Fresh Art International

In our report from Miami Art Week 2017, Tanja Hollander, Nancy Davidson, Tania El Khoury, Sara Driver and Amy Sherald talk about the roles that social media art, inflatable sculpture, interactive performance, documentary film and figurative painting played during Miami Art Week and Art Basel 2017.

Tanja Hollander is an artist who lives and works in Auburn, Maine. No need for a ticket to an art fair or a museum to experience her social media project Are You Really My Friend? during Art Week. You could participate by visiting a small pavilion inside the Botanical Garden on Miami Beach. The vast archive of the project is currently on view in its entirety at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

For the multi-media installation Per Sway that she presents at Locust Projects in Miami, Nancy Davidson created inflatable symbols of power and control that mirror the bizarre and horrifying political climate in the world today. Based in New York, Davidson is an interdisciplinary artist known for anthropomorphic weather balloon sculptures that explore the architecture of the body.

Miami Dade College Live Arts program invited artist Tania El Khoury to share a dozen haunting stories from the Middle East. Based in London and Beirut, Tania choreographed two intimate interactive performances for venues on Miami Beach. As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a one-on-one encounter inside a small room at the New World Center. Gardens Speak is a theatrical experience for groups of ten at the Fillmore Theater.

New York based filmmaker Sara Driver takes us back to a seminal time in New York City history with her new documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sara was part of the independent film scene in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Besides making her own feature films, she’s recognized for producing early film projects by her partner Jim Jarmusch. After screenings at the 2017 Toronto and New York festivals, Magnolia Pictures plans the film's release in theaters for 2018.

Joining us Live on UNTITLED Radio, Baltimore based painter Amy Sherald talks about her work and the impact of recent art news. This year, her figurative paintings came to the world’s attention and doubled in value when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Sherald to paint the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. Our conversation leads to Naima Green's writing on the subject in the New York Times.

Today, we take you to the Everglades, a region of South Florida once entirely covered in a shallow, slow-moving sheet of water. Established as a National park in 1947, the subtropical wilderness of endless marshes, dense mangroves and towering palms is a habitat for rare and endangered species—including manatees, the American crocodile, and the Florida panther. 

Since 2001, the wild world of the Everglades has been a temporary habitat for artists and writers who spend a month here as fellows in the program known as AIRIE, Artists in Residence in Everglades. New York based photographer Adam Nadel was a past resident. In this podcast episode, he introduces Getting the Water Right an expansive exhibition project he produced with Jessica Cattelino, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles. Together, they tell the human story of South Florida’s iconic eco-system.

Alba Triana, a Colombian-born composer and sound artist based in Miami, Florida, introduces three of her exquisite sound and light installations: Music on a Bound String questions whether or not the act of listening is indispensable to the musical experience. Microcosmos animates a cymbal to create an immersive vibrational experience. The interactive Electronic Gamelan invites visitors to perform one of the artist's compositions. Listen to discover her trans-disciplinary approach to the ever-evolving field of sound art.

How does Miami continue to expand on and elevate the international conversation about contemporary art that the world’s premiere art fair sparked in 2002 by launching Art Basel Miami Beach?

On this live streaming show broadcast from the Jolt Radio studio, Miami, Florida, meet artists and curators who are making this city a year round destination for art. We introduce exhibitions you can visit in renovated and new art spaces, the presentation of work by emerging artists in a historic building downtown and an art fair with no art for sale that will take place inside a luxury shopping center in the heart of the business district.

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Studio guests:

In this live streaming talk show on Jolt Radio, we explore the ways that Downtown Miami sparks creative interventions—how the city's cultural landscape inspires artists, curators and city developers based here.

In studio: Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Art + Design, Miami Dade College, on Living Together film and performance series and the Museum without Boundaries initiative, with sound tracks introducing upcoming performances by Carrie Mae Weems and Samora Pinderhughes.

Field Recordings:

Listen in to hear the energy and creativity that our team and guests brought to our live streaming Breakfast and The Beat show on Jolt Radio this week. We thank you, our listeners and invite you to support our efforts to bring the voice of international contemporary art, design and film to our global community.

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Today, we take you to Venice, Italy, to meet Hong Kong artist and composer Samson Young. He tells the stories behind Songs for Disaster Relief, his creation for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. Fake news, meta fiction, politics, pop music and philanthropy are all at play in the multi-part installation that begins in the courtyard. The pavilion’s inter-connected environments mock the music industry’s imperialist history of do-good songs while expressing appreciation for the effort and exposing the artist's drive to find real caring for the Other in today's xenophobic world.

This radio show about Architecture with a Sense of Place features conversations with artists and architects whose work responds to cultural, historical, sociopolitical and environmental influences on our built environment. Featured: Jack Sanders, Design Build Adventure, Austin; Jaya Kader, KZ Architecture, Miami; David Hartt at Graham Foundation, Chicago; Sarah Dunn, Urban Lab, Chicago; Bijoy Jain, Studio Mumbai, India; Marshall Brown, Marshall Brown Projects, Chicago; Jimenez Lai and Joanna Grant, Bureau Spectacular, Los Angeles; and Gerard & Kelly at Farnsworth House.

Today, we take you to the Arsenale, a historic shipyard and main venue for the 57th Venice Art Biennale. In the New Zealand pavilion, we hear artist Lisa Reihana speak on reversing the colonial gaze in her work Emissaries. http://www.freshartinternational.com

Brought to you live from the studio at Jolt Radio, our latest program on South Florida’s film culture introduces Miami Film Festival’s GEMS 2017. Hear from MFF’s associate director Diana Cadavid and Miami-based screenwriter Joshua Jean-Baptiste (#GettheGreenlight winner) and Los Angeles based filmmaker Angel Manuel Soto (VR Escape, La Granja). Listen in on our conversations with filmmakers Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) and Antonio Mendez Esparza (Life and Nothing More). Experience film as you might never have before hearing this show: Through your ears!