Miami Art Museum Shows New Work
[photo credits: Onajide Shabaka © July 2010]
(iPhone image: Onajide Shabaka)
MIAMI, FL.- Miami Art Museum, is currently hosting an exhibition of more than 30 artists based in the Miami area, presenting new and recent artworks in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, environmental installation and performance. New Work Miami 2010 opened to a massive and enthusiastic crowd.
“The aim is to connect Miami Art Museum’s broad audience – which includes a full spectrum of Miami’s population, from avid art followers to the general public – with the exciting and innovative artistic developments unfolding right in our backyard,” said Peter Boswell, MAM assistant director for programs/senior curator. “Nearly every aspect of the production, from the gallery notes, to the title wall, to the sounds in the elevator, will be created by artists in an effort to activate the museum artistically as much as possible.”
Many of the artists are creating works for the exhibition that reach beyond the museum walls, including the Talking Head Transmitters, who will broadcast interviews with both scheduled guests and walk-in MAM visitors over live AM radio. On the lobby monitors, a video artwork by Tatiana Vahan, which depicts scenes from the artist’s childhood embodying a typical, middle-class American family, intermittently interrupted by real TV commercials. Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza will turn the exhibition’s gallery notes from a traditional museum brochure format to a tabloid newspaper that will be distributed at various public locations throughout the city. Other artworks will challenge visitors’ perceptions, such as Don Lambert’s Flatland, a large sculpture with rapidly spinning circles that create the illusion of a vortex-like dept, and an optical phenomenon of suggested color. Felecia Chizuko Carlisle will return regularly throughout the run of the show to continue transforming the installation of “Sketches” in space.
“More than ever the key to participating in global cultural conversations is to speak from within one’s local conditions,” says René Morales, MAM associate curator and co-organizer of the exhibition. “In Miami, we have a richly textured artistic community, one that is increasingly able to make strong and internationally relevant contributions.”
The exhibition will provide a glimpse into the studios and minds of the artists working in Miami. In addition, it will identify and clarify to Miami Art Museum’s audiences various broad patterns in local artistic production. For example, several of the artists in the exhibition focus on aspects of urban life that exist just below the surface of what we observe from day to day, while others focus on developing new approaches to traditional artistic conventions. Among the artists whose work is presented in the gallery space are Kevin Arrow, Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, Jim Drain, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Michael Genovese, Jacin Giordano, Guerra de la Paz, Adler Guerrier, Don Lambert, Gustavo Matamoros, Beatriz Monteavaro, Gean Moreno/Ernesto Oroza, Peggy Nolan, Fabian Peña, Christina Pettersson, Vickie Pierre, Manny Prieres, Christopher Stetser, Talking Head Transmitters, Robert Thiele, Mette Tommerup, Frances Trombly, Tatiana Vahan, Marcos Valella, Viking Funeral and Michelle Weinberg.
What makes this exhibition so good is that the curators did an excellent job, and the quality of the work really shows that the level of art in Miami has gotten better over the years. A second viewing, without the crowds, will be in order soon (with a more elaborated review).
(Part 2)
Miami Art Museum
Miami Cultural Center Plaza
101 West Flagler Street
Miami, Florida, 33130