Artists Intervene for Resiliency at Aspen Ideas: Climate Conference in Miami Beach

In collaboration with The Aspen Institute, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the City of Miami Beach joined forces for Artists Intervene for Resiliency (AIR), commissioning a  series of temporary public art installations and performances highlighting issues related to climate change and sea level rise for the Aspen Ideas: Climate events.

The conference, held for the second time in Miami Beach on March 6 through March 9, is convening a diverse group of global and local policymakers, scientific experts, corporate leaders, innovators, young leaders, influencers, artists and members of the public to engage with climate solutions that have the potential to reshape our world.

The various public art commissions, including temporary installations, film screenings and performances, feature 15 Miami-Dade based artists working at the intersection of arts and resiliency and aim to create awareness and generate a dialogue regarding the climate challenges faced by our community and our world. All public art activations and performances are free and open to the public.

"Once again we are proud to collaborate with the Aspen Ideas conference and the City of Miami Beach to present public art commissions that will create awareness and encourage the public to mobilize to help address the vital issues of climate change and sea level rise," said Michael Spring, Director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. "This year’s commissions feature innovative projects by talented visual, media and performing artists that are doing this important work. Involving the inspired and powerful voices of artists is more evidence of our community’s pioneering commitment to creative solutions to the crucial issues of climate change and resiliency."

The public art activations for Aspen Ideas: Climate conference are as follows:

Visual Art Program

Artworks on for the duration of the conference March 6 through March 9, 2023.

Claudio Marcotulli
Sea Show
On view March 6-9 – Miami Beach Convention Center, Registration Lobby, Level 2

Sea Show appears as a fixed colorful light sculpture on the wall, until it morphs mixing patterns and images using a concealed TV monitor in its center. The artwork borrows its name from the popular annual event Air & Sea Show, giving it a whimsical spin and posing critical questions around the environment’s role in our lives and our voracious consumption of it. Sea Show was commissioned by the City of Miami Beach in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA) for the 2022 edition of No Vacancy, an annual juried art competition celebrating mainly local visual artists.

Cornelius Tulloch

Passages

On view March 6-9 – Miami Beach Convention Center, Hall B

Passages is a multisensory installation offering a place of contemplation of the black history of the Everglades. Environmental justice and social justice are in dialogue with each other, within the stunning backdrop of this beautiful and threatened ecosystem. Passages made a public debut during the Miami-based organization AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) Art and Environment Summit (2022). In this iteration at Aspen Ideas: Climate 2023, the work aims to create heightened visibility and a voice for the “River of Grass,” and the stories it holds.

Justin H. Long

Angle of Vanishing Stability (AVS)

On view March 6-9 – Miami Beach Convention Center, Hall B

Named after a term used in naval architecture to measure how far a ship can heal over before it capsizes completely, the piece features a sailboat that is completely upturned, suspended ten feet in the air solely by its mast. The artist challenges viewers’ perception of balance, equilibrium, and time, asking: “How far can one be pushed until passing the point of no return?” Angle of Vanishing Stability (AVS) was commissioned by the City of Miami Beach in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA) for the 2022 edition of No Vacancy, an annual juried art competition celebrating mainly local visual artists.

Laurencia Strauss

The Bubble Pops Popsicle Project

Zlatko Ćosić

Movement Strategies

Monday, March 6, 7 PM – Miami Beach Botanical Garden

Tuesday, March 7, 12-2 PM – Miami Beach Convention Center, Sunset Vista Lobby, Level 4

Wednesday, March 8, 12-3 PM – Miami Beach Convention Center, Sunset Vista Lobby, Level 4

This artwork is a participatory installation where participants are asked what advice they would share from living through experiences like migrating and surviving hurricanes. In turn, participants receive hand-crafted popsicles depicting local areas at risk of sea-level rise and other climate change conditions, and which reveal advice collected from a previous participant in English, Spanish, and Haitian-Creole. Strauss and Ćosić have collaborated for Movement Strategies, a related series of moving images of collected adaptation advice and water. Visitors and locals will be able to view these collective responses – and contribute their own.

Magnus Sodamin

Florida Wildlife Corridor

On view March 6-9 – Miami Beach Botanical Garden

This installation features a 4 feet-tall, laser cut polished steel sculpture based off of a digitized drawing inspired by the Everglades. Florida Wildlife Corridor reflects South Florida’s wild neighbors, lush landscape, and importance of preserving these wild spaces for the future of our water source and biodiversity. Through this work, Sodamin raises awareness about the local environment and memorializes Florida’s past and present through its magnificent and unique wilderness.

Michelle Weinberg

Tropic Episodes

Michelle Weinberg’s design for The Aspen Ideas: Climate 2023 bags, water bottles, and shirts is based on her work installed at the Miami International Airport, titled Tropic Episodes. In this work, Weinberg introduces a rich, stylized narrative inspired by South Florida's collision of lush tropical flora with streamlined mid-century and post-modernist architecture. Weinberg fuses an art deco palette with patterned vortices inspired by nature forms such as corals, storms and ocean gyres, all elements that figure in the future climate realities of Miami Beach, Miami-Dade and of the planet.

Orlando Estrada

Tiered Panorama

On view March 6-9 – Miami Beach Convention Center, Hall B

Tiered Panorama is a rotating, multi-level sculptural installation addressing Miami-Dade’s vulnerability to a future climate-refugee crisis caused by sea level rise. The diorama of the Magic City collages organic and artificial materials creating a vibrant and gritty vision of modernity, literally glowing under the residue of petro-capitalism. Composed mostly of polyurethane foam, Tiered Panaroma plays with concepts of how the production and use of petroleum-based plastics upend the natural fossil layers within the crust of the earth and confuse these natural markers of time. It was originally exhibited in 2021 as part of Waterproof Miami, a curatorial series presented by Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI) and Bridge Initiative.

Film Program

All films shown at the Miami Beach Convention Center, Screening Room

Cheryl Maeder

Super Natural

Maeder worked with the elements of wind and natural light to create the fog of color in various natural settings, highlighting the spectacular and unique attributes of the region. This work is in alignment with Maeder’s practice of creating large-scale video installations that embrace new technologies and explore climate issues through an often personal and human-scaled approach.

Coral Morphologic

Projections of a Coral City

Projections of a Coral City (POACC) is a large-scale projection-mapping installation featuring macroscopic images of corals native to Miami and from around the world. The piece was commissioned by the Knight Foundation and premiered on the exterior of the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall during Miami Art Week 2022. Coral Morphologic was founded in 2007 by marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay in Miami as a multi-faceted platform for the development of symbiosis between humans and coral. It uses unique methods blending science and art in a way featuring the beauty of coral while inspiring the next generation to restore the reefs and protect the planet.

Shireen Rahimi

Letter from the Age of Ecocide

Dr. Shireen Rahimi's Letter from the Age of Ecocide is a cinematic underwater short film featuring a woman experiencing painful climate anxiety who is guided by the poetry of her ancient Persian ancestors to a place of ecological healing. The film was commissioned by Oolite Arts in partnership with the City of Miami Beach as part of Local Love Letters, a program co-funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation supporting Miami’s filmmaking ecosystem. The film received the program’s People’s Choice Award after its premiere in SoundScape Park in December 2022.

Sri Prabha

Cosmic Occupancy

Sri Prabha’s Cosmic Occupancy is a selection of video projections featuring elements from ancient forests, lava caves, fossils, flora, and fauna fused with text, moving mandalas, and light fields to encourage and raise consciousness about our place in the universe. His works manifest across a range of mediums that include installations, video, light art, sculptural paintings, and sound. Cosmic Occupancy was commissioned by the City of Miami Beach in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA) for the 2022 edition of No Vacancy, an annual juried art competition celebrating mainly local visual artists.

Performance-Based Works

Amanda Crider

Blooming Still: A musical exploration of the relationship between humanity and the Earth

Tuesday, March 7, 4:30 PM, SoundScape Park, Miami Beach

Mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider presents a program of music for voice and string quartet by contemporary American composers including Jessie Montgomery, Aaron Copland, and Caroline Shaw. The texts of the songs reflect on climate change and the beauty and fragility of our natural world. Crider is the Founder and Artistic Director of Miami’s Art Song concert series, IlluminArts, which she created in August 2013.

Juraj Kojš

Orchid Music

Friday, March 3, 7 PM - Miami Beach Botanical Garden

Wednesday, March 8, 4:30 PM - SoundScape Park, Miami Beach

Orchid Music is an experimental music project that investigates the relationship between people, orchids, and technologies. Florida orchids in their multitude of expressions play an important role in understanding how our local environment grapples with the spectrum of climate-driven transformations. Orchid Music uses orchid DNA to provide the creative framework for music by mapping orchid DNA to sound sources such as custom-designed synthesizers and drum machines, as well as samples of typewriter, woodblock, nuts and seeds, clay pots, water dripping, flute samples by Margaret Lancaster, and others.

Liony Garcia

Corporeal Decorum

Monday, March 6, 4:30 PM – SoundScape Park, Miami Beach

Corporeal Decorum is a multidisciplinary dance performance piece and investigation into the cultural erasure of Miami’s Art Deco District, an area that is particularly affected by the effects of climate change and sea level rise. The piece memorializes important features of the city’s surviving deco architecture. The performer's body stores the memory of these places through sequences of movements that are derived from the tracing of architectural ornamentation in the region. It is a work that deals with themes of loss, recovery, and rebirth.

For a full program schedule including satellite exhibitions and to view images representative of the artists’ works visit the website. For more information about Aspen Ideas: Climate programming please visit www.aspenideasclimate.org.

About the City of Miami Beach
World-famous Miami Beach welcomes millions of visitors each year to its sandy beaches, turquoise waters and vibrant cultural scene. Known for its colorful art deco and MiMo architecture, the 7-mile island offers some of the finest dining, lifestyle and health and wellness experiences anywhere. Nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the city is often described as a living laboratory for climate change. As a result, Miami Beach is also at the forefront of identifying workable solutions to meet the challenge of sea level rise. For more information, please visit  www.mbartsandculture.org.

About The Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit organization committed to realizing a free, just, and equitable society. Founded in 1949, the Institute drives change through dialogue, leadership, and action to help solve the most important challenges facing the United States and the world. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the Institute has a campus in Aspen, Colorado, and an international network of partners.

About the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs

The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs develops cultural excellence, diversity, access, and participation throughout Miami-Dade County by strategically creating and promoting equitable opportunities for artists and cultural organizations, and all of our residents and visitors who are their audiences. In 2019 the Department of Cultural Affairs launched its Arts Resilient 305 initiative to increase awareness about the impact of climate change and the importance of resiliency and environmental sustainability.