Writer/curator Cathy Byrd sparks conversations about today’s art, design, and film on the Fresh Art International podcast. Synthesizing interviews and field recordings with critical commentary since 2011, the podcast archives the voices, sounds, and stories of contemporary culture makers from around the world.
Episodes
Wednesday Aug 26, 2020
Wednesday Aug 26, 2020
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
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
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
Monday Aug 24, 2020
Monday Aug 24, 2020
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
Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
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
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
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
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
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
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
Wednesday Apr 01, 2020
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
Friday Mar 06, 2020
Friday Mar 06, 2020
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?
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Wednesday Mar 04, 2020
Today, we take you to Motor City. Once a symbol of the dynamic U.S. economy, Detroit, Michigan, has gone through a major economic and demographic decline since the 1960s. The drastic drop in population created acres of emptiness—vacant lots, abandoned buildings and food deserts.
Detroit’s art scene is known for countering negative growth with a resilient DIY attitude. While locals respect and sustain the history of innovation in the place they call home, the gritty urban landscape has begun to attract newcomers. Creatives from other cities are heading here to seek affordable studios and fresh opportunities.
Education is evolving along with Detroit’s cultural character. At Wayne State University, degree programs are increasingly geared toward next generation art and design. Students taking the course Design for Urban Mobility work with local entrepreneurs to solve design problems. Past clients have been Detroit Bikes and the Detroit Department of Transportation with the Rehab Institute of Michigan. In fall 2019, juniors and seniors majoring in Industrial Design join forces with Dazmonique Carr, founder of Deeply Rooted Produce.
In our conversation with these emerging designers, we discovered firsthand the impact of an educational opportunity that invites students to make a difference. Responding to the call, they are enabling and supporting mobility throughout the city—with actionable ideas that promote self-sufficiency and health literacy.
Wayne State—Designing for Urban Mobility is one of our 2020 Student Edition episodes.
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photography Monica McGivern, except where noted
Related Episodes: SAIC—Imagining Tomorrow, OCAD University—Curating in the Digital Realm
Related Links: Industrial Design, Wayne State University, Deeply Rooted Produce
Design for Urban Mobility is a course offered through Wayne State University’s James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History. Students taking the course consider a variety of questions of how products, spaces and experiences enable and support our mobility through urban space. Each semester—often through client-based projects—they explore four distinct but interrelated concepts of urban mobility: mobility and community, mobility and discovery, mobility and economic vitality, and mobility and social justice.
Deeply Rooted Produce, founded by Dazmonique Carr, is a mobile market with a mission: to provide fresh fruits and vegetables sourced locally and support Detroit’s economy towards self-sufficiency and health literacy. The market’s purpose is to Increase access to healthy foods without sacrificing quality for affordability. DPR Promise: Provide H.E.L.P. (Health Education Literacy for People of Color)
Siobhan Gregory, a senior lecturer at Wayne University, an industrial designer and applied anthropologist, living and working in Detroit. Her research focuses on the progress of a more human-centered design practice. In the business sector, she pulls from anthropological theory and methods to help organizations.
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?
Monday Mar 02, 2020
Monday Mar 02, 2020
Today, we take you to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also known as SAIC. We’re here to meet participants in Imagining Tomorrow. The yearly experiential learning opportunity brings together students from schools in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Pakistan.
During each two-week seminar, they gather in a different host community to envision possible futures through design thinking. The clients are local organizations who ask the students to imagine solutions to real-life challenges—such as environmental sustainability and immigrant integration.
Chicago-based artists Kirsten Leenaars and Laura Davis co-created this international project. A lecturer at SAIC, Leenaars introduces us to three students who have experienced Imagining Tomorrow in Utrecht, Netherlands and Karlsruhe, Germany. Their studies range from film, animation and video to architecture and fashion.
In our conversation, you’ll hear how in a range of cultural contexts, students and educators alike forge meaningful relationships and learn to navigate business and government protocols. Crossing international borders to collaborate and innovate, students bring creativity outside the classroom—engaging with communities and learning to lead.
Related Episodes: Wayne State—Designing for Urban Mobility, OCAD University—Curating in the Digital Realm
Related Links: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Imagining Tomorrow, International Red Cross/the Netherlands, ZKM Center for Art and Media/Germany
Imagining Tomorrow is a two-week international seminar in which students from schools in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Pakistan come together to collaboratively address questions about future design thinking. They work with clients from international public and private organizations to propose interdisciplinary solutions to real-life issues. Participating schools: HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; SAIC, Chicago, USA; Karlshochschule International University, Karlsruhe, Germany; Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago will host the 2020 seminar.
Kirsten Leenaars, an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago, lectures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. She engages with individuals and communities to create participatory video and performance work. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through shared authorship, staging and improvisation.
Laura Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in objects and craft. Her works both present their own histories but easily adapt to how Davis recontextualizes them. She wields and contradicts assumed archetypes of gendered roles, reimagining new relationships by creating handcrafted metal sculpture combined with gender specific readymade objects. Her interactions disrupt notions of value at the intersections of art, design and craft.
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?