Rocking Chair Sessions

Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, a native Floridian, has lived and worked in Miami, FL since 2009. She is an artist, educator and community organizer. She works across performance, installation, sound, sculpture, photography, and video within a wide variety of contexts including nightclubs, gardens, bathrooms, empty lots and fire stations; as well as, museums, commercial galleries and non-profit art spaces.

https://www.feleciacarlisleart.com/

Milly Cardoso was born and raised in Miami, Florida and is the Director and Curator for the University of Miami Gallery in the Wynwood Art District. Prior to joining University of Miami, she worked for the Miami Art Museum (Pérez Art Museum, Miami) and the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Private Collection.

Sammi McLean seeks out a particular sense of longing that seems impossible to satiate, bringing that which feels absent to the surface through the act of creating. In some ways, her work functions as the only physical tie that she has to significant people, places, or things that have gone. While the subject matter has transformed over time, the need to expose that yearning and resurrect what’s been lost remains.

https://www.sammimclean.com/

Gabriela Gamboa is a visual artist working with a broad range of media, including photography, video and performance, sound and printmaking. Though she was born in Pittsburgh she has spent the better part of her life in Venezuela. Her work draws strongly on current affairs and the effect of disruptive political agendas resulting in displacements and upheaval, of which she speaks from the heart.

http://gabrielagamboa.com/

I was born in the center of the Caribbean, where, according to the writer Junot Diaz, the fukú originated, Santo Domingo, where waves and palm trees were always saying something to me with their particular rhythm. Then, looking for new lights, I settled in the city of Miami, where the coast still wanted to talk to me, to offer me its insular imaginary, from the edge, the border. In my work, I explore the poetics related to the construction of a new imaginary in the contemporary Caribbean through video, photography, performance, painting and installation, crisscrossing it with my family history. I focus on ritual, and on the idea that we can eradicate the silences in which these contexts and imagery have been constructed. I call my practice integrating Afro-Caribbean folk traditions and participatory social practice “Art of Uncertainty.”

http://www.charooquet.com

http://www.edgezones.org

Elisa Turner has been called “Miami’s art critic.” Probably a lot of other things too, but we won’t go there. She was an art critic for The Miami Herald when it was still owned by Knight Ridder, which no longer exists. Now that her Herald byline no longer exists either, this award-winning journalist is for sure not shutting up. Here's where to find her most current writing: Artburstmiami and Biscayne Times. In 2019 she won the Leadership Award from the Florida Chapter of ArtTable, Inc.

http://artcircuitsartcentric.blogspot.com/

http://elisaturnerartcrit.blogspot.com/

http://inspicio.fiu.edu/video-categories/elisa-turner/

https://www.artburstmiami.com/

http://www.biscaynetimes.com/

Atomik is a 100 percent Miami artist. Atomik, trained in graphic design, is a big name in the Miami art scene. The graffiti legend, part of the infamous MSG crew, a group of local graffiti heroes, has been painting the city for quite some time. While growing up in the emerging Miami graffiti scene of the 80’s, Atomik witnessed for himself at a young age what would later become his profession. Famous for his iconic orange character which emerged as a response to the demolition of the Miami Orange Bowl ,the artists also marks the walls of Miami with his sleek hand-styles, graffiti and lettering.

https://www.instagram.com/atomiko

After graduating from Florida International University with a bachelors in photography, Monica began collaborating with her sister on videos, large-scale installations, performance art, clothing, VJ sets, and fanzines. A video piece at Bas Fischer International that featured 35 local artists passing on "creative energy" to each other gained the attention of critics. Since then, TM Sisters work has been featured in the second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and at Performa07 in New York. Locust Projects selected the pair from an applicant pool of 72 artists to receive the Hilger Artist Project Award. They were also included in the international exhibition "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium" curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum, and Gunnar B. Kvaran (Miami New Times).

https://www.instagram.com/monicatronica

Thomas Bils’s paintings are a result of his interests over epistemology of memory and the ontology of its subjects, using his adolescence in central Florida as the base position of introspection. Working in photorealistic oil painting he references the mnemonic properties of the photograph and translates the image as an act of nostalgic contemplation. During the translation process Thomas assumes the role of the unreliable narrator, embellishing upon minute details or events, leavening the image with narratorial unease. This falsification accounts for the deteriorating truths of a reconsolidating memory.

https://thomasbils.com/

Evan Robarts (b. 1982) lives and works in New York and Miami. He graduated from Pratt with a BFA in sculpture in 2008. He has previously held solo exhibitions at Berthold Pott, Cologne (2017); Galerie Jeanroach Dard, Brussels (2016); and The Hole, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Abstraction & Architecture, Université de Strasbourg (2018), See the Moon?, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2017); and the Fountain Head Residency Show, Miami (2017) organized by Kathryn Mikesell. This fall, Robarts will hold a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Kunsthalle Kunstverein Bremerhaven in Germany.

http://evanrobarts.com/