award-winning documentarians supplemented by a transmedia website featuring a web series, photography, and essays, the project aims to investigate and preserve the history and cultural vitality of this neighborhood, which is quickly slipping away in the face of potentially intrusive new development and increasing public disparagement of the Haitian community.