[announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by.

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

[announcer] The Miami Dade County Tourist Development Council, the MiamiDade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Cultural Affairs Council, the MiamiDade County Mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners, and the friends of South Florida PBS.

[announcer] 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, sitespecific works.

The art is big, bold, and unexpected.

As we explore the role of place, immersive spaces, and inspiring environments.

With its new Art In Public Spaces Initiative, the Boca Museum is pairing a massive new sculptural work with a modernist classic, the local building where IBM developed its first personal computer.

It's a pairing designed to spark the imagination.

This is just the perfect marriage between a building, which was designed by Marcel Breuer, and the design of that building.

It's uncanny how the details of the facade of that building speak to the details on this sculpture.

It's almost like it was done as a collaboration.

And of course it was not.

My name is Hubert Phipps.

I'm a sculptor and a painter as well.

And it's five, four, three, two, one.

We have ignition.

We have lift off.

Lift off in 41 minutes past the hour.

Rocket is monumental in scale.

And when I conceived of this project, I had no idea that we were going to make it of this size.

All my work is, comes from a sketch, very traditional way of making art.

And I select one of these sketches and I'll go and take it to the next step and usually work it out in three dimensions via a clay model.

We scan that clay model.

I took it into a 3D computer program and we worked it there and I was able to get some really good results in the computer.

And based on that 3D model, I had some size rockets made and they were part of an exhibition that I had down at the Coral Springs Museum of Art.

I had no idea that, that we would do anything further with it.

I had some ideas for some follow on rocket designs.

Urban Litman of the Boca Raton Museum of Art came by the exhibition.

And when he saw the rocket, his eyes lit up and he informed me that the museum had started an art in public places initiative, and that they would like to consider this rocket in a larger size for that initiative.

And they had a particular property in mind.

And so that's how it came about to be what it is today, which is 30 feet tall, installed at the Boca Raton Innovation Campus.

The rocket has a particular style.

Some people refer to Italian futurism as the artistic aesthetic that that it speaks to.

There's a lot of underlying influences.

Aviation has been a big part of my life.

I grew up in the late '60s, early '70s where the space program was really starting to get going.

And I just love the shapes of rockets.

I love the shapes of airplanes.

I started flying when I turned 16, I still fly today.

It's just such a part of my life.

And to be able to produce a work of art that speaks to, you know, the innovation, the technology and the science that we, at least in my life that we've witnessed, you know, powered flight, you know, it just got going in the early part of the 20th century with Wilbur and Orville Wright.

And look where we are today.

And now this renewed interest with space travel And the liftoff.

This is exciting time.

And I think it all had an influence for me to produce this sculpture.

As the NSU art museum reopened after COVID shutdowns, Artist Nathalie Alfonso debuted a new work, a piece specifically designed for, created in, and eventually painted over at the museum.

This is Anatomy, Study Of The Wall.

I've always had a tremendous desire to be awake all the time.

I remember having the urge to see every single thing happening around me.

Even when sick, I would not miss a day of school.

Over time, I developed a strategies to use that energy.

At the age of nine, I started to train for speed walking and track and field.

Lasting 10 years, the consistency of this practice kept me moving and tied my body to routines of extreme order and repetition.

A sense of veniality was imprinted in my muscle memory.

Moving from point A to point B with a particular goal became an obsession.

My coach used to tell me that training was painful.

So the competition was easier.

I never really understood this.

Physical pain was always present and very rare presented to the audience.

Later on, my third career as a professional athlete brought me to negotiate life in unexpected ways.

When moving to the United States at the age of 18, only my integration to the workforce could uphold my alliance in society as an adult.

Combining the sense of repetition learned during my years of training, with the sense of efficiency learned while attempting to become an indispensable worker, has allowed me to question and produce artworks that present notions of invisible labor, repetition, and endurance.

It is a constant exercise of emotional control.

When I learned this year that I was selected for the South Florida Consortium, I was excited, but at the same time, I was overwhelmed because of the challenges that this year has brought.

For a moment, it felt selfish thinking about moving forward with my career while the world was falling apart.

So it took me a moment, but then I realized that the conversations I want to push must continue.

A Study Of The Wall is the second iteration of a series of drawings called Anatomy.

This is the biggest drawing that I have done up to date.

66 feet wide by 20 feet tall, all made directly on the surface with graphite and charcoal.

For the museum, I was more interested in expanding the imaginary of the wall from my own experience within the space.

I utilized charcoal and graphite to fabricate and imagine the interior structure.

While it is impossible to understand precisely how these walls were set up or by whom, I continue to depict my own constructed truth beyond this .

While this drawing was imagined, it allowed the body to consider the preexisting foundation of the space.

Through this process, the drawing that remains on the surface becomes a hologram of reality.

The focus was not only my body, but also the architectural space is a key component.

The small drawings along the wall are the selfreflective object of a study where I'm interested in the specificity of my mark making, abstracted and viewed in a third person.

Through this action, I considered for the first time, my hand versus the hand and worked to blur the identity of the body and distance any notion of it's invisible labor.

The question remains, what is the relationship of my body with the drawn line?

Study Of The Wall attempts to understand this relationship more intimately and presents the narrative of the body moving in a space, using an invented drawing that does not replicate at all the endurance of the production process.

And this is my obsession with emotional control and compulsiveness, concepts related to my frantic relationship to invisibility and visibility.

I didn't make it to the Olympics.

My body doesn't perform in track and field anymore, but I refuse to stay still.

The endurance of my body has moved to realms where there is no limit to understanding the line from its unfolding construction or dislocation.

I recognize how this work in process has helped me go beyond my own life experience to confront issues around labor.

My hand versus the hand, my body versus the universal body, now live in an expensive and fluctuating ecosystem in constant evolution.

[announcer] To learn more, visit NSUArtMuseum.org.

As COVID shut down arts institutions across the globe, The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami looked to bring hope to its neighbors through illumination, by bringing back one of its most exciting public art installations.

Back in the mid '90s, my wife, Dara, and I found ourselves in Mysore in the South of India, a very beautiful city.

And I came across kind of an extraordinary scenario where some people were setting up for a wedding.

And what this family had done was found an enormous banyan tree, and they were gonna wrap the outside of it in canvas to make it an interior space.

In order to light the interior space, they had rigged up all of these fluorescent lights on the branches.

So I asked them, I had a camera with me.

I asked them if I could photograph it before they put the canvas around the tree, could I just photograph the lights?

And they were fine with that.

So I took a set of photographs and it just looked amazing.

The whole thing was so extraordinary.

And so when I got back to the US with this photo, I was like, I have to, I have to try to make this thing happen.

The first actual installation of the tree was in 2011 for the MOCA show.

I really wanted to place works as well as in the museum, out in the city.

That's how I see my work existing, both within kind of traditional art spaces, but also very specifically outside.

And it was, seemed like a real opportunity to do that.

And we were able to go to the city of North Miami and say, I'd really love to work in this beautiful, massive banyan tree you have.

And the mayor was receptive, the city was receptive, and that's kind of how it happened.

It was actually a kind of very serendipitous moment, that kind of meeting of intentions.

So, you know, I think there's something really great about the fact that it's coming back.

We did it nine years ago and like, I feel like it lasted a few years.

Yeah it lasted a long time.

Brandon Kavin that's who I worked on originally on the tree, Brandon knows the tree really well.

And to kind of meet back with him again, it felt like there's something, I mean, I hope for them too, there's something really great about feeling this piece being remade and that it's kind of, if you like returning to its former glory.

Talk to me about, what, what are you doing now?

Tightening the gasket, and these are like waterproof lights so that they can withstand the weather in Florida.

And then, then that will just be mounted to the tree like that.

This is our diagram of the order in which the size of the lights are.

So it's a two foot light, four foot light, three foot light, two foot light.

Yeah, 'cause it's almost like you could come out and look and you can kind of see what's going on quite well from the tree.

The tree is kind of telling us, right?

Like that it's like a three, a two, a four, but we sort of want to break it up a little bit too, almost like a sort of, you know, when you have energy lines coming out, you know.

It's like it's coming out from the tree.

Green, yellow, and then.

It's like, yeah, it jumps a little bit.

But not everything.

It was, it was a lot of work.

It was really complicated and tall and difficult.

And we all invested a lot in it.

And there's something really wonderful about that.

The physical conversation is between this incredibly basic industrial manmade clunky thing, the fluorescent lights and this beautiful, extraordinary piece of nature and about the place where the two meet and the necessity of the two meeting.

People are already emerging of those two instincts.

We're heady kind of scientific people living in wildly organic natural bodies and can't escape that.

We are both nature, and we are both manmade.

You know, we can't help it.

We're industrial beings living in a natural world.

I do think of it very much as being sort of about that, that kind of duality.

In the sense it seems to me that meeting point is I really don't want to be too profound, but I mean, I'd kind of think that's very much a match for kind of what we are, that the strangeness of our existence.

I always wanted sculpture to be somewhat social.

I always saw sculpture as being derived from, from, from living in a way.

Those trees during the day become kind of an oasis of shade, you know, and you see it particularly with that tree in Griffin Park and has these benches and tables underneath it.

Even on the hottest summer day, that pool of shade is, is a livable space.

And I really liked that idea that the tree automatically created the social space.

Therefore at night you kind of mirror that social space with light.

We walk toward light.

That's what we do.

If we see light, we tend to head toward it.

Whatever a shade in day becomes a light at night.

And so we create an equally social space throughout the night.

So it also becomes somewhere where you would naturally congregate.

Something that draws you toward it.

And I think that idea of the artwork as a thing that's pulling people toward it as a place for people to congregate as a natural kind of coming togetherness.

I think that that's, that's what I would want the piece to do.

I think that's kind of what I want to most in the world.

The tree does it almost better than a lot of the other ones I'd have to say.

For more information, head to MOCAnomi.org.

The Florida Keys with its natural beauty around every bend has become an artist's paradise,.

Longtime Keys photographer Larry Benvenuti, explains the allure.

Every photo is a story.

So you take a picture, we'll say of a person or in a building or underwater.

You want to take it so that you can see a story just in that photo.

My name is Larry Benvenuti and a retired professional photographer, even though I haven't really retired yet in the sense that I still love taking pictures.

Especially in the Florida Keys, it's full of nature and there's no better place to get started than in the Florida Keys, especially underwater, which was my forte for years and years and years.

I got started in photography back in 1976, taking an underwater dive course in photography with renowned now, Howard Harley's one of the top cinematographers in the United States, in the world.

So I learned from him out of the San Diego dive locker and took pictures at La Jolla Cove in San Diego and from San Diego, I moved to Hawaii.

And that's where I bought my first camera, professional camera.

It was an IKONOS 2 underwater amphibious camera by nighttime.

And I started taking pictures in Hanauma Bay in Oahu.

Here we are in Crane Point, hammock of the Florida Keys Land and Sea Trust.

And this is a 63 acre property, which is my most favorite place in all the Keys.

Everything here at Crane Point is, is a photogenic object or scene.

You've got mangrove swamps.

You have boardwalks, you have nature trails, the Palm trail, the Bahama trail, the Joe Wood trail, and around every turn is a head shaker.

It's so beautiful.

And so peaceful.

Photographing the Florida Keys involves a lot because there is so much the photograph.

Sunsets for example.

We live on islands in the Florida Keys and every day you'll get a fantastic sunset shot.

One of my favorites was down in the Key Deer Refuge, where I took a picture of a mangrove and it was in the form of a question mark and I got the sun setting right under the top of the question, mark.

One of my favorite shots ever.

People visiting the Keys are aspiring photographers.

I don't think you're going to have much of a problem photographing in the Florida Keys.

There is so much everywhere from Key Largo through Marathon, Big Pine, the Key Deer Refuge, Key West, just go do it.

Largescale immersive works can create new worlds and they can bend reality.

But with real estate and materials at a premium, working in the medium can be cost prohibitive.

Super Blue in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood has come up with a new way to keep those artists doing what they love.

All the works here are fully immersive and experiential.

They are environments that you can completely walk through and experience in your own way.

My name is Shantelle Rodriguez and I'm the director of experiential arts centers for Super Blue.

Our founders are executives of Pace Gallery.

And over the past 10 years, they were working more and more with artists that were prioritizing these large scale shared experiences that reach a broad audience over object based practice.

So they realized that there had to be a whole new commercial engine developed for these artists.

And Super Blue came from that.

We don't compete with museums or gallery.

We're just kind of a new part of this ecosystem that is able to support artists by presenting their works in large flexible spaces like this one, and also shares revenue with these artists.

With every ticket sold to the EACs or experiential art centers, there is a revenue split with the artists, all different agreements.

Basically it's so that they can kind of continue this practice and build on these shared experiences.

There's a couple things that set these experiential art centers apart from, you know, museums, galleries, or other traditional art worlds venues.

The revenue share, that's definitely one and two is, is we're standing in it.

There are large flexible spaces that the Miami Experiential Arts Center is 50,000 square feet with 26 foot ceiling heights.

We really want to give these artists spaces where they can break boundaries never seen before.

We don't want to confine them to a specific gallery space or a box.

So the scale is, is the other.

And the third is our team.

We're not your usual, you know, museum teams of curators and research assistants.

We have 80 integrators on our team.

We have, you know, our marketing teams are experts in time ticketing and audience engagement and reaching a broad audience.

So with those three things, I think, you know, that's kind of sets the experiential art centers apart.

The viewer is really key.

We, we like to say that the art doesn't truly exist or isn't completed without the viewer.

So the artists sets the stage, kind of creates the environment, but it really takes visitor interaction to complete the work and make it a dynamic experience.

And so depending on how everyone in the room is participating and interacting with these works, it's always a new experience and you could see something new every time you come to visit.

As guests enter our experiential arts center, they're welcomed by the first installation, which is by Drift, hanging above my head.

And that's Meadows.

It's an upside down landscape in perpetual bloom.

They will begin their journey in team lab, which is a collective of over 400 artists, robotic experts, botanists based out of Asia.

Within the team lab room we have a couple of projection works, but they're not your typical projections.

They actually react to your engagement or your interaction with them.

Everybody around touches the piece and there's actually a computer generating new code in real time.

So you're always seeing something new.

And following that they would head to James Turrell.

We have one of his Ganzfelds.

James is a pioneer of experiential art.

He started in the '60s and '70s in the light and space movement.

And most of these artists were heavily influenced by his work, and that kind of defined this new movement.

Ganzfeld is the German word for complete field.

So the light and the colors in the room change.

And as they transition, you get this feeling of a whiteout effect, this loss of depth perception, and it's a surely out of body feeling.

And then the third is by Es Devlin.

She's a renounced stage designer, now very well known in this field.

And we have a multistory mirror maze by Ed Stublin.

With our first exhibition, our intention was to really lay the platform and show maybe the general audience what is experiential art.

We're reaching people who maybe don't typically go to museums.

And if they came for a selfie or for their Instagram posts, they probably walked out with some new knowledge of the art world and maybe we're opening access to the art world.

If you go, tag us on Instagram @artloftsfl.

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

Art Loft is brought to you by.

Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

The Miami Dade Tourist Development Council, the MiamiDade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council.

The MiamiDade County mayor and the Board of County Commissioners and the Friends of South Florida PBS.