Women’s Artist Archive Miami (WAAM)

A platform that documents the contribution of women and female-identifying artists using principles of participatory archiving and digital preservation strategies.

These models emphasize democratic processes of selection and curation, where the artist or cultural producer is in control of shaping their living legacy. By creating peripheral archival access points within the community, WAAM will reframe how archival institutions can engage and support local artists, obtaining content from artists across all career stages.

WAAM continued to expand its database after the pilot year by inviting artists to upload content to the digital archive to reflect the diverse and rich cultural production in Miami. Learn more

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

The Bubble Pops Popsicle Project / PROJECTIONS

For over two years, Miami residents contributed their advice learned from adaptive experiences like immigrating or surviving hurricanes in exchange for a hand-crafted bubble popsicle. Each participant’s advice was then integrated into the next iteration of popsicles as the body of knowledge grows and circulates. With collaborator Zlatko Cosic, The Bubble Pops Popsicle Project / PROJECTIONS expands this communal adaptation advice archive by projecting it as a video on the façade of a Miami building. Visitors and locals will be able to view these collective responses –and contribute their own –as they engage with each other during pop-up iterations of the popsicle stand.

The Queer Theory Library

The Queer Theory Library is a free community library and collective space for discussion, experimentation, creation, and knowledge. Hosting texts, books, essays, and zines--and making them available to the public--The Queer Theory Library will provide a scene for greater community dialogue. The Queer Theory Library will also function as an actively growing archive for local artists, writers, and residents to submit their work, writings, and ephemera.

With a mission to radically shift and create new possibilities for queer thought, culture, and creation, the library is focused on futurism. How we frame our past and present influences our future-building; how we perceive and write our realities creates new worlds. The Queer Theory Library, through education and collaboration, aims to enable, empower, and inspire our queer community.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into this artist’s other work on the blog.

At Memory's Edge

Monuments and memorials have often served as placeholders for historical events--physical manifestations of memorialized legacies. Yet they have also functioned as acts of power reinforcing narratives written by the “victors.” At Memory’s Edge is a Miami-based multidisciplinary exhibition and symposium focused around contested monuments. The exhibition will bring together new works by Ashley Freeby, Efrat Hakimi, Iris Helena, and Lihi Turjeman. Examining structures across the U.S., Israel, and Brazil, the exhibition will investigate monuments as wounds of the past--structures that have manipulated the built environment and how we as individuals navigate and negotiate public space and memory. The exhibition will further be activated through a day long symposium featuring panels and roundtable discussions with artists, architects, and scholars aimed at investigating this topic from a historical and global perspective.

Madame Pipi

Madame Pipi is a short documentary that follows the lives of three Haitian female bathroom attendants who work at the hottest nightclubs in Miami. Relatively invisible, underpaid, and under-appreciated, their stories are a journey of triumph, as they massage the temperaments of their patrons for tips. Despite the rising cost of living, these women send remittances to Haiti, fueling a large part of their home country’s GDP.

Club EXILE

Club EXILE is a hybrid disco-chapel installation that celebrates diverse exile identities through social engagement and community driven content. An exile is an uprooted person who permanently leaves their homeland in response to force. Club EXILE looks beyond this definition to ask how marginalized peoples experience different forms of exile.

The installation resembles a shrine; it is filled with metallic fabric, mirror mosaics and multi-colored lights leading to an ornate jukebox. Visitors find a mosaicked bar with a countertop memorial holding 49 ceramic stars for the victims of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub Shooting. The wall is covered with flowers, dedicated photographs, postcards, and a blinking neon sign that announces EXILE. The jukebox houses mix CD contributions that communicate personal histories in response to the prompt: what 10 songs make you think of exile?

Rituals of Commemoration, public art

As the nation debates the role of monuments that commemorate slave owners and Jim Crow, this public counter-monument will commemorate black lives, serving as a placeholder and memorial that ensures the names of victims of police misconduct around the country are not forgotten.

Rather than taking a “this too will pass” attitude, Rituals of Commemoration documents the lives of black men and women killed by police or other law enforcement since 1979: 1,252 so far, and the documentation of murdered lives continues.

This interactive historical marker gives families an opportunity to mourn, while it is also an invitation for viewers to participate in a project that features reflection, social interaction, objects, and actions. Rituals of Commemoration is a physical and reflective space that is indelible to the conversations taking place across the United States regarding police brutality, systemic racism, inequality, and poverty.

18 Years and Counting

Through 18 Years and Counting, I explore the life of my father, Reginald O’Neal Sr., from the year 2002 until now. My father has been incarcerated for 18 years in Florida state prison, and I will be telling his story through paintings, photos, letters, installations, and audio.

The purpose of this project is to give others insight into the experience of someone who is incarcerated. Intimate and personal, the artwork will stem from the perspective of those who are affected by my father’s incarceration, allowing the audience to view him from the point-of-view of his friends and family, as opposed to the rest of society.

Cinemóvil

Cinemóvil is a mobile repertory cinema that operates a state of the art digital projector and sound system out of a 2010 Ford Transit Connect, touring around Miami-Dade County to play films in unexpected outdoor community spaces.

But the vision for Cinemóvil goes beyond the kitsch of a traditional mobile cinema project to serve as an essential conduit for exploring cultural permanence in Miami’s increasingly impermanent communities.

Variety Reinspires

Moving into a senior living community can make older adults feel as if their freedom is limited. Research has shown that social isolation is as detrimental to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In fact, more than 50% of senior-living residents will experience depression or isolation during their stay, making loneliness among seniors a modern mental health epidemic.

Variety Reinspires aims to overcome social isolation through the power of virtual reality and shared experiences. Our project provides opportunities for senior residents to virtually leave the four walls of their community. A curated selection of experiences, each with a discussion guide, will help staff lead conversations.

Supplement Projects

Supplement Projects is a non-commercial arts platform with a focus on highlighting marginalized or under-represented artists, curators, activists, and cultural practitioners.

Every exhibition/program occupies spaces outside of the traditional gallery structure, such as residential homes, empty lots, and vehicles. The project explores ideas of collectivity, inclusivity, and resistance. As a place of comfort and courage, communication and rest, each iteration offers a provocative alternative to the often over-commercialized spaces of art galleries and institutions.

Supplement Projects acts as a community meeting-point run by artists for artists.

GET A CLOSER LOOK at other works from this artist on the blog.

Auto-Mariachi

Auto-Mariachi will bring a performance and related cultural programming to Homestead, Florida, a community that is often excluded in relation to other sites closer to the urban core of the city. The project aims to disrupt typical presentations of mariachi and to show how folk tradition is not static but actively reflects present socio-political conditions. This performance and related programs work to untangle colonial legacy, folk tradition, constructions of masculinity, and conceptual frameworks as a means of understanding Mexican and Latin-American/Latinx identity.

The culminating performance will bring several mariachi groups to serenade each other in the context of the Redland Market Village, a publicly accessible site that boasts a family-friendly environment and free parking. A music workshop organized with the Homestead-Miami Mariachi Conservatory and the Mexican American Council will be organized to introduce the instruments and basic song patterns to an all ages audience. An accompanying lecture will be delivered by Jonathan Clark, UCLA ethnomusicology professor and mariachi historian, to present a more formal analysis of the development of the musical form and traditions.

GET A CLOSER LOOK into the project on the blog.