[announcer] "Art Loft" is brought to you by.

[narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners, and the Friends of South Florida PBS.

[kyla] "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, transformation, we meet a community evolving through the arts.

We meet an organization elevating artists' careers and an artist transforming materials with fire.

When Art Basel comes to town, everyone heads to Miami Beach.

But this year, Basel branched out with a new outpost in an unexpected place, Opa-locka.

We believe that art and culture is a way of not only bringing understanding but bringing people together as well as helping to develop wealth, and we saw that from the beginning of the creation of Opa-locka.

It was about a film, art, and it was a fairytale brought from a far land, creativity, entertainment, and its Moorish architecture and its founding on creating film was what attracted the earliest settlers here to Opa-locka, and so we're just picking up from where we started.

With this project, I've been tasked to help master plan this inaugural "Art of Transformation" event as a registered Art Basel location this year and tying together all the different pieces of the different curators and fusing it together into an outdoor experience, which sits in the midway point of three of the gallery activations.

At the very start of this project, you know, all the creative leads were on a phone call about like, "Hey, what do we do?"

And the very first thing I said, and I think a few other people on the call were also thinking, is that nothing happens on Sunday of Basel.

It goes from 1,000% to absolutely zero, that happens.

And I think that then we started ideating, go, "Why don't we throw an exodus event?"

And we're like, "Well, actually that's perfect" because the majority people are exiting out of Opa-locka through the Executive Airport because that's the private airport for Miami, and that's where the high-flying collectors and all the people are actually passing through this neighborhood already.

They can have some great food, experience some great art, and it's really something that's, you know, there's not too many cities that are curating their own special thing.

How do we tie the past with the present?

What you're seeing now in this exhibit is a culmination of that, where we are not only looking at Africa but also thinking about the artists who are living in the diaspora, because Miami is such a diasporic place.

And so we wanted to root ourselves in Africa but also to think about where Africa is, instead of just the continent but also across the globe.

Obviously we're taking advantage that it's Miami Art Basel but I think more importantly for us is how do we engage our local community here in Opa-locka so that they can be a witness to all this amazing stuff that is happening in their backyard.

Bon appetit.

I will be providing you with a very cultural menu to showcase African and Haitian cuisine.

It's right up my alley because culture goes hand in hand with art, and art goes with food, so this category ties in all together, and my setups and my food is based on culture.

That's the first thing you'll taste.

It's a way to represent, you know, not only our culture but the way we see life, and it is a testimony of the way we live, the way we feel about humanity and our own community.

You will see the 509.

509 is the area code, the telephone area code in Haiti.

That's been, is a communication always and communication with Haiti.

My work represent everything for me.

You know, this is a way I can communicate with other people.

I can show the way I see thing.

I'm really excited about what Dr. Logan and his team are doing to transform the city but also the impact it can have on young people in the city.

Seeing beautiful art inspire people, then I hope the impact of this show is that they are able to find the artistic side inside themselves, and maybe two, three years from now when we have the next edition of this show, we can feature artists that are from Opa-locka.

All the international people that are coming asking me what I'm doing, what's happening.

I go, "Well, actually you should be coming up to Opa-locka, and you better see something at its genesis."

And I think that's, there's something beautiful about that, something raw about that, and something just eager for people to learn more about.

I think it means that we've arrived in the sense that our work, the people who are represented here in the various activities, be it the visual art or the performance art or the spoken word, the culinary art, all that would take place over the next three or four days has gained the respect and interest that other types of of communities and cultures have developed over the decades and centuries and particularly over the recent years here in Dade County.

We also recognize that the African diaspora, which quite frankly is what most of Miami is made up of, has its place in all communities, and the quality of its residents, of people who represent those communities, of the businesses, the community organizations as well as the governments not only are capable but are deserving of getting their piece of the spotlight.

And the only way we can continue to grow Art Basel Miami Beach is with these satellite fairs, with these opportunities for the community, local artists as well as international artists to continue to have spaces where they can show their work, sell their work, and tell their stories.

I think in the end, we really do believe in the term "art of transformation" because this is not just art for the sake of art.

This is art for the sake of transforming place, people, and lives.

I really mean it [kyla] Helping transform careers with the only live-work artist residency in Miami, we welcome our newest content partner, Fountainhead Arts.

Cofounder Kathryn Mikesell explains how a love of artists and collecting has grown into something so much more.

We believe that artists change the world.

They change the way we view ourselves, the way we act, the way we move through the world, the way we treat others, the way we dream and aspire to a better future.

It's artists that are constantly leading the way in just helping us see and feel in a different way.

We started Fountainhead because we wanted a different way of giving back to artists.

We had been collecting for many years, and you know, we couldn't buy all of the artists' work who we loved.

And also there were many artists that we loved and respected, but their work wasn't necessarily something that we wanted to live with.

We wanted to find some way to really have just a much greater impact on an artist's career, and also we were very interested in supporting the local community.

It was at a time when, you know, Miami was really getting started as a leader in the arts and cultural arena, not only, you know, in the United States, but also globally.

And we wanted to do something to give back to the community and to be able to bring the community into the lives and the careers of artists and not just their artwork.

And there was just something magical about that because we were always, we're always trying to, we're always trying to bring new people into the arts, but it's not always easy, right?

I mean, the arts can feel very, you know, the arts can feel very intimidating.

That's the word that I most often hear is that the arts are intimidating.

"It's not a place for me.

I don't know enough."

And I'm like, "You know everything you need to know.

You're a human being with feelings.

That is all that matters."

I think it's also important to say that artists also cause us to question.

Like, it's not, I don't know, they put us in this sometimes beautifully uncomfortable position to rethink, you know, what we already knew.

Like if we're constantly surrounding ourselves with people that agree with us, nothing's going to change.

And sometimes there are, or not sometimes, oftentimes there are difficult conversations that need to be had, and art gives us that chance, that opening to have those conversations in a way that nothing else does.

[studio] Taking up space is important for me because for so long, I felt invisible.

As someone that experienced being undocumented, I want to create visibility for these hidden narratives, especially within art spaces.

When you think of El Salvador, certain things come to mind, and I wanna sort of subvert that.

So I want to use bright colors to talk about another possibility.

My process is very intuitive.

I think that comes from my sort of background as a dancer and a choreographer.

Now I'm working with materials rather than bodies, and at the moment, I'm working with wooden cutouts in order to create an installation that really takes up space.

I guess the work is about trying to find a balance of power.

[nereida] Poetry, that's usually the starting place for the work.

I build it out sculpturally and intuitively just from the picture in my mind's eye.

I feel like really invested in giving beauty and weight and power to spaces that are not necessarily seen as important or powerful and transforming and uplifting those spaces to something that is mythological in scale.

It's like a feminist practice of transforming my own reality.

"Venus was born from fantasy, sweating and dripping the Hudson River on concrete.

Slow violence that traces up snake rivers releases a sudden pressure: Generational exhaust pipe dreams, Nike swoosh bootstrap cleavage, hair with galvanic response.

Hers is the sainthood of love exercised over the body, an angelic sisterhood that guts comparison between estradiol nightmares and the corpse."

[kyla] Cindy Wynn was training as a painter when she took a welding class that transformed her career.

Now she's bending metal and creating fantastical furniture in the Florida Keys.

I'm Cindy Wynn.

I've been making furniture for the last 30 years.

I build furniture out of scrap metal.

I have probably about 200 to 250,000 pounds of scrap metal in my welding studio.

Then I have an idea or the scrap metal gives me an idea, and I go out and I start collecting parts, and I keep at it until I have the whole design.

Usually I design about 10 to 12 pieces at once, so there's pieces of, pieces and parts everywhere that have a future as furniture, either lamps, tables, or chairs is usually what I make.

Furniture can be art.

It's not, you know, the functionality, people think, "Oh, well, if it's functional, it's not art."

But I really think it is because it changes people.

You know, when people, just because you can touch it and sit on it doesn't mean it's not art.

I first got started in college.

I took all the basic classes, drawing, painting, and then I glommed onto ceramics for about three years, which is six semesters.

At the end of the sixth semester, our ceramics teacher said, "You guys get all your stuff outta here."

And I thought, "Well, I'll just take a break, and I'll take Sculpture 2," which was welding.

I learned how to weld really easily, and I was frustrated 'cause I hadn't made anything creative.

So I just made my partner a chair as a joke, and it's like my brain lit on fire.

An idea can come from the materials, or it can come from my head, and then I squeeze the materials into my idea or vice versa.

But I study all kinds of furniture, especially 18th century.

18th century furniture has really a lot of amazing details.

I use some glass, some wood, but mostly it's all scrap metal.

I go out into either, if I'm up north, I go out into a real scrapyard, or if I'm down south here, I go out into my own scrapyard, and I look for parts.

I do a lot of welding, a lot of cutting with a grinding disc and a lot of cutting with a torch.

And then welding is the most fun step.

And then the final step is to put a final coat of lacquer on it and take it down to the gallery.

The grinding is still rough, but the cutting, I love cutting, and I love welding.

I love putting stuff together.

I love the hot metal.

Even when it burns me, I don't mind.

You know, I feel happy.

I'm working on a number of projects.

So what I'm gonna show you today is the end of a, it's a series called "Wrench Chair."

And I've learned a new thing about spring steel.

You can't really weld it, so I catch it in a little cage.

So that's the final step on this Wrench Chair is so it'll still have movement with the spring, but it won't be in danger of breaking.

Chairs are my favorite 'cause chairs are really where I think the art is in my work.

I make 'em so that people are very trepidatious when they see them, and then when they sit down, I can see for an instant everything kind of evaporates, and they're back into a childlike state, and they start laughing 'cause it moves and it's comfortable, and it's usually, down here, it's hot, and the chair's cool.

I just like that moment when they, it changes their perception of what furniture is about.

You know, it makes them feel differently about furniture, and the way people interact with furniture changes when they see my stuff.

[kyla] Isamu Noguchi was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.

His sculptures transformed landscapes.

We head to the museum he founded in Queens, New York, almost 40 years ago to learn more about his practice.

Isamu Noguchi was born in 1904.

He was born in Los Angeles, California.

His mother was an Irish woman from New York.

She was born in Brooklyn.

His father was a traveling poet from Japan.

Noguchi wasn't even named until he was almost three years old.

His mother just called him Boy or Yo.

His identity was complicated from the very first moment of his birth.

He was biracial, chose to be multicultural his whole life but at a time when it was much harder.

He enrolled at Columbia in pre-med.

His mother felt that he was destined for bigger things than being a doctor, and by that, she meant being an artist.

He was a spectacular academic sculptor at 19, 20, and then very quickly realized that he was becoming the poster boy of a passe art form.

He really wanted to change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic good.

He wanted to make it an active part of our everyday lives.

That's why he never stopped making furniture, his Akari lamp series, he made playgrounds, he made playground equipment.

He made sets for theater and dance.

He had long collaborations with people like Martha Graham.

The museum was founded in 1985, but Noguchi had been here for almost 10 years.

He bought a derelict factory building, which is the red brick building behind me, and started using it for storage and staging.

Sculpture is all about physical inconvenience.

Everything is big and heavy and takes up space and requires equipment to deal with, so sculptors always need more room.

He decided that in order to encapsulate his perspective or his point of view, his way of thinking of things, that the best thing to do was to build an institution, and so he began to turn his private garden and space into a display space.

When the museum opened, it was seasonal, or Noguchi would be here himself.

You could ring the bell, and he'd come down and walk you through.

One of the things that you'll notice when you come to our museum probably right away is that we don't have wall labels.

We do that not because Noguchi hated wall labels.

When the museum first opened, there were labels identifying all the sculptures somewhere near them in a kind of traditional museum fashion.

Gradually he just removed them, and it's because he wanted your experience of the work to be primary.

The fastest way to kill an artwork is to pretend that you've solved it.

The museum is really about a direct and intimate relationship with these objects and these things, and more important, the larger sense of an environment that they create.

They really produce an atmosphere.

And we're standing in this garden, which isn't even 2/3 of an acre.

It's teeny tiny.

It's a postage stamp.

He called the museum "an oasis on the edge of a black hole."

The black hole is New York City and the urban maelstrom.

And as small as it is, you come here, and you just soak it in, and you soak it in through osmosis.

It's like visiting a forest, not like going to the museum.

Some of these sculptures are eroding, but the trees are growing.

Their relationship to each other is changing constantly over time.

He planted all of the trees.

So the magnificent katsura tree that provides the canopy that dominates the garden, it really was a sprig.

It was a quarter-inch sapling, and now you see what that's become.

And that's why the heart and soul of the Noguchi Museum is this garden.

[kyla] Body art can transform both the skin and the human spirit.

We head to Key Largo's South of Heaven Tattoos where the work is on the body and on the walls.

Well, because we're in Key Largo, it's a beautiful place to visit, and we get tons of people from all around the world, and we have that map of the world up there for our customers to post pins of where they're from.

Hi, my name is Brandon Bennett.

This is my shop, South of Heaven Tattoo.

We're in Key Largo, Florida, and this is it.

A lot of tattoo parlors use what's called flash.

It's mass-produced pictures of artwork that everybody has on the walls that you select through in books and stuff like that.

They say, "Okay, I like this one, I like that one, but can you change this, can you change that?"

And so they just sort of become guidelines.

You don't really end up doing 'em anyway because everyone wants 'em changed into something that is more personal for them.

I figure it's a, we're selling art.

We might as well have our artwork on the wall.

So that's why we have all of our own paintings, and everything's original so people can look around, see the style of work we do, and know that if that's what they want to get on their body.

Most of the art on the wall is done by me.

Some of it's done by my son Anthony.

He's been tattooing now for a few years.

A lot of times when I'm about to paint something, a lot of times you have like writer's block, and you try to think, "What am I gonna paint?

What am I gonna paint?"

And so I usually think of a sort of theme before I paint on some things.

And I was just thinking, Key Largo, underwater but animated, you know, so nothing real.

They're not real creatures.

They're sort of cartoony, animated things that I, and I envisioned a story of little guys living underwater here.

We're in the Keys, so we do a lot of nautical things, a lot of nature stuff.

We just like to have fun, do clean, awesome tattoos and make people happy.

[kyla] "Art Loft" is on Instagram, @artloftsfl.

Tag us in your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments, and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

[announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by.

[narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County mayor and the Board of County Commissioners, and the Friends of South Florida PBS.