Fresh Art International

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Cathy Byrd channels conversations about creativity in the Fresh Art International Podcast. Since 2011, we’ve amplified the voices of contemporary artists, curators, architects, writers and filmmakers from the center and fringe of creative communities across six continents.

Episodes

Tuesday Nov 26, 2019

Jana Winderen on The Art of Listening Under Water

Tuesday Nov 26, 2019

Norwegian artist Jana Winderen records sounds above and below the surface of our blue planet to compose site-specific sonic environments. For four days during Miami Art Week 2019, she invites you to step inside the Collins Park Rotunda on Miami Beach, for The Art of Listening: Under Water. Miami’s waterways, the Barents Sea and the Tropical Oceans come together within the spherical space, to immerse you in an acoustic collage.

The Art of Listening: Under Water portrays the fragile and complex beauty that circulates through the currents of the interconnected marine world. Winderen’s ephemeral installation promises to leave us with a lasting impression. Those who take time to float into the sensory experience will take away a new understanding of sonic relationships that echo across our seas.

Exploring a global issue of growing concern, our episode with Jana Winderen is the perfect finale for 2019. Visit our website, to hear other conversations centered on environments at risk and explore opportunities to engage with our new and ongoing initiatives.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Special Audio: Jana Winderen

Tuesday Nov 19, 2019

Experts Guide to Miami Art Week 2019

Tuesday Nov 19, 2019

Today, we take you to meet three globally engaged, Miami-based contemporary art experts. Ombretta Agro Andruff, Tami Katz-Freiman and Kathryn Mikesell are here to help you navigate the city and enjoy the intense burst of international art that transfigures the cultural landscape every December.

Miami Art Week brings together local and international art worlds. This is not only an opportunity for globally active galleries to present the best work of artists they represent. Miami art spaces, museums, community initiatives, individual artists and designers and collectives all rise to the occasion, too, to show their creative force to the world.

Diverse participants have diverse agendas. Whether you’re a collector, a curator, a creator, or an aficionado, focus on your passion—what would you like to discover?

Takeaways

Plan your itinerary to focus on one art corridor— either the mainland or the beach
Use the map guides offered at the venues you visit, mark your map - where you want to go and where you’ve been
Take water and snacks, wear comfortable shoes
Do your homework, but be willing to improvise — follow your intuition!

Of Special Interest in 2019

BEFORE THE FAIRS: Dec 1, Miami—Progressive Brunch with local galleries | Dec 2, Miami Beach—Faena Festival

Dec 3-8 ART FAIRS Recommended: Art Basel Miami Beach, Design Miami, UNTITLED, NADA, PINTA and PRIZM

EXHIBITIONS—Openings: The new Rubell Museum and El Espacio 23 in the Allapattah district | Teresita Fernandez at Pérez Art Museum Miami | Yayoi Kusama and Sterling Ruby at the Institute of Contemporary Art | Trenton Doyle Hancock at Locust Projects | Haegue Yang, Mickelene Thomas and Lara Favaretto, at the Bass Museum | Cecilia Vicuña at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art

PUBLIC ART on Miami Beach—Collins Park, Lummus Park, on the beach and at the Convention Center

About Our Experts:

From Italy, Ombretta Agró-Andruff, is an independent curator and founder of ARTSail

residency and research initiative. The program connects artists and scientists to address

the climate change specific to South Florida through creative projects. From Israel, independent curator, art historian and critic Tami Katz-Freiman remembers Miami before Art Basel. Katz-Freiman curated the Israeli Pavilion in the 57th Venice Art Biennale. From the U.S., Kathryn Mikesell is co-founder and executive director of Fountainhead Residencies and Studios. The Residency offers artists from around the world a shared creative space and an introduction to Miami’s art scene.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio

Tuesday Nov 12, 2019

The Mind-Bending Mythology of Trenton Doyle Hancock

Tuesday Nov 12, 2019

In November 2019, Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock brings his mythological “Moundverse” to Miami. Locust Projects gives over the entire space to his site-specific installation. The artist will immerse us in a world inspired by comic books, toys, horror films and animations.

For decades, Hancock has been telling the story of the Mounds (gentle hybrid plant-like creatures) protected by Torpedo Boy (Hancock’s alter ego), and their enemies, the Vegans (mutants who consume tofu and spill Mound blood every chance they get). In paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, video and installation, the artist explores good and evil, authority, race and class, moral relativism, politics and religion.

This is not our first encounter with Trenton Doyle Hancock. He was among artists that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver selected for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. The exhibition premiered in 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Houston, and traveled across the United States. In Radical Presence, Cassel Oliver surveyed seminal black performance art. She invited artists into the exhibition to re-stage their performances.

We make our way to Houston to watch Hancock embody one of the characters in the narrative he began creating when he was 10 years old. For an evening performance titled “Devotion,” he becomes a singing Mound. He's massive. He's blindfolded. Cassel Oliver feeds him Jell-O. The spectacle is intimate, absurd and deeply spiritual.

The next morning, we wander through the artist’s mind. Our conversation explores the histories, objects and ideas that inform his work. His warehouse is awash in accumulating materials—cast-off toys, books and bottle caps, scraps of felt and fabric, cans of paint. Works in progress and finished collage paintings line the walls. A drum kit sits waiting in one corner. It seems unlikely that this artist will ever lose the desire to experiment and play with the fantastical characters that animate his inner world.

Sound Editor: 2019 Anamnesis Audio; 2013 Eric Schwartz | Special Audio: Trenton Doyle Hancock

Tuesday Nov 05, 2019

CYJO on the Complexities of Photographing Identity

Tuesday Nov 05, 2019

We shadow CYJO, a Miami-based Korean American visual artist, as she navigates the complex maze of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018. Her goal is to discover and document exceptional work in the photographic medium for the “Art Basel Miami Week Diary” that she contributes to the bilingual online publication L’Œil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography).

Inside the fair, Gian Paolo Paci, of Paci Contemporary, in Bresi, Italy, introduces us to his gallery’s featured artist: American photographer Nancy Burson. Burson created some of the earliest photographic portraits using computer-morphing technology.

Jared Quintan, Associate Director of Rhona Hoffman, in Chicago, deconstructs the symbolism in a photographic wall installation by Lorna Simpson, an African-American photographer and multimedia artist known for her singular approach to portraiture. Quintan also talks about intimate portraits by African American artist Deana Lawson, whose photographs reveal the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories.

A few weeks later, we meet CYJO in her studio, a light-filled loft that looks out over Biscayne Bay in Miami. We’re here to learn more about how the artist explores the complexities of identity, beauty and belonging through her own photography, video and text.

Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio