Art loft is brought to you by the Friends of South Florida PBS.

Art loft.

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, the Art of community, we meet, a local program taking center stage during Basel.

Miami came to existence with South Beach and then Art Deco.

And I feel like just to kind of be a part of that lineage of kind of the art in the city is important to me.

But also, like, I think it's important to bring it outside of the galleries to the public so they can see it as well.

A Broward Sculpture building community, one work at a time.

It's not so much the art that's created, but the process of the creation.

That is important not to minimize the final product.

But it was through the years of creating art and the process of creating the art.

That I discovered things about myself.

I've come to know that my art is my purpose.

And my mission.

And if it were my ministry.

I create art with purpose.

And a Palm Beach vending machine dispensing tiny treasures.

I really wanted art to become accessible.

I wanted to activate space.

And I wanted people to feel good, feel valued, feel nostalgia, feel joy.

And I feel like art is the best way to make that connection.

It also supports local artists, so that was a big draw for me there.

When Art Basel comes to town every December, the eyes of the of the international art world are focused on South Florida.

And with that huge audience, the city of Miami Beach takes the opportunity to put local artists at the forefront.

As you can imagine, these are different spaces that you wouldn't normally walk in and see contemporary art.

For any passerby here that come across this piece, they're going to look up and be like, whoa, what is this?

This is I think it's the role of an artist to show the work or is narrative everywhere he can.

A project like this, it gives me a reason to walk into 12 different hotels, to see what it's like in their lobby.

I can see is that doing an extra bonus for even for someone who lives here?

No vacancy is a program from the city of Miami Beach that fits culture and tourism together.

We commissioned 12 artists to create new works at 12 hotel properties throughout the city.

The No Vacancy program is open to Miami and Miami Dade County artists.

We really want to be able to have the opportunity for the artists to show their work during the most iconic time of the year for us.

Obviously, we have Art Basel Miami Beach.

The artists are not aware of the spaces that they will be paired with, and that's the job of our curatorial team matching these specific works of art in these specific sites.

My name is Allison Matherly.

I'm Jeffrey Noble and we are nice and easy.

So this work above us here is titled Soft Squeeze is comprised of a collection of custom made inflatables.

They take the form of pool floats and flamingos, gators, turtles, a lot of the sort of cliche wildlife that you find here in South Florida.

We're interested in human production and how we're always imprinting it with nature.

It is interesting that you would kind of have to apply without knowing where you're going.

We did have that in the application, wanting it to be outdoors instead of indoors.

We thought this was a unique location where we could utilize this alleyway, have the work suspended overhead, kind of wedged in here almost as a metaphor for how development civilization sort of encroaches upon nature and sort of, you know, squeezes it.

Yeah.

The moment I knew that I would be here at Surfcomber, I knew I had a chance to make it work.

That falls within what I tend to think about when I think about South Florida.

The work I'm displaying is titled object, Landscapes and Things is this sort of gathering of textures, objects, and even views of landscape that I've made into three works a photograph, a sculpture, and a painting.

This painting is made of multiple images that begins with a view of a citrus plant.

There's a mockingbird.

There's a view of pine rock forest.

A street and it sort of ends with an orchid in the bottom.

This is a painting.

Of which I speak of.

How do we organize landscape?

How do we organize place?

And paintings tend to be one of these places where we organize according to.

Value.

This sculpture has to do more with the textures of actual landscape.

It repeats the sort of plants that are outside.

So we have some orchids here.

We have a piece of wood that is a mangrove, and then the fabric which is the more dominant part is folded on itself.

And the last piece is a photograph of a still life made of various flowers arranged for the camera.

I think this work is as much for someone who lives here as for someone who's visiting.

I think there's something for both.

This year I was fortunate enough to do a project within the Casa Faena.

This work IRC is a representation of whimsical portrayals of Floridian wildlife that are suspended in this room.

They are made of mirrored rose gold plexi which are delicately suspended within the space.

The feeling when you walked into Casa Fina, you feel this kind of old Florida style, and you can see kind of in the details of the architecture.

And to bring something that felt contemporary in the space felt like a good juxtaposition.

The delicate nature of the materials, kind of suspended, felt similar to the kind of the delicate nature that we exist in and our relationship to it.

I also feel like within that, the reflection of the mirror kind of asks us what our responsibility to that environment is as well.

The title of this piece that I created specifically for the Cadillac Hotel is titled Rhapsody for a Beloved World.

I think everything is in the title.

I am talking about love.

I am talking about sharing ideas, sharing concepts to create a better world.

The piece is in backlight because I wanted to highlight the good part of the world.

You can see a little white girl and a little black boy.

They are playing together.

What I love in this connection between both of them.

It's not care about people, not care about the world.

We are there, but we are enjoying the world.

And I think that that is what we should do every day.

This is literally the first time I've shown anything in Miami.

I've been showing internationally for 4 or 5 years, but this is my hometown debut.

I began to draw these marks, and this mark that's in the drawings is this thing we call the Ray in the studio.

It's just a weird squiggly ray that I literally have been drawing now drawing now for 35 years.

We call these dodecagon drawings, and they're multicolored and they're always different and they're always freehand.

And so they look almost alike, but not quite.

A lot of my practice is about memory.

Collective memory that we all share.

And the dodecagon represents the hours on a clock, the months in a year, the zodiac, in essence, the passage of time.

I've taken the ray that I've been drawing forever, making the ray 12 times in a 12-sided figure.

And that integrates the ray drawings into the practice in which I'm always trying to think about and talk about the passage of time.

When I ask somebody what their most vivid collective memory is, they immediately go to it and it takes them to a place they haven't been in a very long time.

If I can do that with a piece of art, I'm pretty happy.

No vacancy is an incredible example of how my city, the city of Miami Beach, has stepped up and begun to lead.

When it comes to culture in our South Florida community.

The great thing about it is that it runs much longer than Art week, and it gives the opportunity for our residents and our visitors to kind of make a day out of it, like a scavenger hunt.

We have maps available.

You can grab a bike and spend the day with your friends visiting each of the 12 locations.

Miami came to existence with South Beach and then Art Deco, and I feel like just to kind of be a part of that lineage of kind of the art in the city is important to me.

But also, like, I think it's important to bring it outside of the galleries to the public so they can see it as well.

Artwork is made to be lived with.

Artwork is not necessarily made to exist in a museum.

Artwork is made to be in your living room, in your bedroom, in your hallway, in the foyer, or a lobby of a hotel.

It's meant to be shared.

In Broward.

Self-taught artist and sculptor George Gadson has been creating works focused on community for over three decades.

His work has been shared by the NFL, the white House, and cities across South Florida.

I'm fulfilling my purpose.

Several years ago, I wasn't quite sure who I was.

I graduated from Duke University to become a Baptist minister, and when I graduated, this was 1975.

I really didn't know who I was.

I went into the banking business in that career.

It was very stressful, and I just decided that I needed a hobby, something just to get away from the stress and over time.

Fast forward many, many years later, I've come to know that my art is my purpose and my mission.

And if it were my ministry.

I create art with purpose.

I'm getting a degree in theology and.

What am I going to do with it?

I don't know.

I was just confused.

And that's why I call this confused.

In 1974, I studied in Spain at the University of Valencia, and my roommate, who didn't speak a word of English, had taken this candid photo of me sitting on the bed like this and looking back years later, after I got the photograph and I was doing art and thought I'd explore doing a portrait, I thought I'd do a portrait of myself.

In the event that it didn't turn out right, I'd be the one that would be offended.

Nobody else would be.

I completed the painting.

But at the same time, many, many years later, I looked back on this painting and I remember where I was mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

I was in a lost place.

Over time, when I wanted to explore outside of painting.

I decided that I'd do a sculpture and I'll never forget it was a first.

It was a paper mache sculpture of a lady on a bus from waist up, and I made the paper myself and everything.

That was the beginning.

And then got involved in the business community in 95 and heard of the South Florida Super Bowl, looking a gift for a gift to give to the NFL team owners.

And I proposed a sculpture of the kicker I did quarterback.

Later in 1999, I did a sculpture for the South Florida Super Bowl.

The face is not a distinct face, no distinct facial features, and I purposely did that so as to leave the ethnicity up to the viewer.

It's a human being who is the kicker?

If it's a commission, the process really starts with actually meeting with my clients and getting a sense from them what they envision about the art that they'd like to, you know, see and communicate.

If it's going in a public space where, you know, people in the public will enjoy it for years to come.

I also do research, research about the space, its current use, as well as maybe its past use, so that in the work that's created can speak to both past and present.

And then I just sort of meditate and pray and just go, okay, so how are we going to pull this all together?

And eventually it comes together.

You know, it's not a ministry like evangelizing as much as having people have an art experience, either through art classes.

You know, I worked with kids in foster care, and I worked with adults who never have experienced creating.

Then I use the art as teaching moments, and particularly with kids and adults who don't feel like, you know, well, you know, I don't have anything to offer.

And I use the the art term, you are a limited edition.

There's only one of you.

So therefore, because there's only one of you, there's great value.

Kids in foster care that I had the privilege of working with over time.

And they did their body cast from the waist up, and I had them decide which pose they wanted to to do.

And then the interesting part about this project is That element of trust.

So they had to trust me that I was going to make sure that they were safe and that they were going to be okay.

Once the cast were done, of all the kids that were involved, then they had an opportunity to paint their body cast and to use that as a way of expressing where they are or who they are at that particular moment in time with these kids.

You know, having giving them that venue and that opportunity for self-expression, it was it was transformative.

In the mornings when I do my morning devotions and read and spend time with God, I have these poems that are dropped in my spirit and I type them.

I would type them and, and, or just sort of thoughts I would type in and you know, I said, you know, I'm going to publish these because there may be someone out there who is at a place where I am now or maybe at a place later.

And these poems might speak to them.

So my book is titled entitled Art Psalms A Compilation of poetry and art.

My paintings, my sculptures, my photography words.

We say them without knowing the impact they have.

As a boulder falls into a river's path, changes its course forever, so too can words dropped into the spirit.

Heart and mind of a listener changed their destiny.

Words.

What would they be?

Would they tear down or build up?

Would they cause pain or bring healing?

Would they bring tears of sadness or tears of gladness?

Would they bring death or life words.

And this is a photograph that of that I had created from styrofoam that I carved.

And these are the different words freedom, hope, wisdom, peace, love.

It's not so much the art that's created, but the process of the creation that is important not to minimize the final product.

But it was through the years of creating art and the process of creating the art that I discovered things about myself.

And once I discovered it, then I did not let it remain there, dormant, but brought it alive.

It's never too late to go through the process of discovery.

Each one of us has gifts inside of us and talents inside of us.

Take a moment to explore what's inside of you.

And that's what I did.

And.

And I'm so glad I did.

I there's not a day that goes by that I don't do art.

Commissioner.

The local arts group Connecting People new to collecting with local artists, is in its seventh season of community building.

Here we meet Commissioner artist Antonia Wright, whose latest work has been added to the Perez Art Museum, Miami's permanent collection.

I work in a range of medium, but I actually went to graduate school for poetry, and while I was in graduate school, I was going to a lot of poetry readings, and I was hearing poets read their work.

And it really blew my mind because poems that I thought were really serious, all of a sudden I would hear a poet read the work, and I realized it was so funny and really dry and witty.

And I loved how the meaning of the work really was co-created in the public.

And I loved the performativity of it.

And then I discovered performance art.

I was living in New York City, and I was just testing out all these performances right there on the sidewalks.

And eventually I realized that I needed the technical skills to be able to capture this kind of work.

I went back to school to study photography, which then I realized a lot of the work needed a video.

Then I learned how to make video, and from there I hit the ground running.

I made performance- based work using my own body for about ten years, and the projects were really physical.

Like I throw myself through sheets of glass.

I've covered myself with bees.

I've fallen on a frozen lake.

All of this work was really about showing the power and the vulnerability of the body.

Every performance project that I do, I push myself to the limit.

My mantra in making all work is to be daring and insightful.

And I find that when I have an idea and I stop sleeping, that's when I know I'm taking a big risk in what I am doing.

Like this piece with the bees.

It took me two years to train to make this, and they told me I was able to have the bees on me for 20 minutes or they would begin to act erratic, which I didn't want to learn what that meant.

So that was it.

I had 20 minutes to shoot this video or it was going to be a total fail.

And that's kind of how I enter every project.

Like, I just hope that I do enough research that I can pull it off.

Ultimately, what led me to stop making a lot of this performance for video work and to switch into immersive installation or sculpture was that I had been making this work for about ten years, and each of the projects involved my body doing a different, logistically challenging action.

And I kind of had a feeling if I keep doing this, it might become formulaic or it's just myself doing a different thing.

And I was like, what am I going to learn?

And I thought, well, how do I kind of capture that intensity of the moment, but not using my own body?

How can I create that for the for the audience.

Then I started creating immersive installations where like instead of doing something to my own self, I would create an environment where the audience would feel what I normally feel.

And these are immersive installations of sound and light, multi-channel videos and sculpture as a surrogate for the body.

I have a piece currently on view at the Perez Art Museum, and it's called State of Labor, and the piece is a data sonification.

I wrote a code.

It's an algorithm that reflects the increase in mileage.

A person will now have to travel to get an abortion with the overturning of Roe v Wade.

I sonify all of this mileage, and the sounds in the algorithm were obtained by partnering with a midwife.

And so the sounds in this composition are very intimate and they're intimate in the same way.

The decision to have a child or not is intimate.

I would say a lot of my work is inspired by an idea the same way a poem would start, and then I learned the skills necessary to make each project.

For me, commissioner is synonymous with community.

What they do is so fantastic in how they commission artists to make works, and then to reach an audience that maybe wouldn't have access to this artist and foster and function as a bridge between these groups, is just so great for the art ecosystem.

It just adds more of what we need in the world.

I think now.

In West Palm, there's an entrepreneur putting art at our fingertips with a unique spin on the vending machine.

Hi, my name is Megan McKenna and I am an entrepreneur in West Palm Beach.

And I'm the founder of Flamingo Vending, an affordable art vending machine featuring local artists.

I really wanted art to become accessible.

I wanted to activate space, and I wanted people to feel good, feel value, feel nostalgia, feel joy.

And I feel like art is the best way to make that connection.

It also supports local artists, so that was a big draw for me there.

These are actually hand-painted canvas magnets from a local artist named Jess Kirby.

She's a surrealist.

These are two-inch canvases and these are citrus butterflies.

We have strawberry jellyfish.

You can have your art gallery wherever you go and your mini fridge or wherever you need it.

When I first started, I had a list of art that I wanted to own, and I approached them and I said, look, I'm a huge fan.

I would love I'm working on this project, I'd love for you to be involved.

And they kind of took a leap of faith with was me.

Since then, since we've grown and people got word of it.

People have been filling out an application on my website, and then I curate from that list folks that are interested.

Currently I have, I think, 51 artists.

So I either have a piece of their art on consignment, or it might be in one of the machines, or we're working on it.

These are prints done on canvas of hand-painted art by a local artist, Melissa.

So she's she does a lot of Florida scenes.

The Jupiter lighthouse, underwater creatures.

She's really inspired by our local sea life.

Some artists have the tiny art already.

They might make something small that they would like to put in the machine, but a lot of times we work directly with the artists to create something special, something unique, just for the art vending machine.

With the affordable art in the vending machine, we're really trying to have people feel the joy, the emotional connection of art within their budget, within their time.

It's available to everybody.

It's it's right here.

Art loft is on Instagram at Art loft SFL.

Tag us on your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments and more at Art loft, SFL and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

Art loft is brought to you by the Friends of South Florida PBS.