[Announcer 1] "Art Loft" is brought to you by... [Announcer 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Announcer 1] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft," it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, gallerists on parade.

Well, sort of.

We'll explain as we take you to Miami's Progressive Art Brunch.

Then, capturing all the drama of a pulp fiction telenovela.

We enter Adolfo Sanchez's Valley of Tears.

And Fountainhead Arts is back with another film chronicling three artists during their residencies.

All that and more in this episode of "Art Loft."

While Art Basel and Miami Art Week come but once a year, Progressive Art Brunch is a day trip to the arts that happens throughout the year.

Let's meet the Miami galleries behind the concept, welcoming patrons for free, selfpaced tours.

[Tyler] We have a great deal of worldclass contemporary art collections and also worldclass contemporary art museums.

So it makes a lot of sense that the galleries would be attracted and want to come here.

We are a worldclass art scene, and I know it and we know it.

That's why we do Progressive Art Brunch.

Progressive Art Brunch is a gathering of 15 galleries that are open on various Sundays throughout the year, from 11 to 4.

We serve light refreshments, and we showcase the best in contemporary art in South Florida.

This is a day to celebrate the arts.

People get out on a Sunday and do some gallery hopping.

We established Progressive Art Brunch in 2017.

The inspiration was how, you know, people would go out for brunch all day and just kind of hang out and socialize.

And I thought, why not try and bring that energy to the art experience?

I'm Tyler EmersonDorsch.

I'm a partner at the gallery.

I started working with my husband, Brook Dorsch, in the 2000s.

He started the gallery in 1991, and it's become, I think, a fixture in the Miami art scene.

As the gallery scene grew, my husband was one of the first galleries in Wynwood and started a gallery walk there.

And so, when Mindy and I, Mindy Solomon and I were doing our walks, we would walk early in the morning before the heat of the day set in, we would often brainstorm about ways to create excitement around the art scene here in Miami.

And one of the ways is just, it's very simple, we coordinate a schedule so that people can gather and navigate between the different galleries.

The model works, and everyone is really busy within their own establishments, but we're able to function as a community of gallerists and support one another through shared social media and marketing.

And you know, it's sustaining.

Most of us are contemporary.

Some of the galleries have a high concentration of Miamibased artists.

Others like myself have a broader, more diasporic program.

We try to look for the best examples in the city that we can that represent a multiplicity of perspectives.

So we feel like we're giving the best examples of what's out there and a good reflection of our city.

And choosing Sundays was important because they have a lot of ground to cover.

Part of the pleasure of being able to go between the different neighborhoods is that you can feel a fabric of the city at the same time as you see the strength of the cultural scene that we have here.

When we decide to open a space in Miami, it was like easy because we visited Progressive Brunch last year, this year, and we like the community.

We like how people, they're really involved, they were interested in what happens in the galleries.

It's very inspiring for us, and we decide to be part of this.

We want to have dialogue between Eastern European artists and Latin American and American, and it's not very common in this part of the world.

I think we are first Eastern European gallery who open a branch in Miami.

For Miami, it's something unique and we decide to support, like, to bring something new to the city, to the community.

I am Andres Cordoba, and I'm the director of the La Cometa Gallery venue in Miami.

We are a very down to earth gallery, very beautiful.

Our projects are gonna be risky, outside of the box.

We've been around for 35 years.

The gallery was originally founded in Bogota in Colombia, and five years ago, we've started an expansion project in which we opened a new venue emerging in Colombia, in Madrid, in Spain, and now our fourth venue in Miami.

We wanted to open with three Colombian artists as we are a Colombian gallery, and we have mainly a mid and long trajectory artists.

Here where we are is the long trajectory one, Miguel Angel Rojas, an amazing artist, more than 50 years of career, so it's very exciting for us and for him and for all the Latin American artists.

The gallery opened 20 years ago in Wynwood, and then we moved to Little River.

There is something that, which is very nice of Miami, that everybody have something to add.

We have more people that are moving to Miami and consuming art and understand that life with art is better.

We are a part of Progressive Brunch from the beginning.

Today, for example, here at the gallery, we are showing two artists from Cuba, but they live in Berlin.

They are part of the scene that we need to educate and to enjoy.

Miami has a very strong and viable gallery scene that really is predicated on the stories that are told in Miami.

The diaspora narrative, the, you know, the cultural infusion of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe, and all of the various flavors that are settling down here.

The galleries are getting to know each other better and so it's making us a little tighter and just knowing to, like, network, 'cause Miami's really about sharing in the arts.

It's much more fun when we all get together and do something.

We are small business and we need to stay together.

We want to add to the conversation.

You cannot do anything in arts if you don't collaborate with each other.

So the Progressive Art Brunch is a great project to collaborate, to work together as gallerists and show the audience of Miami what we have to say because artists are always at the forefront of the contemporary thought.

[Announcer 1] This winter, the works of the late painter, Adolfo Sanchez, took center stage during Art Week.

It's the first time in decades his series of paintings called the Valley of Tears was shown in its entirety.

We meet Sanchez's brother and niece, both playing a key role in preserving and sharing the artist's legacy.

"The year was 1980.

At the time, no one really knew, or at least could not put there what the majority thought should be there.

The tensions and distances grew as reality's moments came grinding down on each and every one of us.

Some would be with us for what it seemed seconds, and some stayed for eternities, eternities that when acknowledged became even faster than seconds.

So we tried as well as we could to keep warm and free."

After 80plus events through the years, we are currently in 2023, this is our Basel Show, and I'm humbled and flattered to present the work of my brother, Adolfo Sanchez, who passed away in 1990 of AIDS.

We are exhibiting in partnership with Anthony Spinello Gallery in his series of six solo shows for Basel, one of which is Adolfo's Valley of Tears paintings which he did in 1987.

I've been studying Adolfo's work, just myself as a painter, for a number of years to kind of get back into painting and to understand him better and really to process the emotions of feeling very connected to someone that I haven't met in my lifetime.

I'm trying to make it look like a smaller drawing, so and I keep the line consistent.

By doing that work, it led me to have the opportunity to create a solo exhibition this summer in Fort Lauderdale at the NSU Art Museum.

I am a curator based at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and I recently organized an exhibition of the artist, Lulu Sanchez.

This was for an exhibition called ADOLFOLAND.

She was responding to the work of her uncle.

His work is very much based on appropriation, and she, in turn, was appropriating her uncle's work as a former selfintrospection, a way to sort of understand a family member and artist who she had never met in person but felt a close connection to.

From that opportunity, I got a lot more interest in Adolfo's work.

I presented a small ephemera vitrine similar to what we have in the show here, so people could see the original documents.

I was really excited when Oliver and Anthony Spinello were interested in presenting this whole series, which is in fact one singular piece.

My brother and I were very close.

We were one year apart.

I'm the baby brother.

We were born in Cuba.

My brother and I ended up in Miami with my widowed mother and sister and my grandmother.

My brother and I just shared a room, and his passion was a really art for a very early age.

I could say I was his biggest fan.

He knew he was gay from a very early age, even at a time when these matters were not common cultural things.

And it wasn't long after graduating from high school in MiamiDade that we moved to New York.

♪ Hey ♪ Andy Warhol this magnet for people, and I know other friends like Kenny Scharf and so many others, we all converged in New York in the late '70s and quickly fell into a subculture of utterly creative people, writers, you know, people of all stripes.

So we laid out this table sort of like a vitrine with different photos, artwork, and source material from Adolfo's archive.

We have some more photos from the Hotel Belleclaire that show Adolfo, show a fan of his Mickey, kind of playing dress up with all the paintings in the background.

There's a photo here of my other uncle, my mom's brother, Kurt Thomas.

For a time after these these paintings were exhibited, he had them all in his house 'cause he was the only one who had enough rooms to hang all of them at the time in Brooklyn Heights.

This is very much in the context of the '80s East Village art scene that Adolfo and Oliver Sanchez were a part of, so it sort of fits in in a lot of ways with like the legacy of pop art, looking at someone like Roy Lichtenstein, but then sort of taking that and making it more biographically relevant to sort of ephemera that the family grew up with what they were used to seeing.

So rather than American comic books, it was these sort of telenovela, soap opera comics.

We were all part of something big.

People like Adolfo, and Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and so many others, they drew from this amazing community of creative.

You have to have that interaction in order to thrive, and I think it was a time where many people thrived.

Adolfo is definitely an artist who is underrecognized that was in a celebrated moment in time within the '80s village art scene, but he has sort of been obfuscated by these other grand figures that he was very close with.

This is an excellent space in which we can sort of now have a retrospective glance at it and understand the value and connect it with contemporary art today and sort of give it the attention it deserves.

His work is with us and his memory is with us.

We now can come back to it and continue to work with him by serving in his memory and in his estate as an artist who's from Cuba, from Miami, and very integral in the New York new wave art historical moment as well.

[Announcer 1] We're excited to continue our partnership with Fountainhead Arts, exploring its artist and residence program, bringing national and international artists to Miami for a monthlong immersive experience.

We meet Manoela Medeiros, Julia Gutman, and Nekisha Durrett, and learn about the history and storytelling woven into their work.

[Manoela] When I start to do these paintings, I was thinking by the idea of, "If I build my own room, what will be?"

My work, it's very related with the limits between nature and culture, and time and space.

I really like to appropriate materials who already exist and play with deconstruction and construction.

I put layers by layers mixed with pigments, and then I start to excavate these layers and reveal something you cannot see.

When I deconstruct something, I also building a new thing.

It's the limit between nature and culture.

It's made by persons who passed there by the insects, by the time, by the rain, and I think this a symbol of reconciliation between men and nature.

[Julia] I always been really interested in storytelling, and I think figuration is this really accessible way to kind of bring people into your world.

I think a lot about the stories that materials hold and I think there's something really beautiful about the really small moments of intimacy that actually make up life and being able to give them presence and really have them take up space.

Every single material lived its own life and all these different members of my community end up getting created out of one another.

It's kind of this idea that we're all kind of being shaped by people that we might never even need, and I get to really directly reference that through the materials.

It's a lot of different timescales impacted together.

The work's become this very slow diary with this materiality that's more loaded and more specific.

[Nekisha] Central to my practice is trying to tell whole stories at a time when there is an assault on whole stories and the whole story of America.

My work tends to be very site specific.

I always want to bring forward histories that are imbued in that space but aren't always evident.

Queen City is a 35foot tall brick tower in Arlington, Virginia.

Within this structure are 903 handmade ceramic vessels that represent the 903 individuals that lost their community because The Pentagon was being built.

When you're not consumed with painting a picture of history that is sunshine and sugar, you end up with something that provides a certain wholeness and completeness for all of us.

[Announcer 1] Up next, a modern take on the Florida Keys as we dip into the Art Loft archives to learn about techbased painter, Colin Goldberg, and his time in sundrenched Key West.

I found out about the studios about two years ago when my wife and I were down here and we actually got married in Key West and traded our place that we were living in with our landlord who lives down here fulltime.

So we spent about seven weeks in Key West and started to check out the art scene here and put work in a juried show in a local gallery called Lucky Street and ended up winning a Best in Show Award, which got me the residency, which I'm doing now for the month of May.

Well, I was born in the Bronx and I grew up on the east end of Long Island, but I've lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan and spent some time out in Ohio for graduate school.

So Key West is by far the most tropical and laid back of all of those places, and that's one reason I really, you know, enjoy being down here.

Well, I came up with the idea of Techspressionism, I guess, you know, trying to come up with a name for an exhibition that I had a while back and I've used it for a couple different shows.

All of the work has changed a little bit in each iteration.

A lot of my work is heavily influenced by the ideas of the abstract expressionist painters of the '50s, and one of my professors in college, he was a second generation abstract expressionist and kind of turned me on to abstraction when I studied under him.

At the time, I was doing mostly figurative work and representational painting and it wasn't really until I started working with computers that I got interested in abstraction.

Techspressionism, to me, is the idea that the computer can be used not only to depict things that exist in, you know, in real life, but to develop ideas that you know are in my own head and kind of building on some of the ideas of the abstract expressionist painters.

I created the Manifesto because I think that there's, you know, resistance within the fine art community to some degree when it comes to computers and technology being placed within a fine art context.

I think it's a little bit like the way the photography was early on where there was segregated photography galleries and, you know, fine art galleries, and now there's certain spaces that specifically show technologyoriented work, and a lot of the mainstream galleries can shy away from that.

So, to me, it's a way of kind of capitulating my feelings about technology and how it really is a continuum of tools that people have used, you know, throughout mankind's existence, you know, up through the computer, but going back to the camera and drawing tools and so on and so forth.

So I don't see the computer as being that different from things that have been used in the past.

[Announcer 1] Alex Harris is a singer, actor, and the CEO and cofounder of an Arts Conservatory for Teens.

We travel to St. Petersburg to meet the artist and find out how his organization is supporting atrisk students.

I'm from a little small town in Manchester, Georgia and one of eight children, five boys, three girls, I'm in the middle.

And music, faith, education, family were the four pillars of our family.

♪ You take me to Heaven every time ♪ I see the gift of music beyond entertainment, but also something that is part of our human experience, all of us, we are creative beings, we are found, we are rhythm, we are a melody.

So we started the Arts Conservatory for Teens, the team and I that I assembled to launch this in 2012, and with the focus to help these students who, you know, that was in the neighborhood and to pursue their dreams and to become successful.

What I desire for students to gain who participate in the Arts Conservatory for Teens curriculum, number one, I want them to gain confidence, two, resilience, and three, a conscious of hope, that there is hope for achieving their highest dreams is when it comes to success.

I remember the exact day that I met Alex Harris, and I knew right away just chatting with him and what his vision was to help young people in the south side of St. Petersburg to finish middle school and high school and go on to college with the support of the artists.

My experience in this program has been amazing.

I have been open to many new genres and I've met many new people and teachers as well.

I've grown as an artist and I'm just so excited to return to college with all the things that I've learned.

My experience in ACT has been amazing.

We've gotten to learn from people who have been in Broadway about acting, dancing, and singing.

100% of our students throughout the past almost 11 years have graduated from high school with a diploma, 90% of our students have gone on to higher education institutions, college universities, trade schools.

When you're involved in the Arts Conservatory for Teens, you might be a dancer, but you also might be a videographer.

You might be working on set design, you might be working on clothing design.

And so you realize the number of people that are involved in creating this business of the arts.

Alex is able to harness all of that to bring it all together.

With great community and family, and it doesn't have to be biological family, but those who believe, those who love, those who support you genuinely, you can achieve and be the best human being that you can be.

At the end of the day, we want those young people who have participated and those who continue to participate today and will participate in the future to understand their sense of worth.

♪ When the world is going wrong ♪ ♪ We stay strong ♪ ♪ I got you ♪ [Announcer 1] "Art Loft" is on Instagram, @artloftsfl.

Tag us on your art adventures.

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

"Art Loft" is brought to you by... [Announcer 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Announcer 1] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.