Rocking Chair Sessions

With decades of experience as an arts administrator, curator, and educator Christopher Barake is the Deputy Director for the Doral Contemporary Art Museum - DORCAM. He is co-founder of Art Industry Movement and was curator at KER Art + Design Gallery and ConcreteSpace.

Barake is also an academic administrator for the Department of Art + Art History at Florida International University. He began his career at FIU in 2007 where his previous duties include coordinating an artist-in-residency program and community-based collaboratory art projects.

He earned his Master of Fine Arts in Curatorial Practice, along with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Sculpture, and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Florida International University.

www.dorcam.org

I use household items and industrial materials to explore identity, gender, displacement and the concept of home. My work is of an intuitive nature, rooted in the painterly and the language of abstraction- though it often defies a singular categorization. These hybrid works are based on the idea of stretching the medium beyond traditional interpretations. The objects I employ are marred by overuse, they speak to their history or demise in order to form and shape narratives between early childhood in Cuba and the present. Chaotic, humorous amalgamations of materials and disparate objects sometimes serve as stand ins for the figure or the self, challenging the threshold between stability and instability as they transcend boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation. Household Plants, fishing line, discarded clothing, broken furniture, wood, and other unconventional materials provide clues as to a city's inhabitants while commenting on our relationship with interior and exterior spaces.

www.claravaras.com

Lucia Del Sanchez is an artist and designer from Miami, FL. Through sculpture and painting Sanchez seeks to build a new relationship with her hometown. In collaboration with her father, Oliver Sanchez, she has produced art shows and programming at Swampspace Gallery since 2008. This independent and non-commercial art space engages a wide range of tastes and often functions as an educational resource for the youth. Sanchez studied abroad at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Holland and the European Exchange Academy in Germany. She attended The Cooper Union in New York City and received a B.F.A in Fine Arts. Lucia Del Sanchez is of Cuban and Slovenian descent and traces her story, breaking down its historical narrative with an eye to archeology and the archive. She employs collections, observations, and word play to produce temporal poetics and protracted self portraits.

Kim Yantis is a visual artist whose work is fueled by collaboration, sewing, and design. Her current project with Lucinda Linderman, "Suiting-up for the Future,” is a wry runway show and workshop series of sustainable workwear and utilitarian accessories that act as “Wearable Tools for the 21st Century.” Together they create demonstration pieces, allegorical costumes, take-away postcards and performance works.Garments and accessories are available for purchase and commission.

http://www.kimyantis.com/

https://www.instagram.com/suitingupforthefuture

Paris-born Karelle Levy was raised in Miami by a Swedish mother and Tunisian father. She spent her childhood surrounded by arts and crafts, music, dance and fashion, which all play a role in her designs. Levy studied textile design at Rhode Island School of Design, where she knitted and wove fabrics for garments and costumes worn during her art performances. The costumes became the impetus for KRELwear, a fashion-forward collection of couture and ready to wear.

As Levy’s textiles evolved, her art grew more intricate and developed into large-scale, site-specific installations and two-dimensional works. Playing with a vast array of yarns and colors to create her signature fabrics, she knits shimmering, glow-in-the-dark rainbows and patchwork landscapes inspired by aerial views during frequent air travel.

https://krelwear.com/

Aaron Glickman is a writer, actor and filmmaker. Through his contributions to SocialMiami, he has had opportunities to document many fascinating people and organizations in the fields of philanthropy, the arts, fashion, design and real estate including Carolina Herrera, James Rosenquist, Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, Russell Simmons, Nicole Miller, Christian Louboutin, Lin Arison and many more. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Miami Theater Center (MTC) and is on the Executive Committee of the National YoungArts Foundation. He recently founded Current.Miami, a digital media platform that tells hyper-local stories through the use of video.

http://current.miami/

Barron Sherer is a time-based media artist with a background in moving image archival practice and research. He currently works in Miami with a focus on altering and repurposing archived films. In the early 2000s, he was curator at Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives where he programmed moving image festivals, public access activities, researched collections and managed photochemical conservation. He is the recipient of awards, fellowships, and residencies including a 2017 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, a 2019 Experimental Media Artist in Residence at Signal Culture and a 2020 Oolite Arts at Anderson Ranch Artist Residency. Sherer’s new studio project, Moving Image Alliance is a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge finalist.

https://vimeo.com/barronsherer

Ade J. Omotosho is a writer living in Miami and the Miami editor-at-large for Burnaway. He has held curatorial positions at Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

For Burnaway, he has written on subjects including the photographic history of the Black male nude and the work of emerging artists in Miami, and his review of Paulo Nazareth’s 2019 solo exhibition at ICA Miami was included in Stranger, Harder, Brighter: The 2019 Burnaway Reader.

https://burnaway.org/author/ade-j-omotosho/

Dímitra Pantoulia is a Conservator of Antiquities and Works of Art, trained in Athens, Greece. After she finished her studies in 2009, she worked for the Library of the Hellenic Parliament and then for the Byzantine Museum in Athens. In the US, she started working for the Caryatid Conservation Services in Miami, under the conservator Stephanie Hornbeck, until she accepted the position of chief Conservator on Field Museum at Chicago, in February 2017. During that period, Dimitra was conducting condition and conservation assessments, conservation treatments and maintenance of three-dimensional artworks.

https://www.pantouliaconservation.com/

Toña Vegas, (Caracas, Venezuela) is a multidisciplinary artist working with mixed media, printmaking, digital processes and site-specific three- dimensional works. Her work reflects on the visibility of an energetic underlying matrix present in every apparently distinct element of nature us humans included.

https://tonyavegass.squarespace.com/