Local Artist Forum is a free series presented by Pérez Art Museum Miami in fall 2019, offered as an extension of the ongoing Local Views Tours to provide additional resources and conversations relevant to working local artists in Miami. Join us for presentations and conversation around balancing your artist practice. The afternoon will feature presentations from Miami-based artists on how they manage their social and work schedule alongside their artistic practice, followed by audience-led conversation and questions. The afternoon will feature artists Kevin Arrow, Jenna Balfe, Domingo Castillo, Aurora Molina, Najja Moon, Emmett Moore, Christina Pettersson, Nicole Salcedo, Nathaniel Sandler, sleeper, and Thom Wheeler Castillo.
Kevin Arrow is a multifaceted artist and museum professional living and working in Miami, Florida. His work has been widely exhibited in South Florida since the mid-1980s. He has exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, the Miami Art Museum (PAMM), and the de la Cruz contemporary art space. His work takes on various forms including, drawing, painting, film, and audio based projects, merging his interest in obsolete media, archival tendencies, the ephemeral object, and humor. Through his work, he is continually seeking to find the sublime within the mundane, and the mundane within the sublime experience, in addition to investigating the interchangeability of both.
For the last thirty years, Arrow has been collecting 35mm slides and diverse printed matter and has amassed an archive of approximately 100 thousand 35mm slides related to a wide range of topics. Arrow’s interest in the medium grew and he began finding and collecting 35mm slides shot by others. He collected orphaned slide material from commercial photo-labs, universities, thrift stores, and yard sales.
In 2019, Arrow established Media + Archival Studies (M.A.S., Miami) based in the Bakehouse Art Complex. M.A.S. is an artist-run media archive focused on connecting artists and the general public to Miami’s unique archives and collections as a source of information and inspiration. Located in the Bakehouse Art Complex, M.A.S. is open as a media resource, research center, and art, photography, and film reading room.
Jenna Balfe has a Masters degree in Dance Movement Therapy from Pratt University. She is Executive Director of the non-profit Nature Links for Lifelong Learning that serves the population of young adults with developmental delays. She is the lead singer of the performance art, punk, no-wave band Donzii. In her art work, she cultivates performative relationships that use the body to create relationship with the self, other people and our shared organic and non-organic environment. She is a resident at Mana Contemporary Miami where her studio is located.
Domingo Castillo is an artist, often working collaboratively to produce artwork and films. In 2010, the end / SPRING BREAK, a nomadic artist-run project space in Miami, FL was co-founded with Patricia Margarita Hernandez which included major contributions by Cristina Farah and Kathryn Marks. In 2013, the gallery Noguchi Breton (F.K.A. Guccivuitton and Versace Versace Versace) was co-founded with Loriel Beltran and Aramis Gutierrez. In 2016 Public Displays of Professionalism (PDP), a transdisciplinary think tank was co-founded with Patricia Margarita Hernandez and Natalia Zuluaga.
Aurora Molina was born in La Havana, Cuba, in 1984. She emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, where she opted to pursue an education in art. Molina received her Associates of Arts in Visual Arts from Miami Dade College, a Bachelors in Fine Arts specializing in Mixed Media from Florida International University and Master Degree in Contemporary Art at the Universidad Europea de Madrid completed in 2009. She currently resides in Miami, Florida, where she works as a full-time artist. Represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
Former student athlete turned artist, it was in college that Najja Moon stopped playing basketball and focused on art. Moving on to graduate in the first class of students to major in studio art from Pfeiffer University. Post undergraduate school, she made the move from North Carolina to Miami where she has established herself as an artist and arts organizer. Her practice is centered on the idea that art is utilitarian. An amalgamation of practicalities that improve her life; design and language, cultural responsibility and community, her visual arts practice uses drawing and text to explore the intersections of queer identity, the body and movement, black culture and familiar relations both personal and communal. She is Co-Founder of the BLCK family a Miami based creative collective responsible for the installation of mobile performance art shows centered around culinary, visual, performing and social arts, motivated by the desire to connect communities in an environment built to encourage collaboration, foster creativity and manifest love.
Emmett Moore is a Miami-based designer and artist represented by Nina Johnson gallery. His work has been shown institutionally at the RISD Museum, the Frost Art Museum, the Miami Art Museum, the Bass Museum of Art, and is in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. He was the first Miami-based designer to exhibit a solo exhibition at Design Miami/. He is known for architectural collaborations and a technically rigorous interdisciplinary approach that challenges notions of functionality. Moore graduated from Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami and received his BFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Christina Pettersson was born in Stockholm, Sweden and lives in Miami, Florida. She is known for her large scale drawings, videos, sculptural installations and group performances, focusing on the history and environment of her native South Florida. Public programming and local collaborations have become central to her artistic practice, and have allowed Pettersson’s work to become a true engagement with the community, dissolving boundaries, utilizing the talents of a variety of people and organizations, and educating and delighting by innovative means.
She is the recipient of a Knight Grant, Ellies Creator Award, Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship thrice, and is a Fulbright Scholar, and has attended residencies such as Everglades National Park, Yaddo and Ucross. She is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Margulies Collection and the Four Seasons Hotel, as well as nationally and internationally.
Nicole Salcedo is an interdisciplinary artist born, raised and based in Miami. She studied object design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through meditative mark making and botanical pattern design, Nicole opens up pathways that restore our connections to nature, with a focus on bringing awareness to native South Florida plants and ecosystems. Nicole has shown in solo and group exhibits in Miami, including two museum exhibitions. She is currently a studio resident at Bakehouse Art Complex.
Nathaniel Sandler is a writer and the founding director of Bookleggers Library serving up Miami with free books on a monthly basis at literary events throughout the city. Focusing on the natural world, South Florida history and museum objects for his Knight Foundation funded project Crypt Cracking. He is quite skilled at low stakes negotiation and finding holes in meaningless arguments.
sleeper was born and raised in Miami. They studied at New World School of the Arts earning a degree in Sculpture, graduating in 2010 as Valedictorian. They have been fortunate enough to see the city’s transformation and cultural maturity. Creating work that touches on identity, Miami has been a major character and landscape for the recalling of translated experiences that inform their work. As a Latinx queer, growing up in the “south’s oasis”, it has offered him an interesting perspective on this colorful city. Their work in the community has been noted in Miami’s developing queer movement, through events like Counter Corner and Gender Blender who are helping shape a queer scene.
sleeper’s work draws a line between relationships. They make work to digest and externalize their experiences, in hopes to connect with others and share an understanding collectively. Their work examines the way we remember, and calls on the collective consciousness to begin a dialogue about the false realities we create to cope with social constraints. These experiences, sometimes masked, layered, stitched or intangible, inform who we are as individuals, but also have the ability to unify through performance and art. Sleeper uses pattern and light to create spaces that envelope their audiences. Dark themes are shifted and translated through multimedia experimental entertainment platforms. Informed by the traditional practices of resist fixity or Butoh, along with more contemporary and experimental forms of movement, sleeper’s work exist in a world between tension and surrender. His collaborations with production companies and major festivals has enabled his artwork and performances to reach large audiences in multiple genres.
Thom Wheeler Castillo lives and works in Miami, FL; Graduated from PNCA, Intermedia. Interested in landscape, environmentalism and ecosystems, he works from an interdisciplinary approach combining art history, earth science and anthropology. Recently he participated in the inaugural Commuter Biennial, supplanting advertisements on public buses with a series of handmade, editioned prints. He also produces works through experimentation and partnership that nurtures his studio practice, including being one-half of Archival Feedback (along with Emile Milgrim). The duo engage in various critical dialogues of the moment, approaching the environment as a studio in the field, producing sound works in a wide variety of mediums. Works with various institutions throughout the region including Pérez Art Museum Miami, O, Miami Poetry Festival, HistoryMiami, A.I.R.I.E. (Artist in Residence in the Everglades), the Rubell Museum, and the Department of Reflection.
