In ‘Vigil,’ Ana Mosquera Redraws the Systems That Decide Who We Are

Ana Mosquera transforms the gallery architecture in Vigil with an immersive, hand-drawn environment inspired by the Palacio de las Academias in Caracas, creating a space where personal memory, family history, and Venezuela’s political past converge. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

At first, Ana Mosquera’s “Vigil” seems impossibly delicate.

The curved entrance walls at Oolite Arts are enveloped in pale pinks, muted reds and cool blues. Arches rise across the architecture. Columns, patterned surfaces and imagined passageways turn the gallery into something resembling a temple, civic building or ceremonial chamber. Look closer, however, and the decorative surfaces begin to reveal a considerably more bureaucratic origin.

Mosquera built this environment from the security patterns embedded in passports, visas and residency documents—the nearly invisible designs intended to establish that a document, and by extension the person carrying it, is legitimate.

“I collected the patterns from 10 years of documents,” says Mosquera during a studio visit. “There were 100 patterns, and they’re all here.”

That act of extraction and redrawing forms the foundation of “Vigil,” Mosquera’s installation in “Sites of the Self,” Oolite Arts’ annual resident exhibition, curated by René Morales and on view through Sunday, Oct. 4. Spanning approximately 65 feet across the exhibition’s curved entrance walls, the installation incorporates digital drawing, prints, a pen-plotter drawing and an interactive website.

But its real subject is less the passport than the fragile relationship between a human being and the institutions empowered to recognize them.

“What happens when the system that is there to recognize you and give you an institutional identity fails?” Mosquera asks. “How do you continue after that failure?”

For Mosquera, who was born in Caracas and now lives in Miami, that question isn’t theoretical.

She describes spending six years unable to renew her Venezuelan passport after diplomatic relations deteriorated between Venezuela and the United States. Her body, of course, continued moving through the world. Institutionally, however, movement became something else.

“You keep breathing, moving, making your life,” she says, “but you can’t do anything else.”

That contradiction gives Vigil its tension. The installation is visually seductive, even soothing, while its source material belongs to systems of verification, surveillance and control.

Security patterns are normally designed to disappear into documents. Mosquera makes them monumental.

Some derive from guilloché, the intricate interlocking lines historically used in currency and official papers. Others carry national imagery. Mosquera painstakingly studies their geometries and reconstructs them because the technologies used to produce them are intentionally inaccessible.

There is something mischievous about the process.

Mosquera describes herself as becoming “almost like a counterfeiter,” moving from document to document, deciphering patterns and figuring out how to redraw them.

Yet she isn’t manufacturing a false passport. She is stripping the state’s visual language from its original function and asking what happens when an individual takes possession of it.

That transformation is particularly effective because Vigil doesn’t resemble an immigration office. Its architecture borrows from temples, churches, and institutional buildings.

Mosquera’s architectural training—she earned a degree in architecture at Universidad Central de Venezuela before completing an MFA in sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Philadelphia’s Temple University —shapes the installation’s spatial logic. During the studio visit, she traces a connection between religious and governmental systems: institutions change over centuries, she observes, yet many of the structures through which society establishes authority and legitimacy are inherited from earlier religious forms.

The gallery becomes both sanctuary and checkpoint.

Small objects interrupt the vast patterned architecture. Among them are prints made on gold scratch-off paper depicting the topography of the Caracas valley and a centuries-old baptismal record Mosquera discovered while researching her family history.

That baptismal record opened another route into the work.

The document described a child as “illegitimate” and identified the place associated with the record as Tierra Quemada—“burned land.” Mosquera became fascinated by the double exclusion embedded in the language: a person positioned outside an accepted familial structure and connected to a place that itself lay outside an officially recognized geography.

While searching further, she discovered women in her own family recorded as hijas naturales, or “natural daughters.”

What disturbed her was the endurance of those classifications.

Her ancestors were gone, but the documents remained.

“The record continues to exist even though the body isn’t there,” Mosquera says, noting that it could continue assigning a judgment to someone long after death.

By printing these records on scratch-off material—the stuff of lotteries and chance—Mosquera introduces a sharp irony. Birthplace, citizenship, parentage, and access to documentation can profoundly determine a person’s possibilities, yet none are circumstances an individual chooses.

Elsewhere, technology pushes that inquiry toward the present. An interactive component allows visitors to manipulate curves and generate personalized security patterns based on their responses. The viewer is no longer simply looking at the state’s visual apparatus but participating in the creation of another system of identification.

Mosquera is careful, however, not to propose that society can simply abandon documentation. Passports, identification numbers and institutional records provide access to rights and services precisely because societies require systems capable of recognizing people.

Her question is more difficult.

“Is it the best system?” she asks. “There’s nothing else available.”

That ambiguity keeps “Vigil” from settling into a straightforward critique of bureaucracy. Mosquera is interested instead in what comes afterward: how people operate within structures they need but that can also exclude them, and how identity survives when the machinery responsible for certifying it breaks down.

The installation makes that paradox physical.

Visitors enter “Sites of the Self” by walking through Mosquera’s invented architecture, surrounded by patterns once designed to determine authenticity. Here, however, they have escaped the passport. They have become walls, arches, lines and pathways.

The institution’s private language has been expanded so that everyone can see it.

And the person who once needed to prove herself to the system has become the one redrawing its boundaries.

WHAT:  “Vigil,” an installation by Ana Mosquera, part of “Sites of the Self,” curated by René Morales

WHERE: Oolite Arts, 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

WHEN: noon to 5 p.m.,  Monday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026

 COST: Free

INFORMATION: (305) 674-8278 and oolitearts.org/

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

AES brings graffiti spirit indoors in ‘Partners in Crime’ at Central Command

Miami-based artist AES (“The Miracle Ghost”) paints one of his signature ghost figures during a graffiti mission. For AES, street painting remains inseparable from his studio practice, with every work in “Partners in Crime” drawing on decades of shared experiences, camaraderie, and Miami’s evolving graffiti culture. (Photo courtesy of AES.)

A ghost appears repeatedly in the world of Miami artist AES.

Sometimes it is reduced to a few economical black lines: rounded, almost cartoonlike, with dripping edges and two vertical marks suggesting eyes. Its simplicity is deceptive. The figure carries the visual immediacy of graffiti—a mark designed to be recognized quickly—but in AES’ hands, “The Miracle Ghost” has traveled beyond the wall into paintings, mixed-media works and sculpture.

That movement from street to gallery anchors “Partners in Crime,” AES’ solo exhibition at Central Command Gallery in Allapattah, on view through Saturday, Aug. 1.

For AES, who is known professionally by his graffiti moniker and did not want to disclose his legal name for this story, the gallery work grows directly from the experiences, risks and relationships that shaped him as a graffiti writer.

“You don’t lose that,” AES says of graffiti’s hold on his practice. “When you fall in love with graffiti … you just keep doing it. There’s no stopping.”

That persistence helps explain the exhibition’s title.

“Partners in crime” refers not simply to collaborators, but to the people who stood beside AES throughout years of making art—friends who painted with him, watched his back, shared adventures and helped transform an individual act into a collective experience.

“I guess everybody that has come across in my life,” AES says, before narrowing the definition to “the people that have been next to me throughout my journey as a graffiti writer and as an artist.”

From the Wall to the Gallery

The ghost itself becomes an important bridge between those worlds.

In photographs documenting AES at work, the character stretches across concrete and corrugated surfaces with dripping black contours. The surrounding environment matters: cracked walls, discarded objects, industrial architecture, and the darkness of nighttime become part of the image.

Inside the gallery, that vocabulary is reconsidered through paintings, mixed media and sculptural objects. What was once encountered fleetingly on a wall can now be examined at length.

“There are definitely elements of nostalgia,” AES says. “Every piece has something from those adventures.”

“Partners in Crime” isn’t simply graffiti transplanted into a white cube. AES is translating a culture built around movement, improvisation and impermanence into objects meant to remain.

The exhibition’s emphasis on memory also complicates the bravado often associated with graffiti. Behind the adrenaline is intimacy.

AES describes the culture through trust: knowing who is beside you, understanding one another without explanation and recognizing that what appears to outsiders as an individual signature frequently emerges from collective effort.

“It’s teamwork,” he says. “One hand washes the other, and both hands wash the face.”

Finding Space in Allapattah

That sense of collaboration makes Central Command Gallery more than a backdrop for the exhibition.

Its founder, Louie “Lou” Caceres, comes from the same cultural ecosystem the gallery seeks to represent. With decades of involvement in breakdancing and graffiti, he describes Central Command as a home for artists whose work may be considered too raw for more conventional commercial spaces.

“We focus on artists that are urban,” he says, including artists who “might not fit into blue-chip galleries because they’re too raw or have too much of an edge.”

Wynwood once offered graffiti writers an industrial landscape of warehouses and walls. Its eventual emergence as an international arts and entertainment destination gave street art unprecedented visibility while simultaneously changing the environment that helped produce it.

AES doesn’t romanticize that transformation.

“Wynwood has definitely been gentrified,” he says. “It’s not even the shadow of what it used to be.”

What he misses is succinct: “The rawness … that was its identity.”

Allapattah provides a different context. Central Command sits within a neighborhood increasingly associated with contemporary art but still marked by industrial and working-class activity. For AES, its character feels appropriate.

“It’s perfect,” he says. “It’s what we’re looking for.”

Central Command’s challenge, then, is not simply to exhibit street-influenced art but to provide a gallery context without sanding away what made that work compelling in the first place.

Caceres sees himself as a connector—“the thread” between the street and exhibition space.

More Than a Solo Show

That philosophy explains why “Partners in Crime” expands beyond objects hanging on walls.

Created in collaboration with Los Angeles-based Chop’em Down Films, the project incorporates film documentation of AES’ process and graffiti activity, extending the exhibition’s interest in collaboration into another medium. Rather than functioning as an unrelated addition, the camera records something a finished painting cannot: the circumstances surrounding the act of making.

The exhibition closes on Sunday, Aug. 1 with a B-Boy Jam, bringing dance into the gallery’s orbit and reconnecting graffiti with the broader hip-hop culture from which Central Command draws its identity.

“Behind every adventure, every risk and every triumph is someone who helped make it possible,” AES has said of the project.

The Ghost Remains

There is an appealing contradiction at the center of “Partners in Crime.”

Graffiti is frequently temporary. A wall gets painted over. A building disappears. A neighborhood changes. The people who once gathered there move elsewhere.

AES is making objects that attempt to hold onto something considerably harder to preserve: the relationships surrounding those moments.

That may be where his Miracle Ghost becomes most effective.

The figure is simultaneously present and disappearing, a recognizable outline attached to something inherently elusive. In that sense, it feels appropriate for an artist looking back at a Miami street-art landscape that has changed around him while insisting that its original codes—loyalty, collaboration and trust—remain relevant.

“You have to go,” AES says of the exhibition. “You have to see the work in order to really understand what we’re talking about.”

WHAT:  Partners in Crime, a solo exhibition by AES (“The Miracle Ghost”)

WHERE: Central Command Gallery, 1798 NW 20th St., Miami

WHEN: Noon to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m., Sunday. Through Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026

 COST: Free

INFORMATION: (305) 587-8520 and centralcommandmiami.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

Kit Pancoast Nagamura returns with her family legacy at The Kampong

“Backbone,” acrylic on canvas, is featured in Kit Pancoast Nagamura’s “When We Come to Paint,” an exhibition of works by the great-granddaughter of botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild, and selected works of her parents. On view through Saturday, Aug. 15 at The Kampong in Coconut Grove. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Whenever Kit Pancoast Nagamura returns to The Kampong, she’s greeted by a scent that has stayed with her since childhood.

“When I go back to The Kampong, the first thing I notice is the smell of the mangoes,” says the native Miamian visual artist. “I think our first memories as human beings are olfactory.”

That memory inspired “When We Come to Paint,” on view through Saturday, Aug. 15 at the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s nine-acre garden in Miami. The exhibition features 26 large- and medium-scale paintings by Nagamura, approximately 40 mixed-media works she calls “Afterworks,” selected works by her parents and original haiku accompanying many of the pieces.

Nagamura, who spent the first four years of her life at the garden, sees the exhibition as both a homecoming and a reflection on the people and places that shaped her artistic voice.

Her connection to the property runs deep. Nagamura is the great-granddaughter of botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild, whose Coconut Grove estate became The Kampong, now part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Her father, Lester Collins Pancoast, was an architect and watercolorist; her mother, Hélène Muller Pancoast, was a Japanese-style woodblock print artist and co-founder of Miami’s Bakehouse Art Complex.

Yet growing up surrounded by accomplished artists came with unexpected advice.

“My parents always said, ‘Don’t talk about your family,'” Nagamura recalls. “What they meant was, ‘Don’t boast about it. You have to make your own life.'”

A family legacy returns home

Only now does Nagamura feel she is ready to bring those generations into the same conversation.

“My family legacy is pretty heavy duty,” she says with a laugh. “I’m old enough now. I can bring them to the table.”

Visitors first encounter works by Lester and Hélène Pancoast before arriving at galleries devoted to Nagamura’s paintings, allowing connections and departures to emerge organically.

“I wanted people to see where some things came from and where I diverged,” she says. “When you spend enough time with the work, you begin to see the echoes, the similarities, the reverberations that we share.”

Brian Sidoti, director of The Kampong, says that connection made the exhibition feel almost inevitable.

“When we finally sat down together,” he says, “it was one of those conversations where you think, ‘Well, of course you’re going to have an exhibition here.'”

Sidoti believes Nagamura’s work belongs at the garden not simply because of her family history, but because of the way she understands the landscape itself.

“She has such a deep understanding of the collections here,” he says. “She could highlight that through her work.”

Sidoti looks for artists whose work grows naturally from the garden’s landscape, history and collections.

“We’re a small garden,” he says. “That allows us to create exhibitions that feel intimate and connected to our mission.”

Artmaking as Life

Rather than presenting a traditional solo exhibition, Sidoti embraced the idea of pairing Nagamura’s paintings with selected works by her parents, creating what he describes as a “living lineage of creativity.”

“We wanted to give Kit a strong platform for her own voice while also celebrating her parents’ remarkable work,” Sidoti says. “The conversations around how much of their artwork to include were a delicate balancing act. We wanted every voice to resonate.”

The exhibition also marks a return to the place where making art first became part of everyday life.

Her mother often worked on Japanese-style woodblock prints while the children created artwork nearby.

“For me, that meant freedom time and quiet focus time,” Nagamura recalls. “I loved the smell of the inks. Even today, if I open a box of crayons, everything comes back.”

Art, she learned early, was inseparable from observation, patience and daily practice.

“People think you just sit down with a paintbrush and become free,” she says with a laugh. “Not at all.”

A fellowship after college took Nagamura to a country that would shape both her artistic practice and the way she observes the natural world.

After graduating from Brown University with an independent concentration in studio art and literature—while also studying at the Rhode Island School of Design—Nagamura received an IBM-funded fellowship in Japan.

Initially, she imagined herself pursuing journalism rather than painting.

For more than 25 years, she wrote “The Backstreet Stories,” a monthly column for The Japan Times that took her through Tokyo’s neighborhoods in search of the histories hidden behind everyday streets.

“I was basically a flâneur,” she says. “A professional stroller.”

Walking through historic neighborhoods, she often navigated the terrain as much by trees as by streets. Old maps revealed layers of history beneath ordinary places.

Without realizing it, those same ideas gradually found their way into her paintings.

“I realized the maps in my artwork come from this searching for meaning and development and history,” she says.

Throughout “When We Come to Paint,” maps reappear layered with handmade Japanese washi paper, mineral pigments and fragments of calligraphy. Many works are accompanied by original haiku.

“I’ve always resisted the idea that you’re either a writer or a painter,” Nagamura says. “To me, it’s all part of the same artistic practice.”

Nature became the thread connecting those disciplines.

Painting the Natural World

Rather than treating plants simply as botanical subjects, Nagamura paints them as living presences.

“I think plants communicate,” she says. “Science is finally beginning to recognize that, but in Japan that idea has existed for centuries.”

Mangrove roots, banyan trees, coconut palms and shifting light appear throughout the exhibition—not simply as botanical studies, but as reminders of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

One recurring idea comes from the Japanese word komorebi, the shifting sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees.

“Those things are worthy of worship to me,” Nagamura says. “I hope people feel connected to plants in a new way. I hope they fall in love with them—love-affair level.”

That relationship with nature extends beyond the paintings themselves.

Among the exhibition’s most distinctive works are Nagamura’s “Afterworks,” intimate mixed-media pieces created from recycled studio materials. For Sidoti, the series reflects the same spirit of stewardship that defines the garden’s approach to conservation.

One of the larger paintings, “Aubade,” holds particular significance for the artist. The luminous five-foot-square canvas celebrating the first light of dawn represents a turning point in her creative process.

“It spoke to me about translucency,” she says. “Every time I thought I should add another layer, the painting itself seemed to say, ‘I’m perfect the way I am.’ So I listened.”

Another painting, “Road Home,” was inspired by the entrance to The Kampong and Nagamura’s reflections on what the idea of home had come to mean after decades abroad.

“If I had not been obsessing about the meaning of home,” she says, “that painting would not have appeared.”

 WHAT: “When We Come to Paint,” an exhibition by Kit Pancoast Nagamura

WHERE: The Kampong, National Tropical Botanical Garden, 4013 S. Douglas Rd., Miami

WHEN: 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Last admission at 3 p.m. Through Saturday, Aug. 15.

COST: $17 for self-guided admission. $2 discount for visitors arriving by foot, bicycle, Uber or Lyft; EASY Perks Transit Card holders; guests of members (unless a greater discount applies); PreK-12 teachers; and residents of zip code 33133 with ID. Admission includes gardens and exhibition.

INFORMATION: 305-442-7169 or ntbg.org/gardens/kampong

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

MOAD at Freedom Tower Explores How America Shaped Abstract Art

At left, Joan Mitchell, “Untitled” (1960), oil on canvas. At right, Willem de Kooning, “Figures in a Landscape #2” (1976), oil on paper laid on canvas, are among the highlights in “Abstraction as Legacy,” MOAD at the Freedom Tower, Miami, through Sunday, Oct. 18. (Photo by Oriol Tarridas)

Inside the Freedom Tower, where exhibitions focus on immigration, the Cuban exile experience and, for now, a journey through the world of soccer, abstract art isn’t necessarily what people expect to find. On a recent afternoon, a father and son visiting Miami for the FIFA World Cup discovered the Museum of Art and Design galleries on the landmark’s second floor where “Abstraction as Legacy” is hung.

They stuck around and examined each work. For Amy Galpin, that’s exactly the kind of unexpected encounter she had hoped for. The executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College conceived the exhibition as part of the nationwide America250 initiative.

“We wanted to do something that would be unique and distinctive,” Galpin said. “Quickly we came to the idea of abstraction and thinking about the role of abstraction in postwar U.S. visual culture and history.”

The exhibition explores how American abstraction became one of the nation’s most influential contributions to art history.

“It is really the first time following World War II that we see the international art world looking to the U.S. as innovators, particularly what’s happening with the New York School of painters and that’s represented in the show by William de Kooning, Hans Hofmann as well as Joan Mitchell.”

Bringing together many of those artists required borrowing extensively from private collections. Nearly every work in the exhibition is on loan from collectors, artists, and institutions, giving visitors a chance to experience paintings that are seldom exhibited together. Only the salon-style installation at the end of the exhibition is drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.

“For me, it was an incredible opportunity to present work that are not often seen in public spaces in Miami,” said Galpin.

Broadening American Abstraction

There are works by artists who deal with the environment, who are influenced by architecture, and some who focus on the body. “In terms of putting this together, I was looking for all the different story points to bring together. I wanted to make sure that I told certain stories, that there was a lot of different types of abstraction and to show the breadth of abstraction in the United States. And how it would all work.”

The first work visitors encounter is George Morrison’s “Traversal” with its vibrant blues, turquoise and fiery reds welcoming with an explosion of color.

The painting broadens the idea of who belongs in the story of American abstraction, according to Galpin. “For an America250 show I think it was important to have American Indigenous artists – he’s a member of the Chippewa Tribe, spent much of his life in Minnesota, lived in New York and showed alongside de Kooning.”

It was also a way, she said, to start the show in the moment.

“The year of the piece is 1958, and while there were abstract artists active in the U.S. in the early 20^th century, this is when the post-war conversation was really beginning. I wanted a painting that was of that spirit. And this is one of the works, too, in the show that speaks also to the international.”

Nearby is Zilia Sánchez’s “Untitled,” (1960). Born in Havana, she fled to New York to escape the Castro regime. “She became part of a Cuban exile group in New York of poets, of painters, and then spent much of her adult life in San Juan, Puerto Rico,” said Galpin.

Like Morrison, Sánchez challenges a traditional understanding of who shaped American abstraction.

“One of the things that was important in presenting this exhibit is to show that American abstraction is many things… just as our country is not one thing… it’s a multitude of voices.”

And it is fitting at the Freedom Tower, she emphasized. “It speaks to the role of migration. In our country, artists first as immigrants, but also artists moving to different artistic centers and being influenced by different artistic centers. There are also two Cuban artists represented in the exhibit, Sánchez and Carmen Herrera,” said Galpin, pointing out that both were impacted by international influence, and both were women.

Borrowed Works Tell the Story

After Morrison there’s Joan Mitchell paired with Hans Hofmann.

On loan from collector Jorge M. Pérez’s contemporary art space El Espacio 23 in Allapattah is Hofmann’s “Yellow Glow” (1960).

“It’s a small work, but it really packs a punch,” Galpin exclaimed.

Patricia Hanna, the curator of the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, said that the selection of the painting was an intentional and smart choice by Galpin. “It’s a kind of transition between the hard-edge abstraction to more gestural with hints of figuration,” Hanna explained.

As visitors move through the gallery they encounter works by Sam Gilliam, Lloyd Kiva New, Noemí Ruiz, Young-Il Ahn and Vaughn Spann.

The “coda” of the exhibition is a salon-style wall of works from MOAD’s collection.

“The collection was really founded by Miami artists, the two Bobs, Robert Thiele and Robert Huff, who were employed by Miami Dade College as professors and built the collection for this space.”

Hanna said that a show focused on the legacy of abstraction and its history in the U.S. that includes works from Miami collectors at the Freedom Tower was an exceptional choice for America250.

“People think about Miami as everything new and contemporary, but there are art collections in Miami that have this historical perspective.”

WHAT: “Abstraction as Legacy”

WHERE: Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 18

COST: $18, adults $14, seniors (62 and older), $12, students and children (ages 7–12) Free for MOAD members, Miami Dade College students, faculty and staff with ID, and select other visitors. Admission includes access to Freedom Tower exhibitions.

INFORMATION: (305) 237-7700; moadmdc.org

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Honey-Barrel Boat Becomes the Heart of ‘Exile’ at Piero Atchugarry Gallery

The work that gives the exhibition its title, “Exile” is a large-scale installation centered on a refugee boat salvaged from the coast of Miami after washing ashore in Key Biscayne, by Ruben Millares and Antonia Wright at the Piero Atchugarry Gallery in Miami, through Sunday, July 26. (Photo by Rudy Duboué, courtesy of the artists)

An ingeniously engineered refugee boat washed ashore on Key Biscayne in 2022. Four years later, it is the centerpiece of Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares’ exhibition “Exile.”

Now at the Piero Atchugarry Gallery in Miami, this is the last week to catch a glimpse of the vessel and other works in the show. It closes on Sunday, July 26 and is part of the Progressive Art Brunch, an event which features a dozen local galleries open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

In a darkened room in the gallery, Wright and Millares have kept the refugee raft intact, bringing emotional meaning through thoughtfully orchestrated sound and light.

Welded together from steel honey barrels, marked with the words “Cuban Honey” and powered by a pre-Castro Chevrolet engine, the homemade balsa washed ashore at Crandon Beach and was headed to a scrapyard. A friend at the Key Biscayne Nature Center contacted the artists to ask if they were interested.

They jumped at the chance.

“When we saw it, we said, ‘We have to preserve this thing. This is beautiful,’ ” said Millares.

Engineering as an Escape

Rather than altering the boat, Wright and Millares took care to preserve the object exactly as they found it.

“Whoever made it made this beautiful object,” Millares said. “We didn’t want to mess with that integrity of the boat.”

However, the idea of what to do with the salvage didn’t come to the two artists immediately.

After deciding they wanted to do something with it, they arranged to have it towed across Biscayne Bay and up the Miami River to their studio.

“We lived with it for four years,” Millares said. Living with the boat became part of the artistic process.

The artists examined every detail of its construction, discovering an extraordinary level of craftsmanship hidden beneath its rusted exterior.

The vessel was built from welded steel barrels once used by Cuba’s state honey industry.

“When it came to the beach, it had ‘Cuban honey’ on each barrel in English. We started looking into, what is Cuban honey?’ “ Wright said.

Researching the barrels revealed another layer of the story.

Wright said they discovered that the Cuban government produces the honey and sells it to Europe as one of the country’s prized exports.

“They have a whole organic farming system in Cuba because they can’t afford pesticides; everything is still done with ox and cart, so there’s no big machinery. They claim it is the purest honey in the world. It is very regulated,” she said.

Constructing a boat as an escape vessel carried significant risk on its own, but stealing the government-owned barrels to build it added another level of danger.

“If you get caught making any boat in Cuba, you’re not allowed to have a boat,” Millares said. “It was all hand-welded in secrecy.”

The boat’s ingenuity extended well beyond its materials.

“It has a 1942 Chevy engine,” Millares said. “The engineering is incredible.”

A handmade propeller, water-cooling system and carefully hammered steel siding all suggest the painstaking effort required to secretly build a vessel capable of crossing nearly 100 miles of open water. Although handmade from steel barrels and salvaged materials, Wright said its silhouette evokes that of an inflatable Zodiac.

The artists estimate as many as 12 to 15 people could have made the crossing aboard the vessel.

Early ideas for the project were dramatically different.

The artists discussed filming the boat burning at sea or filling it with books before setting it ablaze.

“It felt so heavy,” Millares said. “It was such a loaded object already. How do you intervene in a respectful way?”

Ultimately, they realized the structure itself already carried the emotional weight.

Art From Artifact

Instead of physically altering it, they composed a seven-minute soundscape that emerges from speakers concealed inside the boat.

Deep ocean recordings blend with orchestral timpani, distant explosions, vibrations and the recorded buzzing of bees. An inaudible heartbeat reverberates through the space at a frequency below human hearing, producing vibrations that can be felt by those standing nearby.

“The boat itself is like a being,” Millares said. “As the sound is playing, the boat is physically vibrating, and you’re getting a physical sensation.”

The buzzing bees reference the honey barrels from which the vessel was constructed.

The exhibition’s lighting slowly reveals another haunting detail.

As visitors spend time in the gallery, beams of light emerge through seven bullet holes scattered across the hull.

“We wanted to highlight that,” Wright said. “To talk about the violence that’s embedded on our borders, but also to use the bullet holes to honor these people.”

Both artists have Cuban family roots, making the work personal. Although the boat came from Cuba, Wright and Millares said they intentionally broadened the exhibition beyond a single migration narrative.

“It starts from the Cuban experience for us,” Millares said. “But we were really talking about worldwide migration and all the migration crises around the world. This is a symbol, a metaphor for migration in general.”

Beyond the Boat

The gallery’s second room expands on those ideas.

Wright presents a series of cyanotypes made by placing shattered glass over light-sensitive paper before exposing each image.

She explained the process. “I smash glass over light-sensitive paper and make an exposure using the glass. So, the glass becomes like a negative print to each one.”

The finished works echo the violence suggested by the bullet-riddled boat.

“The photos reflect those moments of violence,” Wright said.

Millares’ silkscreen paintings are built from thousands of numbers cut from financial statements, tax returns and investment documents.

He describes them as “visual cacophonies,” dense fields of information that overwhelm on purpose.

“I just layer number upon number. So much data that you can’t decipher and you can’t come to some conclusion from,” he said. “How many migrants are there in the world? How many applications for asylum? How many people died crossing?”

One collaborative sculpture in the middle of this room embeds the boat’s handmade paddle into a block of South Florida oolitic limestone sourced from material associated with Vizcaya.

“When we first saw the boat, the paddle was with it and when we got back it was gone,” said Millares. They tracked it down to “reunite them.”

Displayed apart from the vessel, “Desembarco” becomes both a marker of arrival and a reminder of everything left behind. “It was this idea of the crossing and the migration, and the paddle being the arrival.”

 

The boat offers no names and no history beyond the evidence welded into its steel. The artists said they never discovered whether the Cuban balseros aboard reached Florida, were intercepted or died at sea.

“We didn’t want to simulate what it was to be on the boat. That wasn’t the idea. We’ve never done it. We didn’t want to try to make something didactic like, oh this is what it is to cross through the Florida Straits,” Millares said.

For Wright, it is a representation of the emotional state of migration that’s been going on for centuries.

“These boats, for instance, have always been a barometer for a level of desperation.”

WHAT: “Exile”: Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; special showing on last day of exhibition, Sunday, July 26, as part of Progressive Art Brunch, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. See the galleries participating in the PAB. 

WHERE: Piero Atchugarry Gallery, 5520 NE Fourth Ave., Miami

COST: Free

INFORMATION: 305-639-8247; Pieroatchugarry.com

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Oolite Arts Expands The Ellies With Awards for Curators, Art Writers

John Abodeely, president and CEO of Oolite Arts, speaks to prospective applicants during an information session about The Ellies awards and the organization’s 2027 Open Call. 

For the first time since launching The Ellies in 2018, Oolite Arts is expanding its annual awards program to include cash awards for curators and art writers.

The new Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing Award is part of Oolite Arts’ 2027 Open Call, with applications open through Friday, July 31 for curators and art writers across Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties. Selected applicants will receive support in 2027.

While many arts grant programs focus exclusively on artists, relatively few provide direct support to the curators and critics whose research, exhibitions, publications and writing help make artists’ work visible and accessible to the public. The new award broadens The Ellies’ investment in South Florida’s visual arts community by recognizing those who contribute to its cultural infrastructure, according to Rina Carvajal, senior director of programs for Oolite Arts.

“The Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing Award represents an investment in the intellectual and critical framework that supports artists and strengthens the long-term vitality of the visual arts in our region,” Carvajal said.

Drawing on decades of experience as a curator and arts administrator, Carvajal said the new award recognizes the critical role curators and writers play in supporting artists.

“Throughout my career, I have seen how transformative thoughtful curatorial work and rigorous art writing can be for artists and communities alike,” she said. “These awards acknowledge that cultural ecosystems are built not only by those who create art, but also by those who help us understand why it matters.”

The award provides $10,000 each to two curators or art writers whose work advances critical discourse in contemporary visual art while supporting the visibility, understanding and long-term development of artists and their practices. It recognizes the role criticism, curatorial research and writing play in connecting artists with broader audiences, institutions and public discourse.

“South Florida is home to an extraordinary community of artists, but a thriving arts scene also depends on the people who research, interpret, document, and champion their work,” Carvajal said.

In addition to The Ellies, Oolite Arts’ annual Open Call includes Studio Residencies, which provide free studio space, professional development and housing support for visual artists; Home + Away Residencies, offering national and international travel opportunities; and the Cinematic Residency, which supports filmmakers through mentorship and professional development.

Applications for The Ellies, Studio Residencies, Home + Away Residencies and the Cinematic Residency will be accepted through the end of July.

Additional information and eligibility requirements at oolitearts.org/ellies-open-calls/

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburst.com.

‘Under Pressure” at Tomás Redrado Art Explores Material and Memory

Installation view of “Under Pressure,” curated by Tomás Redrado, featuring works by Guadalupe Reyna, Kristin Reger, and Tali Halpern at Tomás Redrado Art in Miami. The exhibition is on view through Wednesday, Aug. 5. (Photo by Evelyn Sosa, courtesy of Tomás Redrado Art)

The first impression of “Under Pressure” at Tomás Redrado Art is not one of visual excess but of restraint. The gallery is remarkably spare, allowing each work by Guadalupe Reyna, Tali Halpern, and Kristin Reger to occupy its own physical and emotional space. Rather than competing for attention, the three artists establish distinct rhythms that gradually begin to converse with one another.

Although they work in very different media—encaustic painting, textile, and sculpture—the exhibition finds common ground in the way each artist transforms everyday materials into something contemplative. Wax, thread, fabric, wire and stretched forms all become vehicles for exploring memory, resilience and personal experience.

Reyna’s encaustic paintings possess an unusual luminosity. Built through repeated applications of beeswax and pigment, the surfaces appear to glow from within, revealing evidence of the artist’s hand beneath translucent layers. Rather than depicting literal narratives, the paintings suggest cycles of preservation and change, where each layer simultaneously conceals and reveals those beneath it. The rich reds and earthy tones evoke organic forms without becoming descriptive, their shifting textures unfolding over time.

Across the gallery, Halpern’s textile works introduce a very different tempo. Dense with embroidery, beadwork and stitched fragments, the compositions reward close viewing. Bits of language, images and decorative elements emerge gradually from the fabric, creating visual diaries assembled through countless hours of handwork. While some references draw from contemporary culture and personal identity, the works never feel illustrative. Instead, they communicate through accumulation, allowing meaning to emerge slowly through repeated looking.

Reger’s suspended sculptures activate the gallery in an entirely different way. Thin cables stretch across corners and walls, supporting delicate biomorphic forms that appear almost weightless. Their balance feels precarious without becoming unstable, creating a dynamic relationship between the sculptures and the surrounding space. Empty space becomes an active component of the exhibition, with distance, gravity and tension shaping the installation.

One of the exhibition’s strengths is its pacing. Redrado resists overcrowding the gallery, allowing generous intervals between works. That openness gives each artist room to establish an independent voice while revealing subtle connections across the exhibition. Themes of transformation, vulnerability and endurance emerge naturally through the materials rather than being explicitly stated.

Despite the exhibition’s title, “Under Pressure” does not dwell on anxiety. Instead, it considers pressure as a creative force—one capable of altering wax through heat, tightening thread through repeated stitching, or pulling sculptural forms into delicate balance. The works suggest that change is rarely effortless, yet they also demonstrate the surprising resilience of materials subjected to sustained care and attention.

The result is a thoughtful group exhibition that rewards patience. Rather than delivering immediate answers, “Under Pressure” unfolds gradually, finding extraordinary emotional weight in ordinary materials. 

WHAT:  “Under Pressure”

WHERE: Tomás Redrado Art, 1015 NW 23rd St., Unit 2, Miami

WHEN: 2 to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. Through Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026.

COST: Free

INFORMATION: (305) 774-7740 and tomasredradoart.com 

RECENT ART REVIEWS ON ARTBURST:
Elisa Turner: Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova State of Transition at Dimensions Variable
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ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

The Geometry of Silence: Medina and Tagliafico in Coral Gables

Installation view of “The Silent Paths: Medina & Tagliafico,” featuring works by Carlos Medina and Pedro Tagliafico at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Coral Gables. The exhibition is on view through Aug. 7, 2026. (Photo by Pavel Acosta, courtesy of Durban Segnini Gallery)

“The Silent Paths” at Durban Segnini Gallery in Coral Gables unfolds less as a dialogue between two Venezuelan artists than as an invitation to slow down. Sculptures and installations by Carlos Medina are paired with paintings and mixed-media works by the late Pedro Tagliafico in an exhibition where abstraction communicates through restraint rather than spectacle.

In a city where exhibitions often compete for attention through scale and sensory overload, “The Silent Paths” offers something increasingly rare: space for contemplation. Silence is not presented as emptiness but as an active condition—one that asks visitors to notice subtle shifts of light, material and perception.

Although Medina and Tagliafico worked independently across different generations and mediums, their works meet through a shared commitment to economy of form. Neither artist pursues abstraction as decoration. Instead, each reduces visual language to its essentials, allowing line, geometry and repetition to become vehicles for reflection.

Medina’s sculptures establish the exhibition’s most immediate physical presence. Delicate metal rods extend into space with remarkable precision, appearing almost weightless as they trace geometric forms in midair. Their shadows become as important as the objects themselves, constantly changing as visitors move through the gallery. Rather than occupying space, the sculptures seem to reveal it.

One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths is Medina’s ability to make viewers conscious of their own movement. Walking around his suspended constructions, perspectives continually shift; lines align, separate and overlap, transforming simple structures into changing spatial experiences. The work rewards patience rather than immediate recognition.

Equally compelling are his transparent installations, where slender acrylic elements evoke atmospheric phenomena without literally depicting them. Instead of representing clouds or rain, they suggest fleeting natural events through lightness, rhythm and nearly invisible material. The gallery itself becomes part of the work as reflections and shadows activate the surrounding architecture.

If Medina’s contribution explores space, Tagliafico turns inward toward time.

His paintings and mixed-media works are built through repeated linear gestures that gradually accumulate into delicate grids. At first glance they appear almost monochromatic, but sustained viewing reveals subtle variations in texture, density and tone. The surfaces carry evidence of countless measured decisions, transforming repetition into meditation.

Unlike the rigid geometry associated with much 20^th-century abstraction, Tagliafico’s grids never feel mechanical. They breathe. Small irregularities interrupt their apparent order, reminding viewers that these structures emerge through the artist’s hand rather than mathematical perfection. The result is work that feels simultaneously disciplined and deeply human.

Several pieces reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to material. Linen, graphite, oil, acrylic and wood become active participants in the image rather than passive supports. Time is allowed to remain visible through slight chromatic shifts and accumulated surfaces, giving the work a quiet physical presence that resists reproduction.

What makes “The Silent Paths” particularly successful is that neither artist overshadows the other. Rather than establishing a hierarchy, the installation allows their distinct practices to resonate across the gallery. Medina’s suspended linear structures echo Tagliafico’s drawn grids, while Tagliafico’s restrained surfaces provide a contemplative counterpoint to Medina’s spatial interventions. This creates unexpected visual conversations unfolding across rooms.

The exhibition also reflects Durban Segnini Gallery’s commitment to Latin American abstraction while expanding beyond familiar narratives of geometric modernism. Instead of emphasizing historical movements, the presentation focuses on ideas that remain remarkably contemporary: perception, presence, materiality and the act of seeing.

Perhaps the exhibition’s greatest achievement lies in its confidence. It never demands attention through dramatic gestures or elaborate interpretation. Instead, it trusts viewers to slow their pace, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through observation. That confidence feels refreshing in today’s accelerated visual culture.

“The Silent Paths” demonstrates that abstraction can still surprise, not through complexity alone, but through clarity. Medina and Tagliafico show how the simplest line, carefully placed, can reshape the perception of space and time. Their works linger beyond the gallery, inviting sustained reflection on the expressive possibilities of restraint.

WHAT:  “The Silent Paths: Medina & Tagliafico”

WHERE: Durban Segnini Gallery, 3072 SW 38th Ave., Coral Gables

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Through Friday, Aug. 7.

COST: Free

INFORMATION: (305) 774-7740 and durbansegnini.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova Explores Barriers and Migration at Dimensions Variable

At Dimensions Variable, co-founder Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova draws inspiration from objects evoking immigrant travel across hostile boundaries in “State of Transition.” (Photo by Francesco Casale)

Cuban-born artist Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova is a seeker. He mines mundane remnants of immigrants’ uncertain travel. He seeks out their unsettling and imperfect beauty. A cotton tank top discarded as temperatures soar.  A plastic bag could double as a flimsy, unlikely suitcase.

In his solo show “State of Transition,” Dimensions Variable co-founder Rodriguez-Casanova draws inspiration from objects evoking immigrant travel across hostile boundaries.

Materials comprising the five sculptures here are reminders of such travel. His art often incorporates objects that could have been left behind.

Indistinct found photos integrated collage-like into his sculpture may stand for memories of places abandoned or encountered during hard-to-forget moments. The photos seem to show a rocky beach, a river skirting mountains, a chain-link fence enclosing an empty lot, an idyllic grassy field.

Rodriguez-Casanova endows his art with reminders of his own past, asserting that one of his biggest influences was his own immigration to Miami in 1980 as a child during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba.

A longtime Miami-based sculptor whose resume cites exhibits in New York, Cuba, Colombia as well as Miami, he has shaped these various remnants into precarious structures for “State of Transition.” They inhabit ghosts of architectural stability. They resist a readily mapped sense of place. Those indistinct photos are gleaned from his family archive. Combined with objects like fences and fabric in his art, they poignantly evoke urban migrations, travel to uncertain destinations.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research of the migration routes,” he says, mentioning studies conducted by anthropologist Jason De León. “Most of his research is happening on the border of Mexico and Arizona. . .Fences are being built where it is so desolate.” They are far from towns where immigrants might easily be spotted. Still, those fences along desolate borders are “incredibly difficult” to cross. “So this in the broadest sense is about barriers that we’re constructing in this country,” he says of his current exhibit.

Educated at New World School of the Arts and Ringling College of Art and Design, he has a notable history with boundaries and barriers from early in his career. They’ve intrigued the artist as a reminder of the working-class life he shared with his family in Miami. Growing up, he helped his electrician father on home-improvement projects, kindling his interest in making sculpture with sly architectural references.

In 2007, Rodriguez-Casanova created “A Fence Obstructing Space” for the VIP lounge at the Scope Miami art fair. He installed a black aluminum fence with faux Rococo flourishes across the lounge entrance, leaving visitors only a 32-inch opening through which to enter. The deliberately obstructive work commented on gated communities and the exclusivity of the art world. He ensured the opening was ADA compliant.

“Inaccessible Gazebo” in 2008 was installed for six months at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, N.Y. Railings completely encircled the Victorian-styled white vinyl structure, allowing no point of entry. It implied an overtly picturesque challenge to the appearance of security and shelter in suburban gazebos.

And yet, in this more recent iteration of his perennial interest in boundaries and barriers, his art seeks a nuanced reinvention of what it means to face up to fences. “I’ve been exploring them as a lattice or receptacle for catching things. They’re holding on to remnants. . .keepsakes or artifacts, if you will,” he says.

Elements in the largest sculpture here, “Gate Composition (Insulated),” can be read almost like lines in a poem. Rose-printed fabric is suspended behind a black metal fence. Does it signify a curtain veiling a window for privacy? A sheet for much-needed bedrest? The answer is at least both. Packing straps in an incongruously peppy shade of yellow suggest unwanted restraint, even a kind of prison. They tightly bind the fence to what could be a white painted rectangle of wood scavenged from a modest bungalow.

Trapped within this sculpture is a pink panel of insulation. It defies its conventional purpose to protect home dwellers from extreme temperatures. Pressed close to the fence, raw lumber is neatly constructed to evoke an empty picture frame or a window lacking any view to the outside. The claustrophobic, layered composition itself seems to narrate disjointed attempts to reinvent home during a taxing journey.

In the four smaller pieces, the artist’s signature minimalist sense of metaphor is not always successful.  These works tend to possess a barren simplicity. They are composed of sparsely assembled ordinary objects, like a wooden mop handle, that do not resonate with broader significance. Instead, the smaller pieces function to some extent as call-and-response chants, reiterating imagery and themes more fully developed in “Gate Composition (Insulated).”

An exception is the smaller, but still poetically complex, “Composition (Earth).” It’s chiefly composed of a found travertine cube. Attached to the cube’s surface is a photo of a grassy field, alluding not to sleek architecture where one would expect to find this building material, but to its earth-bound origins. The cube is scarred by a peculiar indentation. “Probably it was considered damaged in some way. Maybe it was a mistake,” the artist says.

For him, that “mistake” resembles a crack in the earth. Folds of fabric partly cover the cube, as if, he adds “leaking” from the earth. A sponge rests near the fabric. At first glance the sponge is breathtakingly, absurdly banal.

Surely one implication is that the damaged earth, undergoing its own state of transition, may be cleaned by this vivid emblem of domestic immigrant labor.

WHAT: “State of Transition—Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova”

WHEN: 1 to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday or by appointment only. Through Friday, Aug. 21, 2026.

WHERE: Dimensions Variable (DV), 101 NW 79th St., Miami

COST: Free

INFORMATION: 305-606-0058 and dimensionsvariable.net

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts, featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

 

Fountainhead Artist Residency Leaving Morningside for Bigger Home

An AI-assisted image shows the front of Fountainhead Arts’ new artist residency. AI was used to change the building’s paint color and add the striped awnings; the structure is unchanged. (Courtesy of Fountainhead Arts)

Fountainhead Arts is leaving the Morningside house that has defined its artist residency for 18 years. The move will, for the first time, separate studios from artists’ living quarters and give the organization twice the space of its previous location.

The Miami nonprofit runs a year-round residency program that brings three artists at a time from across the country and internationally to live and work in Miami for a month.

The new property is located in what Fountainhead Arts founder and executive director Kathryn Mikesell described as “a tucked-away spot just west of Midtown and just north of Wynwood.” She did not want to disclose the exact address because, she said, the space is still being prepared for its public debut.

Mikesell sees the expansion as a way to do more than improve the residency: It will allow Fountainhead to develop residencies for curators and art writers, revive a program that connected Miami artists with one another and expand its public programming.

“Fountainhead is all about connections . . . connections between the artists, the artists and the community, but it’s also about connecting with Miami and people in the community,” she said.

At roughly 4,000 square feet, the new location is about twice the size of Fountainhead’s 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom residence in Miami’s Morningside neighborhood. It includes a two-story 1950s duplex and a separate one-story building.

“The big difference is that the artist studios are private and located steps from the home where they’ll be living,” Mikesell said. “Their living space will be separate from their studios and connected by a beautiful courtyard.”

At the current house, artists have lived and worked in the same space.

“We’re still keeping the home aspect of it, because that’s a very important part of Fountainhead,” Mikesell said. “A home is welcoming, and that’s one of the most important aspects to Fountainhead, is that it be welcoming to all.”

Fountainhead will take over the new location in September but continue operating its residency at the Morningside home through the end of the year. Mikesell said the organization did not want to disrupt the experience of artists who had been selected and were expecting to live and work at the longtime residency.

Mikesell expects the new space to be introduced during Miami Art Week in December and officially start operations there in January. The Morningside home will be sold.

The ground floor of the two-story residence has four bedrooms and three bathrooms. A separate two-bedroom apartment upstairs initially will allow Fountainhead alumni to return to Miami for visits.

The second building will contain private studios for the three visiting artists who participate in each residency cycle. Once Fountainhead has settled into the new location, Mikesell also plans to launch residencies for curators and art writers.

Fountainhead will rent the property for what Mikesell expects to be five to 10 years, using that time to test new programs and determine what the organization needs before eventually buying or building a permanent home.

Fountainhead is now in fundraising mode for the move, including the cost of rent, renovations and furnishings.

“We want to grow, but I’m very conservative in my approach to growth,” Mikesell said. “I think it’s very important to try things first, kind of work out the kinks, see what works, see what doesn’t work, reevaluate and then move forward.”

The move comes as Fountainhead is changing how it selects artists for its residency. For 2027, the organization has replaced its limited open call with a full nomination process. Artists will be nominated by a group of curators hand-selected by Fountainhead, along with alumni artists from the program.

“We have curators spread around the world, so that will ensure that we are truly reaching globally for the artists that we are bringing to Fountainhead,” Mikesell said.

Fountainhead’s leadership team will make the final selections in October.

What won’t change is the residency’s makeup: only three artists will participate in each cycle. Mikesell said the small group is central to a program in which artists who often have never met live together and become immersed in Miami’s arts community.

The move also will allow Fountainhead to revive MEET, a pre-pandemic program that brought Miami artists together over a meal with no formal agenda. Mikesell said connections made through the gatherings led artists to find roommates, studio space and collaborators, and sometimes even life partners.

The program ended during the pandemic and did not return, in part because of the cost of hosting it in restaurants. With its own courtyard and gathering spaces, Fountainhead expects to bring it back next year.

The new location also will allow for more public programs, including artist-led dinners and talks, while continuing the monthly Open Houses that invite the public into the residency.

Founded in 2008, Fountainhead has hosted more than 600 artists. Its earlier footprint also included a complex in Little Haiti with about 30 artist studios that Fountainhead operated for nearly 15 years before the property was sold.

Mikesell said the cost of Miami real estate makes recreating that studio complex unrealistic now. With the new space, Mikesell said Fountainhead’s focus will remain on building relationships: among visiting and Miami artists, and with the curators, writers, collectors and institutions that can bring their work to a broader audience.

The new location came about through one of those relationships. Alex Degwitz, the son of arts leader and collector Milagros Maldonado and a close friend of Mikesell’s, knew she had begun looking for a new home for Fountainhead and told her he might have the right place. Maldonado owns the property, according to Mikesell.

Mikesell and the Fountainhead team visited and immediately saw its potential.

“Relationships are everything,” Mikesell said. “If you can create an environment that fosters that, it can be a game changer.”

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburst.com.

Wolfsonian Goes Shoe Crazy with ‘Foot Notes’ Exhibition  

Shoe displays from the Bullock’s Wilshire department store, Los Angeles, are part of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection and are one of the design objects on display as part of the Miami Beach museum’s latest exhibition “Foot Notes: Shoes, Symbolism & Society.” (Courtesy of The Wolfsonian –Florida International University, Miami Beach, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection)

Could anyone go without shoes for even a day? Footwear is one of those important things most of us take for granted, an everyday object that we nevertheless can’t live without. Now a new exhibition open at The Wolfsonian–FIU uses the museum’s extensive collection of 19th- and early 20th-century design objects to adjust our perceptions of the things we put on our feet.

Far from a mere collection of footwear through the ages, “Foot Notes: Shoes, Symbolism & Society,” which is on display through Feb. 28, 2027, defies expectations from the very start. In the first room, a hulking pair of Nazi overboots, used by German infantry to guard against frigid Russian winters during World War II, serves as the centerpiece of a display on the symbolism of footwear.

Propaganda posters from the era from both the democratic United States and the Axis powers surround the imposing, heavy-duty boots, covered in animal hair and insulation. If one were to imagine a real-life version of Orwell’s vision of “a boot stamping on a human face,” this would be it.

“Foot Notes” is the first show at the Wolfsonian by Danielle Charlap, who joined the museum as curator in November 2025 and describes working at the museum as “a dream job.” Charlap got the idea for the show not from a shoe, but from a bizarre machine she found in the Wolfsonian’s collection catalog: a shoe sizer that beams X-rays at people’s feet. The dangerous-in-hindsight 1940s contraption inspired the curator to dig deeper into the museum’s holdings, uncovering everything from propaganda and advertising artifacts to “random recreational footwear” like ice skates and bouncing toy “rocket shoes” with springs attached to the soles.

“We are not a fashion museum, but it turns out we had so many materials related to shoes,” Charlap says. “It really just became a lens into the collection, and I remember in the beginning we were thinking, was there enough material? And it turns out there was way too much.”

While most of the show is sourced from the Wolfsonian’s holdings, a few key works were secured through loans. The Ferragamo shoes came from the company’s museum in Florence, for instance. Though the show is light on sneakers due to the collection’s focus on objects from before 1950, they did manage to secure a gaudy “Solid Gold” Adidas sneaker from the Miami Shoe Museum designed by Jeremy Scott. The shoe ties together a section on the theme of Mercury, the Greco-Roman messenger god who wore winged sandals. Posters for Goodyear Tires and the 1939 Foire de Paris retail expo flank the flamboyant shoe.

Elsewhere, the show features extensive discussion of the materials used to make shoes and how industrial processes and design innovations changed the nature of our everyday footwear. Two sections profiling famous designers highlight this ingenuity.

A display of vintage shoes by Salvatore Ferragamo details both the Italian designer’s reputation as “shoemaker to the stars” and the constraints he faced during his career. One rainbow-colored shoe with a bulky heel, created for singer Judy Garland in 1938, uses lightweight cork, while other models repurpose cellophane and rattan, a result of creativity enforced by the economic and political environment of fascist Italy.

A set of different imperatives motivated the work of Beth Levine, the pioneering designer behind the Herbert Levine brand. Though the sexism of the times forced Beth to take a back seat to her husband as the face of the company, her work dominated the mid-20th century American shoe market and brought avant-garde ideas into shoe design. Most famously, Levine pioneered the fashion boot, giving the utilitarian footwear a sleek, feminine form that sparked a craze after Nancy Sinatra wore the boots to promote her hit song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

Other innovations include the “no-shoe,” a heel secured to stockings via adhesive that serves as a precursor to more contemporary designs such as Demna Gvasalia’s “Speed Trainer” sneaker-socks for Balenciaga.

One of the most unique artworks welcomes visitors in the museum’s Art Deco lobby: A giant inflatable pair of legs wearing stiletto heels. The sculpture by artist Ann Slavit, titled “Della (Waiting),” serves as a commentary on the degradation of women in the media. Slavit designed and named the artwork after Della Street, played by Barbara Hale, the secretary to lawyer Perry Mason on the 1950s and ’60s legal drama of the same name. While Street is depicted as a staunch professional in the show itself, Slavit observed that the camera consistently cut to her legs, servicing the male gaze and objectifying the character.

“I was thinking about, as I was growing up in the ‘50s, how crazy it was that the moms around us were literally wearing high heels all day long just to take care of the kids, cook, do laundry. Because there were less and less women working at that time, at least in my memory,” Slavit recalls. “I was also aware of billboards where they were using women to sell cars, or objectifying women by body parts, and that memory kind of stayed with me.”

As well as being a collision between feminism and pop art, two of the dominant movements at the time, “Della (Waiting)” also serves as an early example of inflatable art, a medium made famous in recent times by the likes of KAWS and Cyril Lancelin. Slavit decided to allow the piece to be used in the show after some discussion with Charlap about the show’s concept, and the idea of exploring history and changing social trends through common objects. In the process, the artist herself ended up connecting the same childhood experiences she’d used in her art with some of the objects in the show.

“She was talking about the X-ray machine, and I had forgotten all about it, but I actually remember that from getting shoes,” Slavit says. “I think it takes a kind of awareness to point these things out, because we take them for granted. Like now, people are okay about wearing sneakers…When I was growing up, you never wore sneakers unless you were playing a sport. I mean, you put them on to play basketball, but you didn’t walk around in sneakers. No one walked around in sneakers.”

It’s a powerful observation: Few things change more quickly and dramatically than fashion.

“We’re moving so fast that, in a way, slowing down to think about what we’re wearing means a lot,” Slavit says. “Where is it made? Who made it? All those kinds of questions.”

WHAT: “Foot Notes: Shoes, Symbolism & Society”

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday. Through Feb. 28, 2027.

WHERE: The Wolfsonian –FIU, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach

COST: $12 for adults, $8 for seniors, students with ID, and children ages 6 to 18; free for Florida residents, children under 6, state university system students, faculty and staff, and active U.S. military and veterans with ID.

INFORMATION: 305-531-1001 or wolfsonian.org.

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com