In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami student Kristian Kranz heads to Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, for a conversation with Lynne Barrett, editor of the book Making Good Time, and two of the book’s contributors: author Les Standiford and poet-engineer Richard Blanco. Listen to hear a few ‘only-in-Miami’ stories about getting around South Florida.

Producers: Kristian Kranz/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Making Good Time, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide, Making Good Time in South Florida, Lynne Barrett, Les Standiford, Richard Blanco, Jai-Alai Books

Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do and Don’t Get Around South Florida —The city of Miami is renowned for her beauty and often imagined as paradise. Yet many locals and visitors find South Florida’s highways and byways a challenge to navigate. In the 2019 anthology Making Good Time, editor Lynne Barrett brings together thirty-one true tales inspired by transportation adventures in the southern realm of the Sunshine State.

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition,  University of Miami students Diana Borras and Kurt Gessler discover sacred land hiding in plain sight at the heart of Miami’s business district. Carib Tribal Queen Catherine Hummingbird Ramirez has come to meet them at the  sacred Native American site known as the Miami Circle. Ramirez has come to share her concerns about the ongoing impact of urban development.

The Miami Circle: In 1998, an archaeological investigation at the mouth of the Miami River uncovered evidence of a 2,000 year-old Native American site on land once occupied by the Brickell Point Apartments.  Now known as the Miami Circle, the Tequesta site consists of a circle over 35 feet in diameter with about 20 basins and hundreds of smaller postholes. Many consider the Miami Circle a North American “Stonehenge.”

Producers: Diana Borras and Kurt Gessler/Miami Moves Me, Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Miami Circle, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Culture Making in Downtown Miami

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Tequesta Artifacts, Miami Circle, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami student Luz Estrella Cruz makes her way to the Third Horizon Film Festival at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex in Miami. She’s there to meet filmmakers Diana Peralta (De Lo Mio, 2019) and Michael Lees (Uncivilized, 2020), whose work she’s been researching. Interviewing them and watching their films, Cruz discovers the passion behind their stories and immerses herself in two diasporic experiences from the Caribbean. 

Producers: Luz Cruz/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux and Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes Miami Moves Me/Third Horizon, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Miami's Caribbean Arts Remix

Related Links Miami Moves Me Podcast, De Lo Mio, Uncivilized, Third Horizon Film Festival, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami students Gretchell Cano and Luz Estrella Cruz explore the work of Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. They, along with the rest of the Miami Moves Me team, visit Duval-Carrié’s studio in the Little Haiti district. Listen to find out why the artist chose to call Miami home, and hear his views on how the Caribbean influences the city’s art and culture.

Edouard Duval-Carrié was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1954. He was educated at the University of Loyola Montreal, Quebec, in Canada; and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris in France. Duval-Carrié moved to Miami in 1992 and swiftly established himself as an integral factor in the city’s cultural fabric.

Duval-Carrié’s work explores the social and historical dimensions of Haitian culture. His imagery includes very often Voodoo gods combined with aspects of classical mythology and Haiti’s national heroes. His images are visual examples of Magic Realism, portraying a world in which reality and mythology are intertwined. (biographical source: panamericanprojects.com)

Producers: Gretchell Cano/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Little Haiti, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Cultural Complexity in Little Haiti

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Little Haiti

In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami students Ben Vinarski and Reese McMichael venture to an abandoned hotel in Miami Beach to go behind the scenes of an immersive theater production. Inside a room designed as the well-equipped kitchen of an upper-class home, actress Maggie B. Maxwell has just rolled out a pie crust while introducing her visitors to the city’s Black history. 

Producers: Reese McMichael and Ben Vinarski/Miami Moves Me, Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Maggie Maxwell’s Motel Story, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Black in America

Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide, Juggerknot Theater Company, Miami Theater Review

In today’s prologue to our Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami senior Melissa Huberman tells the story of Art in the Time of Corona. She recorded with Fresh Art International founder Cathy Byrd, local artist Dana Musso, and team members from the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, to find out how some artists, curators, and educators are responding to the impact of the global coronavirus pandemic. Listen to hear some of the ways they are creating and implementing meaningful art encounters for their communities. 

The Story Behind The Story

In 2020, hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and around the world have been sickened and forced into quarantine by the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. The pandemic continues to affect us profoundly—both physically and economically. All of us have had to adjust how we live and work, teach and learn. 

In January 2020, Fresh Art founder Cathy Byrd began to introduce a group of University of Miami students to podcasting in a course titled Once Upon a Time in Miami. With Byrd, a team of nine students explored cultural sites across the city to record and produce the Miami Moves Me podcast. Due to the pandemic, at mid-semester, field expeditions came to an abrupt halt and classes went online. A set of eighteen episodes represents the UM student team’s research, field recordings, and interviews. Art in the Time of Corona is the prologue to our Fall 2020 Student Edition. 

Producers: Melissa Huberman/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux and Jahné King/FreshArtINTL

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Featured Voices: Cathy Byrd, Dana Musso, Leilani Lynch, Julia Rudo, Kylee Crook

Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Art in the Time of Corona, Fresh Voices Miami

Related Links: Miami Moves Me, Fresh Art Distance Learning Resources, Fresh Art Student Edition, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Locust Projects, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Lowe Art Museum

Meet fresh voices from Miami! With educators Giselle Heraux and Jahné King, we talk about art, storytelling, and the next generation of creative podcasters. Heraux and King will set the stage for each episode in our Fall 2020 Student Edition.

The Student Edition

In 2019, we initiated the Student Edition with visits to art schools and universities in the United States and Canada. Recorded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago/Chicago, Wayne State University/Detroit, and Ontario College of Art and Design University/Toronto, episodes in our Spring 2020 Student Edition revolve around how students engage communities.

During the Spring 2020 semester, Fresh Art founder Cathy Byrd introduced podcasting to a group of University of Miami students. As a team, they explored the City’s cultural landscape to record and produce the Miami Moves Me podcast. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, field expeditions came to an abrupt halt and classes went online mid-semester. More than a few Miami Moves Me stories convey before-and-after perspectives. A set of eighteen episodes represents their research, field recordings and interviews. Our Fall 2020 Student Edition  features a selection of episodes from the Miami Moves Me archive.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Miami Moves Me podcast

Today, we’re talking about symbolic statues and monuments. In this moment, many are demanding the removal of memorials believed to perpetuate a legacy of systemic racial and ethnic injustice. Recent acts of violence against Blacks in the United States have brought these memorials to the center of a nationwide debate.

On Memorial Day, in the year 2020, Minneapolis police killed a Black man named George Floyd. The public incident ignited the resurgence of a 21st century civil rights movement known as Black Lives Matter. In 2013, with use of the hashtag BlackLivesMatter, thousands responded on social media to the acquittal of a white man, George Zimmerman. He had been charged with the shooting death of Black teen Trayvon Martin.

Black Lives Matter is now the leading force behind massive protests across the U.S. and abroad. Crowds are toppling statues honoring colonizers, slaveholders, and Confederate heroes. The controversial figures have become a cultural flashpoint.

Social justice advocates have contested these iconic sculptures for decades. Let’s look back to 2014, for one example, when artist william cordova and his collaborators staged an unannounced public declaration of liberty and justice. They chose to make their statement at the site of a towering statue of confederate leader Robert E. Lee in New Orleans.  

Born in Lima, Peru, and based in Miami, New York and Lima, cordova is known as a cultural practitioner. We call him to hear the story behind this prescient intervention. 

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: silent parade, 2014 

Related episodes: Black in America, Modern Black Portrait of Florida, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives, Amy Sherald on New Racial Narratives,  Sanford Biggers on Time and the Human Condition, Fahamu Pecou on Art x Hip-Hop, Theaster Gates on Meaning, Making and Reconciliation, Jefferson Pinder on Symbols of Power and Struggle

Related links: silent parade, The Soul Rebels, william cordova, now's the time:narratives of southern alchemy, Perez Art Museum, Miami, 2018, Prospect New Orleans, Headlands Center for the Arts, Black Lives Matter

Today, we’re in Miami, to introduce you to Don and Mera Rubell, art collectors since 1964. We recorded with the Rubells in December 2019. Since then, the coronavirus pandemic has shaken our planet. We recognize the very real sense of before and after as we share these conversations about creativity.

Today’s episode conveys the excitement that surrounded the opening of the Rubell Family’s new museum. From March 17, 2020, the collection has been closed until further notice, as South Florida awaits the all clear to safely resume public life.

The Rubells started collecting when Don was in medical school and Mera was a preschool teacher. The first work they collected was by Ira Kaufman. They paid for it in weekly installments of $25. Collecting art ever since, they’re joined by their son Jason, who became a collector himself as a teenager. They’ve become known for supporting the work of emerging and overlooked artists. Pursuing their passion in person, they visit studios, museums, fairs, galleries and biennials across the globe. Research and relationships are vital to each acquisition. 

In 1993, they opened the Rubell Family Collection in Miami’s Wynwood District. Over the next two decades, the value of real estate in the neighborhood soared. The collection outgrew their 40,000 square foot space, a former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse they had turned into an art venue. The Rubells started looking for storage nearby. An abandoned food-processing plant by the railroad tracks less than a mile away sparked the idea of creating a museum.

The 100,000 square foot warehouse complex in the Allapattah district became the spacious new home for their collection. Architects transformed the seven buildings into an epic space for more than 7,000 works by over 1,000 artists. 

On the eve of the museum opening, we join a private tour with Mera, Don and Jason…A wall-sized painting by Kehinde Wiley, two of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms, and Keith Haring's Statue of Liberty are just a few of the large-scale works that have room to breathe here.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Related Episodes: Paint and Pixels Power the Art of Allison Zuckerman, Art and Our Uncertain Future, The Art of Collecting—with Erika Hoffmann

Related Links: Rubell Museum, Yayoi Kusama, Kehinde Wiley, Keith Haring, Amoako Boafo, Allison Zuckerman, Ira Kaufman

Today, we take you to Toronto. We’re here to meet a group of graduate students at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, also known as OCAD. For the Intro to Curatorial Practices course, their goal is to research, develop and activate an exhibition in the digital realm. Recorded in the first weeks of the semester, our conversation reveals how the students are defining their roles and designing their strategy for curating an online platform. 

In the months following our campus visit, the students forged an interdisciplinary curatorial collective. In December 2019, they launched the exhibition titled connection_found. Online now, works by seven artists illustrate the quirks of navigating intimacy on the web. “At the core of the exhibition,” writes the collective on their website, “connection_found simultaneously expands, individuates, and links the collective experience of existing on the internet.”

OCAD University—Curating in the Digital Realm is one of our 2020 Student Edition episodes.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photography: FreshArtINTL

Related Episodes: SAIC—Imagining Tomorrow, Wayne State—Designing for Urban Mobility

Related Links: Criticism and Curatorial Practice Program, Ontario College of Art and Design University, connection_found

Intro to Curatorial Practices, a graduate seminar in the Criticism and Curatorial Program at OCAD University, introduces students to the major critical texts, theories and debates in the burgeoning international field of contemporary curatorial studies. Simultaneously throughout the seminar, students attend public exhibitions, screenings, lectures, performances and events in Toronto's visual art and design worlds. An ongoing examination of contemporary art and design practices within public culture provides students with an eclectic and critical mapping of the layers and intersections of the visual arts, media and design in relation to their varied publics, audiences, markets, the mass media and the scholarly community. 

connection_found is an online group exhibition organized by feelSpace featuring works by Ronnie Clarke, Taylor Jolin, Leia Kook-Chun, Madeleine Lychek and Paula Tovar, Noelle Wharton-Ayer, and Becca Wijshijer. Together, these works trace and re-trace digital intimacy, touch, and the body as it moves and navigates towards the virtual realm. More literally, connection_found suggests the curatorial alignment of these works in a digital context which, in and of itself, requires finding connection. Source: feelspace.cargo.site.

Andrea Fatona, Associate Professor, Faculty of Art and Graduate Program Director, Criticism and Curatorial Practice, is an active curator. Her areas of focus are culture, cultural policy formation, cultural production, nation making, citizenship and multiculturalisms. In the classroom, she engages students in thinking about issues around equity and diversity in the context of art.

The Student Edition began in 2019, with visits to art schools and universities in the United States and Canada, where we began recording voices of the future. In 2020, we present the first episodes in our Student Edition—conversations about creativity with emerging makers and producers. Given opportunities to explore and experiment, students are discovering how they can shape the world they live in. What issues and ideas spark their creative impulse?