The Miami Rail | Issue 16

JUAN DOWNEY / JUSTINE LUDWIG / JOHN MILLER + JIM SHAW / MATTHEW RONAY DASH SNOW / AMELIA EARHART IN HIALEAH / REVIEWS

Spring 2016

OV E R 6 0 B O U T I Q U E S N OW O P E N .

M I A M I D E S I G N D I S T R I C T. N E T

Maíra das Neves and Pedro Victor Brandão, The þit, 2014

IN THIS ISSUE

V I SUA L A RT S 6 NEW BUSINESS: ART IN SEARCH OF ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC SYSTEMS Justine Ludwig 10 MATTHEW RONAY: WHEN TWO ARE IN ONE Martha Raoli 14 JOHN MILLER with Jim Shaw 20 A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARTISTS TEACHING IN MUSEUMS Mari Robles 22 UNITED STATES ARTISTS: CAROLINA GARCÍA JAYARAM and Dennis Scholl

LOCA L

COVER John Miller, Dynasty, 2007. Gold leaf, plaster, paper maché, Styrofoam, plastic objects on hollow-core door, 139.7 x 109.2 x 40.6 in.

Courtesy the artist and Richard Massey, Miami

26 ON CAPSIZING A CANOE IN BISCAYNE BAY Franky Cruz 29 AQUAFAIR Drew Lerman

30 TRANS AMÉRICA Christy Gast 34 MĂIASTRA: A HISTORY OF ROMANIAN SCULPTURE IN TWENTY-FOUR PARTS Igor Gyalakuthy

24 SOME IRREVERENT AND TRUE EARLY CONCEPTIONS OF FLORIDA AS UNDEREXPLAINED REASONS FOR WHY THIS PART OF THE WORLD IS CONSISTENTLY AND CONTINUALLY ABSURD Nathaniel Sandler

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EXPRES S

36 THE NATURE OF DESIRE: DASH SNOW AT THE BRANT FOUNDATION Ed Winstead

@miamirail

@themiamirail

2016 SEASON HIGHLIGHTS @

YO U N G A RT S M I A M I MARCH 8 - 13 Performances, exhibitions, writers’ readings and film screenings from the most promising young artists at the YoungArts Campus and Colony Theatre

YO U N G A RT S N E W YO R K APRIL 12-17 Performances, exhibitions, writers’ readings and film screenings at Baryshnikov Arts Center and other cultural institutions

PA I R I N G S @ TED’S World-class performances and a themed culinary experience by STARR Catering Group

F E B R U A RY 2 6 + 2 7 RUDI GOBLEN’S PET MARCH 18 + 19 NU DECO ENSEMBLE APRIL 29 + 30 O, MIAMI

21 0 0 BISCAYN E BO U L E VAR D, M IA M I , F LO R I DA 33137

sponsored by Miami-Dade County and The Children’s Trust, State of Florida, Wells Fargo and Miami Downtown Development Authority

L E A R N M O R E AT YO U N G A R T S . O R G @YO U N G A R T S # YO U N G A R T S

For the past 35 years, the National YoungArts Foundation has identified and nurtured the most accomplished young artists in the visual, literary, design and performing arts and assisted them at critical junctures in their educational and professional development. YoungArts aspires to create a community of alumni that provides a lifetime of encouragement, opportunity and support.

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PUBLISHER & FOUNDER Nina Johnson-Milewski MANAGING EDITOR Kara Pickman PROGRAMS MANAGER Michelle Lisa Polissaint FILM AND PERFORMING ARTS EDITOR Monica Uszerowicz FLORIDA EDITOR Nathaniel Sandler LITERATURE EDITOR Sarah Trudgeon POETRY EDITOR P. Scott Cunningham DESIGN Jessalyn Santos-Hall INTERNS Melissa Demarziani Kathryn Garcia Josh Lewis Santino Sini BOARD Phong Bui Lauren Gnazzo Nina Johnson-Milewski John Joseph Lin Tommy Pace ADVISORY BOARD Matthew Abess Christy Gast Daniel Milewski PRINTER Nupress, Miami SPECIAL THANKS The Brooklyn Rail CONTACT advertising@miamirail.org editor@miamirail.org info@miamirail.org

55 A R CHITECTURE 40 HIGH ART AND THE HIGH RISE Laura Randall

L I T E RATURE & P OETRY 42 AMELIA EARHART'S HIALEAH LAYOVER Rob Goyanes 45 Rio Cortez

The Miami Rail is made possible with the generous support of the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation.

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS 46 NATIONAL YOUNGARTS FOUNDATION: 1981–2016 Erica Ando 52 A LOVE SONG TO TENDER FRUITION AND DECAY: HEARTS OF PALM Monica Uszerowicz

Lee Miller, Fire Masks, 1941.

Modern exhibition digital print.

The exhibition was organized in cooperation with the Albertina, Vienna © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved

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Justine Ludwig is the Miami Rail’s Spring 2016 Visiting Writer. The Visiting Writer Program is generously supported by the John S. and the James L. Knight Foundation.

NEW BUSINESS:

Art in Search of Alternative Economic Systems JUSTIN E LUDW IG

In 2002, Art Basel Miami Beach became a fixture of the international art world, bringing galleries and well-heeled collectors to Florida. In the time since, countless art fairs have subsequently popped up in Miami during the first week of December. This proliferation calls attention to the interrelationship of art production and economy.

A slew of recent articles claim the art market bubble is on the verge of bursting.1 Other recent texts warn of the impending failure of capitalism2 and point to plummeting oil prices as well as a lack of stability in the Chinese stock market3 as major causes for concern. In light of this, now is the time to address the relationship between art and finance and seek out the potential for art to inspire an alternative to existing financial systems.

Art, with its readiness to break rules, can function as an experimental, discursive space where alternative economic structures can be addressed. Recent art exhibitions have brought attention to the potential of trade-based barter economies and have sought to revive past alternative economies.

These projects, each infused with an activist mentality, expand the definition of artistic practice.

1 See several articles written in response to the results of a study conducted by the University of Luxembourg: Roman Kräussi, “Is there a Bubble in the Art Market?” Journal of Empirical Finance 35 (January 2016): 99–109; Henri Neuendorf, “Academics Say the Art Market Bubble is about to Burst—Are They Right?”

Artnet, January 19, 2016, https://news.artnet.com/market/art-market-bubble-report-409136; Edward Helmore, “Art Market in ‘Mania Phase’ and Risks Bursting of the Bubble, Report Says,” Guardian, January 17, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/17/art-market-mania-phase-bubble-report.

2 Drew Hansen, “Unless it Changes, Capitalism will Starve Humanity by 2050,” Forbes, February 9, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050/#129ed2014a36.

3 Kelly Crow, “A Widespread Chill in Art Sales,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2016, http://www.wsj. com/articles/a-widespread-chill-in-art-sales-1454012388.

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Surasi Kusolwong, Dallas Dollar Market. Photo: Kevin Todora. Courtesy Dallas Contemporary

In January, Mexico City–based artist Pia Camil opened A Pot for a Latch at the New Museum in New York. The installation, constructed of modular displays, borrows the aesthetic of commercial space. Upon this structure hangs an assortment of objects, ranging from paintings to hats, records, sports equipment, and other objects more difficult to discern. On designated days throughout the run of the exhibition, viewers are invited to exchange the objects that are hung up with those they bring in. In her invitation to the public, the artist says, “Bring objects of power, of aesthetic interest, and of poignancy. The monetary value of these items is insignificant; their value lies instead in their richness of meaning and in the new life that they acquire on the grid within the Lobby Gallery.”4 In Camil’s project, it is not the artist who defines what is of aesthetic value, but rather the viewers/consumers. They are invited to acquire either objects that are of use to them or things they simply find visually compelling through acts of exchange.

The exhibition title draws from the potlatch ceremony of American Indians from the Northwest Pacific Coast. During these 4 Artist’s invitation: “A Pot for a Latch,” http://www.newmuseum. org/exhibitions/view/pia-camil.

ceremonies, property and wealth were distributed according to social status through the discretion of the host. In preparing for the piece, Camil was inspired by the idea of gift economies, where goods are given without the expectation of equal exchange.

This project followed up on lines of inquiry established in Camil’s previous work Wearing-watching, which was commissioned as part of Frieze Projects New York in 2015. At designated times during the fair, Camil distributed unique cloaks to the public free of charge. The project was met with simultaneous gratitude and contempt as some were thrilled to receive a wearable work of art at no cost, while others believed those with VIP status should receive special treatment, such as not having to wait in line to receive a cloak. Wearing-watching functioned as a subversion of the pay-to-play structure one is accustomed to at art fairs. All Camil asked of those who took part in the piece was that they wear her colorful ponchos.

A similar, yet more direct proposal for a trade-based financial model is established in Michael Austin Diaz’s For What It’s Worth, which functioned in Tallahassee for six months in 2014.

This neighborhood market ran on communal exchanges where people were invited to trade stories, interviews, and conversation for clothing, food, haircuts, and so on. The intention of the project

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VISITING WRITER

Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch, 2016.

Exhibition view: New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio

ART, WITH ITS READINESS TO BREAK RULES, CAN FUNCTION AS AN EXPERIMENTAL, DISCURSIVE SPACE WHERE ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC STRUCTURES CAN BE ADDRESSED.

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was to service the homeless community by treating life experience—and a willingness to share it—as currency. There was little to establish this project as a work of art aside from the instigator’s position as an artist.

Artist Christine Hill also sets up businesses under the premise of art installations. She has been doing so since the 1990s under the name Volksboutique, which began as a hybrid art installation/ thrift store in Berlin. Over the years, Volksboutique has taken on the form of other businesses, which Hill refers to as “organizational ventures,” such as a tour guide agency, a television talk show, and, most recently, an apothecary. In each case, the business is operated by Hill herself, with the interaction between the artist and the client presented as central to Volksboutique’s function. It highlights art production as labor.

Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong makes installations and performances that draw inspiration from consumer society and the economy, encouraging social interaction over economic exchange. In his 2011 project at Dallas Contemporary, Kusolwong took up residence in the gallery space, culminating in a one-night performance in an informal interactive space. During this event, everyday objects were sold off—all for the cost of one dollar, regardless of their actual market value—breaking down the hierarchy of value. Goods supplied ranged from laundry hampers to tennis shoes to pieces of rope.

While these projects co-opt the language of commerce without offering a sustainable alternative to the capitalist model, other artists have aimed to create their own economies. This is the case of the project Time/Bank organized by e-flux, which is modeled after the Cincinnati Time Store, an experimental general store created by anarchist and jack-of-all-trades Josiah Warren that operated between 1827 and 1830. Warren created his own type of currency, one directly tied to time itself. Both labor and goods would be recorded as a measurement of time and not be tied to any financial system. The store made no profits, as it was based on a system of exchanging labor for labor. Goods would be purchased with labor notes stating, “Due to Josiah Warren, on demand, thirty minutes in carpenter work—John Smith,” or “Due to Josiah Warren, on demand, ten minutes in needle-work—Mary Brown.”5 Time/Bank, launched by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle in 2010, follows the format of the Time Store, but recasts its alternative economic system as an art project. As with the Time Store, services are exchanged for “hour notes.” Reinforcing the role of Time/Bank as a social practice work of art, these hour notes are designed by pioneering text artist Lawrence Weiner. Time/Bank, in contrast to focusing on basic goods and services like the Time Store, is geared toward the creative community with a particular focus on those who do not produce commodities. It offers an exchange of skills such as teaching someone how to mold silicone, translating texts between languages, or helping install an exhibition. While the project does continue to function and pop up in various exhibitions, sadly it is now mostly defunct, as its message boards are spammed with 5 William Bailie, Josiah Warren, the First American Anarchist: A Sociological Study (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906), 10.

exhibition listings rather than offers of labor exchange.

Writer and activist Fran Ilich’s Spacebank (2011) is an investment bank built on capitalist trading structures, but uses an alternative currency, which is backed by Ilich’s own labor.

Spacebank is based on the fictional currency digital material sunflower, managed by the Digital Material Central Bank. The goal of the bank is to support socially conscious projects. It runs like other banks, offering the opportunity to open accounts and receive a Spacebank debit card. Another project by Ilich, Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op (2014), similarly disrupts traditional economic systems. This business produces coffee, which can be traded for alternative currency and time deposits with the goal of connecting anti-capitalist social movements.

These projects open up a space for discussion and experimentation where we can imagine different manners of commodity exchange. They also pose the question, “How are works of art funded if they opt to work against established financial models?”

The þit (2014) by Maíra das Neves and Pedro Victor Brandão used three cryptocurrency mines to create a self-funding model to run a communal park and its programming. These mines use algorithms to amass the digital asset, Bitcoin, that can be exchanged for physical currency. The installation was financially self-sustaining and, once dismantled, two of the cryptocurrency mines were given to other cultural initiatives to support their financial wellbeing. The þit addresses how art, which looks to divorce itself from established economic models, must also posit an alternative to art market reliance.

The designation as work of art, which each of these projects has adopted, provides a façade of levity to serious subject matter.

Each proposition for alternative financial modes earnestly calls for consideration. Fully taking advantage of artistic production as a space where experimentation is embraced, these artists point to the social responsibility and practical application of creative thought.

Justine Ludwig is director of exhibitions and senior curator at Dallas Contemporary.

Michaael Austin Diaz, For What It's Worth, 2014. Courtesy the artist

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MATTHEW RONAY: WHEN TWO ARE IN ONE M ARTHA RAO L I

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The title of Matthew Ronay’s installation at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) asks us to consider the forms that take shape When Two Are In One, a condition open to numeric calculation or philosophical conjecture. Given the squirmy eros and comic brutality of his work, I’m looking for the mathematics of the flesh. These sculptures easily invoke human figures, with their upright orientation and amalgamated biomorphic shapes.

They could read as abstracted body parts assembled to form a single body or, just as readily, as two bodies, each described by body parts. When organs, tongues, and smaller bits stand in for people, we can see human scenes in the throes of copulation, birth, death—the full range of motions that move us between states of singularity and duality. In this way, the works work through binary modes, tangibly and metaphysically, quivering between being two and being one. Total blending between two beings is impossible, and results in a kind of violent death for the individual. Ancient object makers have long been in touch with the deathly aura of sex. Motifs like the vagina dentata and relics such as spiked Venetian chastity belts and the great phallic stones of Scandinavia evidence lore that placed death within the auspices of eroticism.

For at least a decade, Ronay’s work has responded to what happens when one thing passes through another, and the site of this passage is the orifice. These responses have taken the form of drawing, costumery, performance, sculpture, installation, and life-size dioramas. The artist’s long-established relationships with Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Nils Stark, Copenhagen, have produced numerous shows, and more recent exhibitions include the 12th Lyon Biennial, as well as shows with Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, and Marlborough Chelsea.

No stranger to Miami, in 2011 Ronay and Nathan Carter were invited by Locust Projects to create a site-specific installation that, according to director Chana Budgazad Sheldon, “included handmade costumes, stage sets, and musical instruments based on misunderstandings of both Mummenschanz (a Swiss mime troupe started in the 1970s) and early Bauhaus performances . . . to a packed room of enthusiasts.”

Though I’m sure to embarrass him by saying so, you might say Ronay makes devotional art. In the studio, he practices labor with the intention of a monk or Shaker, looking for illumination in the shapes of things. He works to enter a meditative state, from which he can source imaginative forms from his own private pantheon. That these shapes also resound with our own collective semiotics is testament to the claim that good art, art that matters to us, must serve the creator first.

He is one of the rare artists who has passed thought the MFA vortex of insular theory and come out through the other end with the earnest sensibility of a folk artist. He’s a woodworker whose handsy constructions recall the earthy muscle of California clay tradition; any superficial resemblances to the oozing bubbles of Kenneth Price and the drippy sheen of Ron Nagle’s little sculptures only pronounce the differences in

materiality and production. This is wood worked by hand.

Each sculpture begins as one solid block of wood that is chiseled, carved, and cut into parts, shaped, and reassembled.

There’s poetry in how they fit; sensuality lies in the joints. An elegant example of how constituent parts are reassembled into one form is Cairn Column Wand (2015). A primordial signal for travelers, a cairn marks a site, lets you know you are on the right path, and acts as an existential marker of having been there.

Is there a more substantial role for sculpture than this? Cairn Column Wand is a vertical pile of triangles and spheres, some perfectly stout and others smashed thin as pancakes, stacked one over another, over another. Achieved by the simple act of piling, the cairn, a terrifically humble apparatus, succeeds if it remains erect and doesn’t topple. As for the wand of the title, its tip ends in a flourish, which I suspect holds the magic (sometimes a star, here reduced to a triangle), an apex that somehow suggests a fulcrum. The idea of balance is so much a part of the piece, and one might imagine an invisible horizontal line balancing on its tip. Other forms evoked are totem, Christmas tree with a topper, spear, skewer—I prefer these last two, because they also express the action that provokes the form. To stack, to skewer, to spear, to pile.

Cairn Column Wand may best express how Ronay is at work with his choice material, basswood. The material doesn’t perform like wood. Instead it recalls, by its shape and behavior, scalped rubber balls, silly putty pounded with a fist, curved soapstone, or bean-shaped slabs of coral reef. The way the patty-cake disks drape on each other with biomorphic awkwardness does not feel like something wood does organically.

Ronay works the wood so it appears to take on the physical qualities of soft organisms, revealing woodworking so attuned to the empirical realities of the material that is has tapped into its impossibilities. You get the sense that wood has been gently willed into theatrical postures while being perfectly honest about its texture—the grain lines accented by pastel stains.

Different shades and hues help distinguish the character of each piece, and it can’t be overlooked how pleasingly the palette of bubble-gum pink and ocean blue and pumice gray and cobalt Klein-like blue activate the eye up, down, up, and down looking for matches, gradients, familiar prismatic relationships, searching for associations between colors and shape that leave you endlessly skimming for a resolution to an inscrutible pattern.

The title of the work Probe (2015) likely refers to the fanciful red wand that pierces the sculpture’s hole, but it also signals formal investigations, the probing for shapes through the excavation of the wood. A slim whip lends a slight BDSM vibe. The tip of this wand sprouts a dangling beaded tassel that invokes both sperm and the flashy bait of flyfishing lures and mating feathers. Supporting the wand is a superstructure V padded by tongues and lips lining the mouth and all manner of fleshy pads and mattresses as the baseline. Cradling the inverted nub is an aortic whoopee cushion that looks comfy and fits snugly. The V,

Matthew Ronay, Progeny, 2015. Basswood, plastic, steel, dye, flocking, shellac-based primer, and gouache, 30.5 x 73.6 x 38 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

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WHATEVER WE MAKE OF THE FAMILIAR ORBS, ORGAN-LIKE BLOBS, AND THE HOSES AND PIPES THAT UNWIND AROUND THIS LANDSCAPE, IT’S HARD TO DENY THEIR DISTINCT BIOMORPHISM.

Matthew Ronay, Cairn Column Wand, 2015.

Basswood, plastic, dye, flocking, and shellac-based primer, 109.2 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

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it should be noted, looks content. Could blue beads at the end of a wand be the smoke from a cigarette?

The sly Progeny (2015) alludes to another result of sexual union, the new human. Two alluringly grotesque, groovy green fingers slink over the rim of an aquamarine oval hollow, an egg, a decoy tomb, a womb. A finely puckered pink coin rises like an anal sun. There’s fun to be had in pronouncing these shapes, while straining to recognize the real just beyond the reach of representation. Is the pink bulb riddled with holes a microphone or a rattlesnake? The fingers themselves appear to be reptilian, slithering menacingly from ominous nether regions. All this is mounted on snaking tubes, each one swallowed in progression by its larger encasement the way our blood vessels are encased and telecommunication lines are bundled.

Each sculptural unit is lined up on a long plinth, in what looks like a parade of anthropomorphic objects. The artist explained that the processional quality alludes less to people than to objects: “Arranging in an ordered row always appealed to me in counterpoint to the disorder, chance, and destructive atmosphere often present in the moment before something is created. It seems that everything is in the process of falling apart to be built again.” The disorder/order of creation are the forces at work here, and it’s no wonder that the arrangement loosely evokes a Darwinian narrative, quickly confounded by an incoherent narrative. It’s a line, but it doesn’t work directionally. If this is a sentence, the words that compose it are arranged in a syntax unfamiliar to us, yet for which we have the innate tools to read.

Joyfully, Ronay’s language can be accessed without a museum brochure. Though reminiscent of the talismans and prayer artifacts of this or that ideology, there is no set of privileged cultural symbols at play. As such, these quasi-ceremonial totems resist cultural hegemony. While When Two Are In One finds resonance with the culturally diverse ethos of the museum, its placement within the more didactic interests of the institution is complex. Through Aboriginal Australian abstract painting or the museum’s ongoing permanent collection exhibition, Global Positioning Systems, PAMM seeks to “illuminate the role of place and location as central to the conception of itinerant identity,” to quote the introduction to the recent group show Poetics of Relation. Ronay’s work isn’t framed by geo-locational or anthropological clues. It’s precisely this rich encoding that excited Diana Nawi, associate curator, who said, “because the visual, cultural, formal, and aesthetic references in the work are so myriad they defy us to locate or trace them all, and ultimately this ‘referentiality’ is only part of what I consider Matthew’s very singular approach.”

This installation in the gallery adjacent to PAMM’s lobby teases the audience to presume it represents an elusive foreign culture. In fact, the works belong to all cultures, and as such, transcend ideologies. They can be activated with absolutely no prior or supplementary knowledge of either Ronay’s personal identity politics, his ancestral culture, or any vernacular tradition of his native land. The work resists the illustrative or educational roles of art making. This is one of those projects—like Geoffrey Farmer’s delightful Let's Make the Water Turn Black (2013–14), on view at PAMM last year, that belongs

to anyone, and in fact, for this reason perfectly illuminates the mission of the museum, as Nawi confirms. “His work is certainly informed by an incredible openness to a global art history— across geographies and temporalities—and he very smartly and self-consciously engages that conversation, and he is comfortable with certain processes, influences, and aesthetics that defy a lot of dominant conversations in contemporary art, which is where I might locate the resonance of his practice with PAMM’s broader program.”

Humanity’s conception and destruction are played out in these sculptures, laid out like an intuitive anthropogenic map.

Whatever we make of the familiar orbs, organ-like blobs, and the hoses and pipes that unwind around this landscape, it’s hard to deny their distinct biomorphism. We may see in the sculptures an abstracted reproductive narrative, from conception to death and back again, and all the little deaths in between. We may think of each sculpture as a physical model of a logic system, perhaps in some primitive, feral animal part of our brains. Taken as a whole, the sculptures might compose an entire philosophy, a codex of psychosexual ritual, or an elaborate passion play, with a porny intermission. On the other end, through a micro-ontological lens, the whole cluster of sculptures—shapes within shapes—could be seen as some super tiny code of molecules that holds the answers to what happens when two are in one.

Martha Raoli is a writer and artist living in Miami.

Matthew Ronay, Probe, 2015. Basswood, plastic, steel, dye, and gouache, 88.9 x 66 x 35.6 cm

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JOHN MILLER with Jim Shaw

On the occassion of I Stand, I Fall, a comprehensive survey exhibition of the work of John Miller at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA)—the first of its kind to be presented in an American museum—the conceptual artist spoke with Jim Shaw about his experiences as a young artist in New York in the 1980s, his evolving approach to art making, the exhibition’s unique focus, and the powerful influence of some of the mainstays of American popular culture, Magnum P.I., ABBA, and reality TV stars among them.

JIM SHAW: The show at ICA is a survey, right?

the strategy wasn’t working out the way that you thought it might.

JOHN MILLER: Yeah, the curator Alex Gartenfeld approached the show as a chronological survey of my work with an emphasis on figuration and how I use that in different ways. We looked at my previous shows in Europe and wanted to do something different—to select different work and put it into a new context.

MILLER: The biggest issue in that regard is how I think about sublimation and desublimatory aesthetics. Early on, I was looking at sublimation, of course, from a Freudian standpoint, but also from the aesthetics of the sublime. I guess I was influenced by the politics of the ‘60s and the idea that desublimation is liberatory. Even so, even when I was making what I would call my first gestures toward desublimation, I never thought anything could be desublimated absolutely. Rather, you could allude to that possibility.

SHAW: You’ve produced an awful lot of different work. I just had a survey show, and I know it’s hard to put it all into a single exhibit when there’s so much variety.

MILLER: We wanted to include lesser-known and early work, but quickly discovered it was hard to get ahold of everything we wanted. The things someone buys twenty years ago or more can easily get lost in the shuffle: the entropy of collecting.

SHAW: I’ve read you changed your mode of attack, so to speak, over time, because you felt like it was no longer effective, or

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SHAW: And I think this all goes through a change when actually making things into artwork.

MILLER: Yeah, that’s Freud’s premise, that you have libidinal and antisocial impulses redirected to a socially useful end. I think the classic example is somebody who wants to cut flesh becomes a surgeon, so the original libidinal impulse is satisfied,

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yet redirected toward something that benefits society. Freud thought that art making derived from a libidinal urge to model feces. And typically art is thought about as having no function. So you can say, well, how does art serve as a form of sublimation? I thought it proves the efficacy of sublimation symbolically. It’s sort of a meta-discourse.

What’s happened over time is that American culture became a good bit less puritanical than it was in the ‘80s and that now there’s a lot of stuff in popular culture that is far more desublimated than anything I ever did. I’ve only watched one episode of the show Hoarders. It featured a woman who had accumulated so much stuff she was living inside mountains of waste. But this episode concluded with an otherwise independent person—the hoarder—being institutionalized. It was supposedly done for her own good, but to me it also represented a kind of repression.

Gone is the promise of liberation. And that’s not an isolated example. So I have to recognize that mass culture has overtaken the kinds of provocations I raised earlier

John Miller, Untitled, 1987. Acrylic on canvas, 180.3 x 146 cm. Courtesy the artist and Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles

on. And I don’t think it means that work is invalid, but now I take a different approach.

We work in specific contexts and, as times change, the meaning of artistic approaches necessarily changes with them.

SHAW: Becoming part of the art world and the art market changes everything for me. It’s like the art market is this inevitable maw that eats everything up and changes the meaning of everything.

MILLER: Certainly, those sublimation issues are tied up ultimately in the market. I forget who observed that the escalation of prices in art auctions is paradoxically driven by a sense of the artwork’s incommensurability. So does that mean that the artwork transcends the market, or is it defined by it?

EVEN WHEN I WAS MAKING WHAT I WOULD CALL MY FIRST GESTURES TOWARD DESUBLIMATION, I NEVER THOUGHT ANYTHING COULD BE DESUBLIMATED ABSOLUTELY. RATHER, YOU COULD ALLUDE TO THAT POSSIBILITY.

SHAW: I remember you talking a little bit about an interest in Magnum, P.I. years ago, and seem to recall you being very much into Abba. Would you like to talk a bit about your interest in tropes and popular culture?

MILLER: I got into Abba via Dennis Cooper, because he mentioned them in The Tenderness of the Wolves. I had never heard of them before. When I asked him, “Oh, are they really good? What album should I get?” he said, “Yeah, you have to get them all.” And eventually I did. At that point, Abba’s career was already more or less over; when it comes to popular culture, I’ve never been particularly ahead of the curve. That said, their songwriting is amazing, particularly in the last album, “The Visitors.” “The Day Before You Came” is supposed to be a song of promise, but there’s this undercurrent of sadness that Benny and Bjorn (Abba’s two B’s) really handle adeptly.

SHAW: Your early paintings you made through the idea of painting—they were sort of standard trope paintings. Paintings painted in a kind of average way. And then you also did a number of paintings that were based on Arizona highway photos.

MILLER: Yes, there’s a bit of a gap between those batches of realist paintings. With the first ones, what I wanted to do—and it very

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John Miller, Untitled, 1983/84. Pencil on paper, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. Courtesy the artist and ICA Miami

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much relates to Picture Theory—is to paint normative pictures. But I started doing this before I really knew that term or understood that discourse. Ironically the first New York art opening I ever went was Douglas Crimp’s Pictures show at Artist’s Space. But I didn’t have any context for it at the time. I was coming to it out of video, basically, and I knew a bit about the New York punk scene.

I was working with the idea of scenario in a manner similar to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, but I was coming to this from literature. Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa—which Mike Kelley introduced me to—was especially important. In the original edition, an illustration appeared opposite each page of text. Roussel had commissioned an artist named Henri Zo to make these pictures, because he felt the text alone was not fat enough to be a real novel. So he augmented it with scenes like “a parrot on a perch talking to no one in particular” that didn’t illustrate anything, but were narrative kernels in and of themselves.

I liked that idea, because the narrative went through this scenario concept, or scenario sense of a picture. As a picture of the world, it implied ideology, i.e., a worldview. What I tried to do was to second-guess my viewers and think of pictures that would be sort of normative.

SHAW: Did you have anything to spring off of? Or did you just think harder and harder until you could come up with an image that would make sense?

MILLER: I invented the images under the pretext of imagining what someone else would consider ordinary. But these also had to hold some kind of poetic affect for me, subjectively. Those were my criteria.

Some of these imagined images came from observation or memory; sometimes they came from generic fantasies. The hardest part was not actually painting, but thinking if an idea that would satisfy my criteria.

SHAW: Yeah, that seems like the hardest part.

MILLER: That was exactly it, coming up with the right vehicle. I informally called

John Miller, Everything is Said 22, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

these paintings “regionalist works”. At the time, I was looking a lot at Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Charles Burchfield. I had this two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side and when I would finish a batch of five or ten—they were all small paintings—I would walk them over to Metro Pictures.

Once, John Baldessari recommended my work to Ileana Sonnabend. Even back then, in the ‘80s, she was fairly advanced in age. I said to her, “I’d like to show you my work, but I live in a seven-floor walk-up.”

And she said, “Why don’t you bring your work to me?” So I put it all my work in a shopping cart and wheeled it over to West Broadway from the Lower East Side.

SHAW: [Laughs.] That sounds like a perfect subject for one of those paintings.

MILLER: She was very gracious. At the time I was doing artist books, too, and she bought several copies of each. But when it came time for me to do my first show, I finally saw everything together at

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Metro Pictures. I remember immediately getting a headache because everything looked old-fashioned. I realized my idea of normal was the world of my parents.

There were no paintings of people with mohawks or Walkmen or whatever would have been contemporary then.

That was a bit of a revelation. I realized that I viewed the developments that occurred during my lifetime as things that had an exceptional quality.

SHAW: It’s hard to step back from it, if it’s in the present, but I still do images of stuff from before I was born, I think in part because that’s what Pop art consisted of.

But by the time TV came along, it kind of got rid of the singular image.

Are you going to show any of your early videos?

MILLER: No, but we’re going to show a recent video, Mannequin Death, a collaboration I did with Richard Hoeck—I just finished the final cut.

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SHAW: Do you ever want to show those videos, or are they something from the past, like student work?

MILLER: I would show them. Some of them appeared in the first show I had in New York, at Anthology Film Archives with Jenny Holzer and Jane Brettschneider. The video world at that point was a really open then. Shigeko Kubota was Anthology’s video curator at the time. Shortly after that, Jane became the youngest artist to be included in a Whitney Biennial. Maybe I should put these early videos up on my website, or on Vimeo or YouTube.

SHAW: Yeah, that’s a good idea.

MILLER: It’s funny, when I was working on my last collection, The Ruin of Exchange, with the way publishing was going I was afraid it would come out only a a PDF and not a “real book.” Now my feelings about that have changed. I think I would like to put as much of my work as possible online and to make it available for free.

SHAW: When I was looking up your writings on Google, I came across one search result for that book and it was from Walmart.com.

MILLER: Oh really? [Laughs.] It’s funny because I checked it out on Amazon and it’s also available as a Kindle edition.

SHAW: I think mostly in the future I’m just going to collect images that I find on the computer rather than collect anything three-dimensional or on paper.

MILLER: Computer technology really affects what it means to collect.

SHAW: There used to be this thing—“Oh, I found this obscure recording in a thrift store in Des Moines, Iowa.” Now someone has put all those obscure recordings on their blog somewhere and we’ve lost that nerd sense of pride. But on the other hand, it’s opened up all this information to everybody.

Could we talk a little bit about your game show and reality show paintings? I read that none of the paintings of people crying had sold—that seems such a shame, because they’re such beautiful paintings.

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John Miller, Untitled, 1983. Acrylic on canvas, 55.9 x 71 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

MILLER: Oh, thanks. The Rubells bought a few, but no one else. These are muted paintings with the figures rendered only in gray and brown. So the figures feel like cut-outs. They have a very flat, attenuated presence, but it’s probably the crying that makes them unpopular.

SHAW: So they’re not based on the aesthetic of the image itself, it’s a palate you developed.

MILLER: Yeah, but what I didn’t consider is when someone cries on one of these shows, thirty seconds later it’s resolved and you forget about it. But, in a painting, you’re stuck with it. I chose this motif because I think viewers have come to associate the breakdown of the ego with reality. That’s the kernel of reality in this programming.

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SHAW: It’s kind of like the money shot.

MILLER: A little bit, yeah. [Laughs.]

SHAW: Do you remember the show Queen for a Day? All these just horrible stories of poor housewives who had to deal with all this misery— MILLER: Yeah, I was just thinking of that.

And whoever had the most tear-jerking story would win. Reality TV begins with that and with Candid Camera.

SHAW: You know Alan Funt? He was an art historian, and saw the show as a Surrealist effort.

MILLER: Oh, really? When I was at RISD, my roommate’s father was on Candid Camera. They had a revolving door and they set it up where they could put rods through and trap people on their lunch break. He happened to have been a Golden Gloves boxer. So when they let him out and the host said, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” he just punched the guy and kept walking. [Laughs.]

SHAW: [Laughs.] I wonder how rare that was—that they got punched.

MILLER: I think it’s very rare because with this kind of media functon it’s obligatory to accept the premise. The other thing is how the whole reality TV ethos has moved into politics in volatile and unpredictable ways. Like reality TV stars like Palin and Trump waging their ideological battles based on the shaming that’s intrinsic to reality TV’s game structure. Or like ISIS conducting its campaigns—its beheadings—along these lines.

SHAW: Do you want to talk any more about Magnum P.I.? Anything else we should cover?

that was the costume that they gave him at the time. But I’m not sure where the Hawaiian shirt fits into that.

MILLER: Well, the thing that I was going to say about Magnum P.I. was that I would watch it when I would stay with Mike Kelley when I came out in LA.

MILLER: It was shot in Hawaii. That was also an excuse for Magnum to be wearing short shorts.

SHAW: [Laughs.] Because he was watching it?

MILLER: No, no, I got him to watch it.

What I liked about it was that it was one of the first shows that featured a gay subtext.

“Magnum” was supposed to be a straight heartthrob but he lived with a bookworm, Higgins, who was always scolding him, perched on one of those rolling library ladders. Mike just watched it because of me and he always said, “There’s too much Magnum and too little Higgins.”

SHAW: Right, right. We actually bumped into him and his daughter at the liquor store when we were in Hawaii setting up a thrift store show.

MILLER: Oh, really?

SHAW: He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and still had a mustache.

MILLER: So, maybe now we’ve covered everything.

SHAW: [Laughs.] Certainly now.

SHAW: When Magnum was on he was basically wearing a gay mustache and

Friday, March 18 at 7:30 PM

New World Center Josh Cote, horn fellow and host Anthony Delivanis, horn fellow and host

Celebrate Cuba's cultural heritage as the New World Symphony presents ¡Fiesta Cubana! Explore a variety of Cuban music, art and food at the New World Center, transformed for one evening into a gallery of live musical performances and art installations. #FiestaCubana For tickets and more information: www.nws.edu | 305.673.3331

Untitled-2.indd 1

2/8/16 5:16 PM

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A Brief History of

ARTISTS TEACHING IN MUSEUMS M ARI RO BL ES

Imagine encountering a group of forty adults using fabric pieces to create an improvised performance on your walk toward a museum entrance, or a father helping his daughter create a custom designed headdress while he playfully explains the ways women have been required to cover themselves through time and culture. Both of these experiences were designed by a teaching artists at Pérez Art Museum Miami and were inspired by exhibitions there: Project Gallery: Sheela Gowda and Firelei Báez: Boodlines, respectively. Since arriving in Miami in 2012, I’ve noticed museums and cultural institutions are increasingly working with artists as teachers. Instead of looking to art historians, administrators, or curators, organizations are cultivating artists as educators as a way to help their visitors understand the creative process, ask critical questions, and experiment with modes of teaching and ways of learning. As an arts educator with a long-time interest in working with artists in this capacity, I’ve traced the history of artists teaching in museums. Here’s a brief look at this evolution, with a focus on three pioneering institutions: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Early Years The 1870s in the United States was the decade of the museum building boom. Over a short period, several art institutions were established, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the early decades of these encyclopedic institutions, art objects alone were seen as vehicles for public education. As museums started to experiment with and fine-tune their role, curators and museum administrators began giving gallery talks, tours, and lectures that provided opportunities for public discourse. The

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popularity and demand of these programs eventually evolved into departments whose sole responsibility was to take on these tasks and help the public “develop an understanding of art in order to increase their appreciation and enjoyment of it,” as stated in an early department of education charter at the Art Institute of Chicago. As early as 1910, artists began to take positions in museums and transform approaches to teaching and learning.

Democratizing the Museum In the beginning of the twentieth century, the central tenet of the

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Met was to support artists, their study of the collection, and their use of its library. However, the Met had strict copyright regulations that restricted artists’ ability to create reproductions and sketching and note taking were entirely prohibited in the galleries. In 1905, these policies were relaxed to allow copyists to use the galleries; patrons with hand-held cameras were allowed to photograph the museum’s collection, and artists could draw and sketch in the galleries without written permission. These measures were proudly advertised as steps that increased the ease of use of the museum and laid the foundation for artist involvement in gallery teaching.

Drawing for Everyone The department of museum instruction at the Art Institute of Chicago formed in 1913. As it grew in staff size, former students and teachers from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago transitioned into positions as gallery instructors. These trained artists brought to their teaching practice an intimate knowledge of the making of objects, and training in line, color, texture, and composition, which gave a distinct character to their instruction.

Dudley Crafts Watson was one of the most well-known artists—as well as a showman, travel companion, entrepreneur, and extension lecturer—of his time. He was active at the Art Institute of Chicago from the 1920s until the 1950s, pioneering a career path for teaching artists that combined artistic talent, technical training, and business savvy to reach art circles beyond the city.

He believed art appreciation was best taught through entertainment and experimented with film, slides, and music to create memorable art experiences. His weekly workshop, Sketching for Non-Professionals, was popular with museum members and early advertisements for the course began with the encouraging phrase, “Mr. Watson believes everyone can draw.” 1 By focusing on non-professional audiences, the museum clarified its goals from those of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. However, Watson borrowed many of the same structures and markers common at art schools in his curriculum.

Demonstration Lectures In the 1930s, the Art Institute of Chicago introduced a new twist on the traditional forum style lecture called demonstration lectures—another model borrowed from arts training. These presentation-lectures featured speakers performing artistic techniques with the purpose of illuminating materials and artistic process. Part art history class, part studio training, the courses were adapted for audiences of all ages, including weekly lectures for Chicago public high school students. Lectures were offered on a variety of topics, including Sports and Action in Art and Tie Dye and Batik.2 A rapid rise in museum attendance in postwar America increased educational programming of this type at many US art institutions through the 1950s.

their role in society, both toward the populations they served and minority and ethnic groups they failed to engage. In the summer of 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art piloted an intensive class for “serious” high school students from marginalized communities in the city. The course aimed to improve technical skills and expose young people to the museum’s collection so that they might “claim this culture as their own right.”3 The main studio was outside the museum, but students were encouraged to spend time sketching and discussing artworks in the Met’s galleries.

Artist instructors pushed their students to better understand the elements of design through personal inquiry and detailed assessment of composition, balance, texture, line, rhythm, and spatial relationships.

Community Building and Multiculturalism An American Association of Museums (AAM) report titled New Century: A Report of the Commission of Museums for a New Century became a catalyst for institutions to reassess their values and priorities in the mid-1980s. The AAM commission urged museums to make the role of education clear and obvious, and the general public its primary audience. In response, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, launched a program that customized gallery and studio experiences aimed at bringing out the multicultural aspects of the museum’s collection that was then tailored for Boston communities. Artist educators encouraged multicultural youth to “feel increasingly at home” at the institution.4 The program was named Artful Adventures and, through its framework, artist educators visited community spaces, invited organizations to the museum, and led studio and instructional workshops.

Creativity and Interpretive Habits Today, artists are helping museums rethink a range of meaningful audience experiences. Institutions in South Florida and across the country are employing teaching artists to help museum patrons practice skills and introduce interpretive habits, such as close looking, analyzing artworks, focusing attention, personalizing artworks, and understanding the creative process.

As head of education at PAMM, I work with a group of fifteen teaching artists who are helping visitors connect with arts and ideas at the museum and in Miami neighborhoods. These educators are also active members of Miami’s thriving arts community, an ecology we’re proud to be part of. Art museums and cultural organizations have the potential to be at the forefront of advocating for the arts in our communities. In South Florida, as museums redefine their roles within a dynamic cultural scene, increasingly they are looking to artists at all stages of their careers to develop and implement a program that attracts and engages new visitors, a participatory strategy for a new generation.

Mari Robles is deputy director of education and public programs at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Claiming the Museum The social upheaval of the 1960s pressured museums to question 1

Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago (Oct. 1925): 82.

2 Danielle Rice, “Balancing Act: Education and the Competing Impulses of Museum Work,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 29, no. 1 (2003).

3 Blythe Bohnen, “Old masters: New apprentices,” Metropolitan Museum of Art (1968).

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Annual Report of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1989).

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UNITED STATES ARTISTS:

alternates for each category. Let’s say we have forty alternates at the end and maybe twelve spots left, the board then meets and we treat that board meeting like a panel, the board sees all those applications and they fight tooth and nail about who’s going to fill those twelve spots. This is where diversity is very important to us—“We don’t have enough people from the upper Midwest, we don’t have a jazz person, we don’t have enough dance,” whatever it may be, and we fill in.

Carolina García Jayaram and Dennis Scholl

DENNIS SCHOLL: I think the best way to start is to give a little synopsis of what United States Artists is.

critical times in their careers, giving them the type of validation that is very central to the work they go on to do afterward.

CAROLINA GARCÍA JAYARAM: United States Artists was founded after two major events in the early ‘90s. First, the NEA ended their funding for individual artists, which caused a major ripple effect and left a giant, gaping hole. Several years later, the Urban Institute, among others, measured what were the biggest obstacles that artists were facing in major markets, as well as what was keeping artists from being successful. Access to unrestricted, no-strings-attached kind of funding was one of the biggest factors, as was the kind of validation that allowed artists to take greater risks in their work and push boundaries.

Susan Berresford, who had been the longtime president of the Ford Foundation, wanted her legacy project to address this issue of individual artist support, so she went to three other foundation presidents—of Rasmuson, Prudential, and Rockefeller—and together they started this fund and with the help of my predecessor Kathy DeShaw designed this program for artists across every creative discipline, all fifty states and territories, through fifty unrestricted $50,000 awards per year.

So we’ve done this now for ten years, we now have given 450 of these awards to this country’s most accomplished artists at

SCHOLL: So the first thing artists always want to know is, how do I get one?

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JAYARAM: The process runs about a year long, it begins by scouring the entire country for nominators. This year, we asked one thousand people to nominate for us, which is the most we’ve ever done, in an effort to get the most wide-ranging and diverse pool of artists we can. It’s a challenge, because we need nominators in Nebraska and Puerto Rico and everywhere in between, from Boston to Hawaii, and across all disciplines, so the nominators are really key. They have their ears to the ground. Once those artist names come in as nominations, we then contact them and they submit work samples and a simple application. Because it’s not project-specific, it’s really up to them what they want to show us of their career, and we don’t ask them what they would spend the money on. Once they come in, we then invite in-person panels to come to Chicago, and these are experts in the field with twenty-five, thirty years of experience.

The panels come in the spring, they look at all the applicants, and it’s a fascinating conversation, as you can imagine, and they choose a number of applicants who will be named fellows and then a number of

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SCHOLL: We’ve been hearing about how the Oscar nominees and participants are overwhelmingly white and about the program’s ongoing lack of diversity over the decades. I’ve always been dazzled by the range of artists that are chosen by United States Artists. Every single year when the choices come out, it really is a reflection of America: what it looks like, what it’s interested in, where it lives.

JAYARAM: Yes, and it starts from the very beginning with the nominators. The director of programs, Meg Leary, just went on a road trip all over the Midwest, going to the International Nordic Museum in the middle of Iowa, for example, and meeting with the curators there. How else are we going to get access to the great Nordic craftspeople in the middle of the plains states if we don’t go find these people and get to know who they are?

And this year, if we are just talking about racial diversity, out of the thirtyseven winners, twenty-eight identify as people of color.

SCHOLL: Are the grants going to established artists, mid-career artists, are they emerging artists?

JAYARAM: The majority of artists are at their mid-career.

SCHOLL: So they have a body of work that’s out there that you can judge.

JAYARAM: Yes, because you have to something to show. Of course, there are fellows like LaToya Ruby Frazier, who hasn’t done a lot of work, but it’s such incredible work that it rises above. We always have a couple of really young fellows, and then

we have some older winners, and this year, our North Dakota winner, who is an incredible storyteller—our first ever storyteller—Mary Louise Defender Wilson, is eighty-five years old.

SCHOLL: I know you’ve done research about this—what is it that the fellows do with the money?

JAYARAM: We’re launching a study this year, from the mainly anecdotal research we’ve done over the past ten years, and our findings have shown that over 90 percent of fellows use the award to make new work, but that could mean a lot of things.

A lot of them use it to pay off the mortgage, to pay health insurance, to pay for equipment. Catherine Opie won in 2006, and of course she was already a very well-known and revered photographer. She told one of our board members, “Oh, I can finally get this camera I’ve been needing,” and the board member almost fell out of her chair, she couldn’t believe that—so, artists at all stages need this kind of support.

SCHOLL: The healthcare thing really threw me when I saw the research. Way more than half the artists end up using some of the money for healthcare.

JAYARAM: Or a health procedure, you know, they have this tooth that’s been killing them for three years. But that all goes into the work, because you need to fix yourself first in order to make work.

SCHOLL: How do you want to recast the program looking forward? You’re ten years in, its time for United States Artists 2.0, if you will.

JAYARAM: I was handed an incredible program and, with it, a great alumni pool.

I immediately saw an opportunity we had in front of us. We have never reached back out to our alumni, and here we were sitting on four hundred-plus people who really liked us, we really changed their lives, many of them in significant ways— arguably one of the most representative and uniquely diverse groups of artists in this country. That, to me, was an obvious place to start, so I put together an Alumni Advisory Council.

It starts a new conversation of what we can do together and that is a big part of United States Artists 2.0. We’re about to launch a study with Bloomberg to look at what we’ve done in the last ten years, both for the artists, but also to the field, so that we can be smarter about the direction we’re taking, but also share our intel with fellow funders, like the Knight Foundation. We’re now in a position where we can be thought leaders in a way we haven’t really owned before.

SCHOLL: I just spoke at the Artists Foundation panel at MoMA. Artists have been starting their own foundations— JAYARAM: Yes, like Steven Juras.

SCHOLL: Steven was up there, he spoke.

It's another example of artists deciding to not be the other, that those who have the resources can come in and be an agent of change. Look at what Mark Bradford has done with his foundation, look at what Dee Aster has done in really turning the art world upside down. Rick Lowe has been doing it for an awfully long time.

JAYARAM: And those are the big ones, a lot of people are doing it in small, quiet ways that matter just as much to their own communities, that’s a really important point. And I know a lot of the money that we’ve given out has been paid forward in that way.

SCHOLL: The Artists Assembly is coming to Miami—what can the arts community here expect? Are you willing to whisper any programming highlights?

JAYARAM: The Artists Assembly is a new initiative that we started last year in Chicago, a three-day conference that will move around the country so that we can engage different artists, arts organizations, and communities. This is a chance for us to embed ourselves in an arts ecosystem, inviting all the fellows to that community to learn new things. It’s not going to be for all 450 alumni, but for some of them, like Bill T. Jones, who said “sign me up!” You’d be surprised because many artists feel like “all I know is this little universe of people, and I want it to be bigger.”

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We want it to be both a moment of privacy for the fellows to be around each other and get to know each other and we want to share them with the community. So there are a couple of events that will be open to the public by invitation, including an afternoon session in Little Haiti Cultural Complex, a studio visit with Edouard Duval-Carrié, and a panel discussion with artist-led organizations in Miami, and a big stage celebration at the New World Symphony.

Also we have our first blues fellow, the great Joe Louis Walker, he will be performing, as well as Cheryl Warden, also known as My Brightest Diamond. Tony and Uri Sands, the great choreographers— it’s a very strong lineup.

SCHOLL: Do you have any particularly great stories about individual artists and either what they did with the money or how they reacted to it?

JAYARAM: There was a fellow who is a poet in Alaska who lives down the street from Sarah Palin, and when he won, he said, “I’m going to move away from Sarah Palin, because I really dislike this woman.”

And then he decided, “You know what?

No, I’m going to stay next to Sarah Palin and continue to irritate her.” I guess they were kind of antagonistic neighbors, and he paid the $24,000 he had left on his mortgage and he quit his job as a greeter at Wal-Mart and wrote his next collection of poetry, which went on to win the National Book Award. Good use of $50,000 dollars right there.

This last July we went to Seattle for a board meeting and I always like to invite local fellows to come meet the board so I cold-called Annie Proulx and said, “Annie, would you be willing to come read to us from the phonebook, or whatever, from your latest work?” She said, “Are you kidding? I literally just finished a book that I wouldn’t have ever been able to finish if I wouldn’t have won this award, because it’s a book that spans one hundred years, it has two hundred characters, and no publisher wanted to pay for it.” Even Annie Proulx couldn’t get a book written that she wanted to write, and this award allowed her to.

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SOME IRREVERENT AND TRUE EARLY CONCEPTIONS OF FLORIDA AS UNDER-EXPLAINED REASONS FOR WHY THIS PART OF THE WORLD IS CONSISTENTLY AND CONTINUALLY ABSURD NATH AN I E L S AN DL E R

The Caribbean has no civilization because the Caribbean shuns poetry. Scandalously.

—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, “Calling the Magician: A Few Words for a Caribbean Civilization” (1944)

Can you name five people that lived in Florida from 1513–1765, and any that aren’t Spaniards?

—J. MICHAEL FRANCIS, Professor of Florida History, University of South Florida

~ In 1776, Biscayne Bay and the surrounding environs were most likely completely uninhabited. There is no archaeological evidence from the time of any human presence in the area. This means that when these United States of America were formed, conceptually, legally, and through the vicious blood of virtuous insurrection, there wasn’t a goddamned soul living in Miami.

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~ The document that ceded Florida to the United States of America in 1819 from Spain was called the Adams–Onís Treaty, so named for the two representatives and signers: from the United States, John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, and from Spain, Lord Don Luis de Onís, Gonsalez, Lopez y Vara, Lord of the Town of Rayaces, Perpetual Regidor of the Corporation of the City of Salamanca, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal American Order of Isabella, the Catholic, decorated with the Lys of La Vendee, Knight Pensioner of the Royal and distinguished Spanish Order of Charles the Third, Member of the Supreme Assembly of the said Royal Order; of the Council of His Catholic Majesty; his Secretary with Exercise of Decrees, and his Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary near the United States of America.

This is an incredibly stupid title. The Spanish were really ridiculous. And to further that point, you should know that they were mostly convinced that La Florida was inhabited by unicorns.

~ In one of the most bizarre skirmishes in American history, the United States Army attacked Fort Gadsden, the so-called Negro Fort, of East Florida, one of the first freed black settlements, in July 1816.

It only took one shot to bring the entire fort down. The heated cannonball auspiciously hit the fort’s magazine and arms store, completely obliterating the building. In addition to twenty Choctaw Indians, nearly all the three hundred freed black men, women, and children were killed by the massive blast.

A little-known fact is that Florida was also home to the definitive first free black settlement in these United States, Fort Mose, full name Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, established nearly eighty years earlier, in 1738.

It is very much like Florida to be so progressive as to have the first freed black settlement, but juxtaposed with the history of a different early freed black fort blowing up with one shot, it’s like a heartbreaking cartoon leading to the horrific massacre of blacks and Natives.

~ André de Thévet, the French monk and cosmographer who was mostly wrong, thought Florida was the home of a mythical beast called the succarath. In his La cosmographie universelle (1575), the animal was said to inhabit the banks of rivers and had a massive plumed tail that guarded its young. For more than one hundred years, countless other histories of the New World included the succarath or su, despite the animal being completely imagined.

Its reputation changed from simply peculiar to vicious over various editions by other mapmakers and intellectuals, creating a natural history based on nothing.

Thévet also understood Florida to be so large that it was bordered to the north by Canada.

~ Always remember that Florida was only subject to British rule for twenty years (1763–83). It was barely a colony, as the history books teach it.

Britain was somewhat responsible for the final removal and effective eradication of the remaining Florida Indians, though.

When the British took control, the Spanish population left, and shipped the last few hundred indigenous people to Cuba.

According to historian Jerald T. Milanich’s research, the Timucua tribe in northern Florida lost 75 percent of its population due to disease brought on by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.

He describes the seventeenth century as “positively horrendous,” with a 98 percent reduction, from 50,000 people to 1,000.

In 1763, when Florida was traded to the British, only a single Timucua Indian was sent to Cuba.

~ Most evidence points to the first piece of fiction written about Florida to be François-René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801).

Though “Florida” is mentioned several times throughout the text, many scholars emphasize Chateaubriand’s general misunderstanding of the local flora. The book, now canonized by the West, was mostly a literary conduit for the further oppression of American Indians and the promotion of Christianity. Chateaubriand’s work was set up in direct contrast to the popularized concept of the “noble savage.” It seems Florida was an idyllic locale for both the physical eradication of Indians, and the symbolic.

~ Again and again we bring into use our field glass, but alas, the same unbroken level plain meets our view, the same brown color unrelieved by even a patch of green or depression or rising in the surface. We are unable to distinguish where the marsh grass ends and the sawgrass begins, for it is all alike, all the same color, the same height, and what is worse still, all the same difficulties and perhaps greater for the next ten miles in our front, on our left and on our right.

—MAJOR ARCHIE P. WILLIAMS, account of an expedition to the Everglades, 1883

Yeah dude, it’s flat here. And super wet. Good luck with those ten miles.

~ Florida, for whatever reason, has always seemed to be a place for the slightly deranged. According to Hernando de Escalante de Fontaneda, when the Calusa (a large South Florida tribe) captured the shipwrecked Spanish in the late sixteenth century, they yelled at them, demanding of them to sing and dance for entertainment. When the befuddled Spanish explorers did nothing because of the obvious language barrier, they were killed. Florida was built on confusion. We must sing and dance in order to live in the face of constant misunderstanding. Nothing is certain except the presence of water. But believe in Florida nonetheless.

Nathaniel Sandler is the founder of Bookleggers and the Florida editor of the Miami Rail.

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ON CAPSIZING A CANOE IN BISCAYNE BAY F RAN KY CRUZ

We got to the bay, the sun up only halfway. Looking toward the islands, both natural and man-made, the hues of pink, orange, and yellow melded with blues and danced with the clouds on top of the iron-flat water. Alejandro and I unstrapped, packed, and prepared to paddle, hesitating for a second to drop the canoe in the water so as not to disturb its stillness. The jumping mullet are the first to ripple the reflection of the seagulls and osprey flying above.

Before the boaters and the jet skiers were even up, we set off; it was so calm we almost didn't need to paddle. The dome-shaped island was like a magnet slowly pulling us toward it. After circling the islands, we landed ashore still full from the sublime float across. We stashed our cooler, hammock, tent, and other supplies around the island, camouflaged within the surrounding terrain, no different than the other human objects that were already there. Bird Key Island was next, where the white herons can be seen flapping on the trees in the distance, even as the concrete continues to encroach on this patch of what’s left of wildlife.

With a tremendous rustle of leaves and branches, a very big adult male iguana dropped in on us from about ten feet and landed three feet away with spikes and crests in full flair, huffing and puffing, wiping its tail, challenging us in his territory. Nesting birds nesting above scared, aware of our presence, flying away, but not before an osprey dropped a four-inch fish splat smack on my shoulder, promoting me to the rank of guts and two scales.

Still in the company of the morning sun, we set our invisible sails back to the little dome island camp. Trash and paradise seem to be in harmony here. I accept this trash as my own. The duality of this place expresses the feeling I have about my role in this natural place. Our supplies untouched, we set up camp. Soon, curiosity about the neighboring islands awakened our bodies and

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we prepared to visit them. Sandwiches made, I got my camera out of its bag. But it’s not in the last place I remember putting it. Was it the over stimulation of all those discarded objects combined with the excitement of visiting a new place that muddled my memory, is it possible I left my camera back on Bird Key? Coordinates change to return to Bird Island; we overlooked the behavior of the waves in what has become a search and camera rescue mission. Neither of us paid any mind to faraway Hurricane Joaquin, a category 4 blowing 130 mph winds 3.85 miles southwest of Bermuda and approximately 711 miles from these islands. A challenge snuck upon us as we rocked and rolled, riding a bull forward into the wind. It let down, we turned, it turned up. Humming a remix of the theme song for the video game Zelda, we capsized in the bay after the boat hit the water at a weird angle caused by the choppiest of wave combinations.

We were under water with bubbles and bags tangling us up like a 2 vs. 8 duel with mini Kraken. I sunk down, pulled them off, and went up for air. Alejandro emerged from his own wrestling match with his bac pack filled with salt water bricks.

Scrambling to save as many of our things as possible, I noticed my sketch books fluttering out of my bag in slow motion dancing away from me under water. I let go of the canoe and saved them, a wet mass, then smashed them into my bag.

Lost: two phones, one lantern, one head lamp, three pages from my journal, one paddle, one pair of shoes, two yummy sandwiches, one life vest, and Wilson (our salvaged coconut friend with the Ringo Starr haircut).

Holding on to the half-sunken canoe, Alejandro put on the remaining life vest, grasping the rest of the equipment. I tred to flip the boat, but water continued to flood in. Alejandro reminded me not to get too tired. The canoe was stuck in the

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limbo of failed ships, between buoyancy and wanting to sink, though it kept us afloat and we keep it afloat. Trying not to think of silly things like a rogue bull shark seeing us for the vulnerable morsels we really are, we took turns honking the rusted air horn at boats too far away to hear. We continued to paddle in place, floating toward the island.

Then, a small red speed boat—the only boat on this side of the islands—headed our way. I waved my arm and gargled a sound similar to the word “help.” And they saw us.

We celebrated, yet I reminded Alejandro to not look so joyful, in fear they might think this is some kind of joke. Two men told us that we looked like a floating log and asked us where we were coming from. I held back the urge to, in my best Cuban Spanish, ask for water and answer, “Cuba hermano.” Instead, I told our skeptical angels we were from Miami and that we were trying to rescue our camera. They found Alejandro a bit suspicious with his octopus grip on both our bags and our only paddle. The captain wore a black shirt with a silhouette of a soldier carrying another on his back and his companion, a red shirt with a flying bird and the words “Get Lucky.”

The man in the black shirt steered the boat while the other helped me get back in and tied the canoe as I maintained my balance; Alejandro was by that point floating away with a straw hat visible above the waves that the current, like a slight-ofhand magic trick, brought back to him. Reassurance came from one of the heroes that we would pick him up after we tied the canoe, after I told them, truthfully, that it was his birthday. It was, at that moment, a rebirth for both of us. They gave us a bottle of water and we asked them to drop us off at Bird Key. Our determination to fulfill the mission has not been diluted.

On “dry” land, Alejandro told me that as he was floating away by himself he was listening for the sounds of sharks underneath him. “Do you want to know what sharks sound like?” Alejandro asked.

We were marooned on the island. An anhinga flying by released an ancient croak, setting a Jurassic tone. We ate the potato salad—the only thing that was salvaged and waterproof— savoring every bite. Alejandro lost his shoes, so he couldn not venture to look for the camera because he risked getting cut on glass and rusty debris. With high tide, half the island was now under water and the garbage was floating up past the knees. I chugged through the garbage-and-bird-feces swamp trying not to slip on broken logs. I expected to find my camera bag submerged in the salt water, but got to the only part of the island above water and recognized a trash pattern, but no camera. My brain wanted off this island and began to search for items to make a makeshift paddle. A puffer fish evaded my footsteps and swerved pass two milk crates into the deep. When I returned, Alejandro told me he was attacked by wasps, one of which stung him in the ribs as he chaotically ran around, forgetting about all the debris, and was forced to jump into the water to escape.

No camera. I found among the trash two sandals, almost the same size and color, that fit Alejandro perfectly; shoe laces; and a broken mop handle and wooden plank with hole in it that I could MacGyver into a paddle. We needed to get off this island.

The waves hadn’t let down, smashing against us, while the

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island very slowly grew smaller and our dome sanctuary grew bigger. Rocking and digging into the water, with leche condensada viscosity, we approached home. The makeshift paddle snapped halfway there, as the boats and jet skis crisscrossed the channel, not at all aware of our situation. At this point, we nervously joked it might be easier to flip the canoe and hope for another rescue. Exhaustion was making us lazy. Alejandro paddled with just the piece of wooden board, but we paddled harder, determined, almost angry at the waves.

We touched land and the stability of it was strangely cloudlike. We dried off. Alejandro made the most delicious tuna sandwich and saved a quarter bottle of water (our only fresh water not including the ice) from our rescuers to make the very important morning café. While I was on the hammock, suspended, coming to terms with the loss of my camera, our phones, and whatever else sank into Biscayne Bay, Alejandro dashed toward me with a brown plastic shopping bag, my camera glowing inside it. Only Ponce, who found the fountain of youth, could understand my exhausted excitement. I pointed and laughed at our mischievous universe for setting us on this wild golden goose chase.

It was in the tent the whole time.

With an emergency hand-crank dynamo radio/flashlight, we squeezed out the rhythms of the city at random. Salsa and celebration time, we made a fire, using it to dry our salty chamomile tea, and danced with trees in harmony with debris. The night air was so cool and serene, with a hint of a party coming through, the city lights squeezing through the trees, and not one mosquito in flight. Floating in the hammock, I wondered what must it have been like for the Tequesta to live and explore in these waters or for Ponce de Leon to take a shortcut through the bay as he and his crew fled the Calusa. Curiosities and my love for the Miami flora and fauna led me to these islands with concrete lights and electric engineering that powers our architecture framing the dense paradise that is still very much alive, like it was in the days manatees roamed these parts by the hundreds. A lesson learned. Paradise found.

Franky Cruz is is a multidisciplinary artist with a BFA from the New World School of the Arts who currently lives in Miami.

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AQUAFAIR DREW LERMAN — In the decades after World War II, the amusement park industry in South Florida is cruel and merciless. By 1954, George Rooks had established Aquafair as the premier attraction between the Broad Causeway and Hollywood Boulevard, featuring alligator wrestling, trained porpoises, and the famous “horse dive.” With the help of Lafe, his right-hand man, he has protected this domination ruthlessly, sometimes violently.

But now, as winter approaches and with it the promise of tourists packed into station wagons, Mr. Rooks discovers something ominous taking shape just beyond Aquafair’s walls…

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TRANS AMÉRICA CHRISTY GAST

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ABOVE Juan Downey, Yanomami jugando con CCTV, 1976–77.

Courtesy the Estate of Juan Downey and Marilys B. Downey LEFT Juan Downey, Video Trans Americas, 1973–76. Fourteenchannel black-andwhite video, with sound, and vinyl map, dimensions and duration variable.

Installation view: Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960– 1980, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015–16. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Latin American and Caribbean Fund and Baryn Futa in honor of Barbara London. © 2016 Estate of Juan Downey and Marilys B. Downey. Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Thomas Griesel

On December 26 I set off for a trip mas allá del fin, beyond the end of the world, with the Ensayos research and residency program in Tierra del Fuego. There, the Andes shatter toward Antarctica, leaving a dizzying archipelago of mountains encased in ice, surrounded by belligerent seas and howling winds. As I packed, paring down my cameras and gear to what I considered the bare essentials for a mobile studio, the work of Chilean video artist Juan Downey was on my mind.

Born in Santiago in 1940, Downey was an early adopter of video as an art medium and a proponent of cybernetic utopianism, optimistic that technology could expand the senses and connect individuals. His seminal installation Video Trans Americas was created between 1973 and 1976 using a Portapak, the first video camera that could leave the studio. The Portapak gave artists of Downey’s generation mobility. Since each second of footage was less precious than that filmed with celluloid, early video work tended to push durational boundaries, as well.

Video Trans Americas condenses several years of black-andwhite video travelogues, mostly filmed in (and with) indigenous and working-class communities throughout South and Central America, into a fourteen-channel video installation. On view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), in their recent exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, the videos are bound together within the installation by an outline of the Americas stretching contiguously from the walls to the floor.

Downey’s graphic outline of the continent brings to mind América Invertida, Joaquín Torres García’s small, but iconic ink drawing from 1943, which was simultaneously on view at MoMA. Torres García flips South America’s cone to the top of our frame of reference, a reorientation that feels physically manifested as the viewer moves through Downey’s installation.

Footage, including of street protests in Cuzco, Peru; the ruins of Machu Picchu; weavers in Chiloé, Chile; and a Texas blues singer, play on pairs of cube monitors encased in black plinths.

These are placed throughout the space so that, when walking between the monitors, one might simultaneously cross the Amazon, pass over the Caribbean, and come to rest somewhere over New England. The installation places disparate individuals and remote communities within walking distance of one another on a stateless continental mass.

Transmissions focused on conceptual and political artistic practices during the Cold War, and Video Trans Americas was instigated in part by the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. The installation was produced amid this climate of social movements against authoritarianism throughout the continent, and Downey trained his camera on marginalized communities, putting the Portapak’s potential as a tool for cybernetic utopia into practice. The portable video camera allowed for instantaneous playback, and Downey employed both technological and cultural feedback in his process.

He recorded documentary-style footage while on the road, which he watched with his subjects on-site, using live feed, and screened again to people he met in other places, connecting previously unlinked communities in a sort of analogue precursor to web 2.0.

In his drawings, sculptures, and writing from this time, Downey considers the cyborg, a futuristic man-and-machine

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Joaquín Torres García, América Invertida (Inverted America), 1943. Ink on paper, 22 x 16 cm. Museo Torres García, Montevideo © 2016 Sucesión Joaquín Torres García, Montevideo

THE ARTIST’S WAY OF LOOKING THROUGH THE LENS, THE STYLE OF OBSERVATION, THE TYPE OF ATTENTION THAT IS GIVEN TO THAT WHICH IS BEING FILMED, SOMETHING AKIN TO EMPATHY, IS ANOTHER KIND OF TOOL. 32 T H E M I A M I R A I L

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hybrid, saying “technology operating in synchronicity with our nervous systems is the alternative to a disoriented humanity.” Are we these cyborgs, our movement through the world, mediated by our tiny screens? If so, this utopian view of hyper-connectedness, technology as an extension of the senses, is questionable.

However, nearly two decades before the Internet was available to civilians, Downey encouraged interaction by shooting with his subjects, putting the camera in their hands and letting their eyes guide the lens, and using simultaneous playback as he filmed.

In Video Trans Americas and other video works he made during this time, Downey maintains both a technological self-awareness and an awareness of the social orientation of his work. These concerns are equally apparent in The Laughing Alligator, which was screened at Artists Space Books & Talks in New York this past December.

It is a half-hour single-channel narrative video shot during the eight months that Downey, with his wife Marilys and stepdaughter Titi, lived in the Amazon with a small community of Yanomamo.

In the mid-1970s, when Downey filmed The Laughing Alligator, the Yanomamo lived in villages of about five hundred people, moving every few years when the soil that nourished their banana and yam fields began to be depleted. The village Downey and his family lived in consisted of a communal roof around a central plaza of flattened earth, with sleeping hammocks hung from the rafters.

Toward the beginning of the film, Downey is being led through the forest to the village. There is an implied showdown between Downey with his camera and the Yanomamo man who is leading the expedition, who springs from the brush with his rifle pointed at the artist.

This shot-reverse-shot editing, with Downey narrating the encounter in voice-over, explicitly refers to the reigning anthropological treatise on the Yanomamo at the time, Napoleon Chagnon’s The Ax Fight. Chagnon referred to the Yanomomo as “the fierce people,” supposing a deepseated cultural propensity for violence and warfare. The Ax Fight literally focuses on a single event—an ax fight between two individuals that draws a sizable

crowd—and positions this violence at the center of the community, the bare dirt plaza, and at the center of Yanomamo culture.

Downey blithely mirrors this self vs. other posturing in the shot-reverse-shot structure of his showdown scene. However, the ruse is quickly up. A flash of humor crosses the gunman’s face, his eyes relax, he grins, and lets out a belly laugh. This looped gaze, where the camera is both observing and being observed, is sustained throughout the film, whether Downey is behind the camera or in front of it, whether it is his gaze or the camera is being operated by a local person filming his or her own home. It is this sensitivity, this empathy that is so apparent in the act of looking and being looked at with curiosity and openness, that interests me.

The camera is a tool for documenting the world, and the impulse to take it to exotic places has been strong since the advent of recording technology. The artist’s way of looking through the lens, the style of observation, the type of attention that is given to that which is being filmed, something akin to empathy, is another kind of tool.

What happens when empathy guides the way we look through the lens? And how does it work when the camera is pointed not at other people, but at other forms of life, the minutest beings that make up our world? How can I access not just the exterior, the surface, but the inner life of the species on the other side of my lens? These questions were on my mind as I packed my studio gear for Tierra del Fuego, intending to film lichens that have been clinging to the same rocks since before Darwin passed

through in the Beagle Channel.

I have extended my trip an extra month to join an expedition of Wildlife Conservation Society scientists who will survey a colony of elephant seals in the Admiralty Sound at Karukinka Natural Park—just beyond the point where the Pan-American Highway dead ends into the Patagonian Sea. There, in support of marine conservation, marine biologists and veterinarians will construct a curious cybernetic assemblage. Satellite transponders will be affixed to the heads of the seals with epoxy, so that as the animals migrate around Cape Horn, their route can be plotted, a highly technological form of interspecies communication.

At the end of the Austral summer, the elephant seals will return from Chile to Argentina, crossing historically fraught national borders via the treacherous southern seas. In doing so, they will show us an image of their own world, the boundaries of land and sea that sustain their lives, that have scientific and political value in the field of marine conservation. This human-animal collaboration will create an extra-continental map of the Americas. For my part, Downey’s connected gaze, and the idea that technology gives us access to a world beyond our own senses, will be a starting point as I train my lens on these other lives and spend ten days living in their world.

Christy Gast is an artist whose work across mediums reflects her interest in issues of economics and the environment.

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MĂIASTRA: A History of Romanian Sculpture in Twenty-Four Parts IGO R GYAL AKUTHY

PART V: MEDUSA Even as a young woman, Miliţa was not what you would call beautiful. She had large, fleshy jowls that obscured her neck like a dewlap, and made her already squat, hunched figure—different from those of her elegantly proportioned, delicately connected contemporaries Irina Codreanu and Zoe Baicoianu—appear as a solid lump of clay. She had buggy eyes with heavy lids and a long, sharp nose that cast a shadow over her carnivorous mouth. This is my portrait of Miliţa Petrascu, one of the most talented sculptors in Romanian history, and a personal favorite of mine.

Petrascu was born on New Year’s Eve in 1892, in what is now Moldova, then Bessarabia. When she was sixteen, she moved to Moscow, where she would begin her formal sculpture education.

She studied at the Stroganov School of Fine Arts under the great Soviet sculptor Sergei Konenkov, the solemnity of whose cracked stone crag of a nose was made playful by his wispy white hair and beard. Konenkov’s representational work was mythic in both scale and sensibility and by the time Miliţa got to him, Konenkov had sculpted almost every significant figure in Russian history.

His chisel’s monumental ambition served as solid foundation for Miliţa’s education.

After Moscow, Miliţa moved to Munich, where she studied with Vasily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky, one half of the German artist group Die Blaue Vier (the Blue Four). Painting at the time was further afield into modernism than sculpture was, and the heroes of Abstract Expressionist painting significantly influenced young painters and sculptors alike. Miliţa next moved to Paris, where she sought out and studied under Antoine Bourdelle, “a great sculptor, but as a teacher . . . by far better at giving Sunday sermons to old Protestant English ladies,”1 and Henri Matisse, “a man with rosy cheeks, framed by rust-colored hair and beard, jutting out eyes, lacking expression, wearing eye glasses.” 2 1

Like Pablo Picasso, Matisse used sculpture as a way of solving problems of light and perspective in three dimensions before reducing them to the canvas. And while the undoubtedly important sculptural works of these two men succeeded in sending formal statuary free falling into abstraction, the two remained, fundamentally, painters. This is where Petraşcu diverged from her teacher. The difference between painter and sculptor is the difference between parishioner and priest, pew and pulpit. While painters render with the fullness of their sensibility the beauty of God’s creations in order to be judged favorably in his eyes, sculptors aim to emulate his power, even to supersede it, creating new beings, a new nature. This is not a critique of painters; on the contrary, the Icarus-like striving of sculptors is what renders most sculpture absurd, even tyrannical. But it is exactly this quixotic ambition that opens, on occasion, a distant, glowing door to the sublime through which sculpture alone may walk. And though Petraşcu was never entirely comfortable in Constantin Brancusi’s primitive abstraction, and shied away from the allegorical masculinity of Auguste Rodin, whose nose could have achieved government rank, her sculptural portraiture had in it, somewhere in the brow, the mouth, the jowls, that green-glowing hint of sublimity.

Her time in France was fruitful, and in 1919 she displayed a bust in the prestigious Salon des Artistes Indépendants, which only a year later would play host to that famous prizefight between the Cubists and the Dadaists. There was where she met countryman Brancusi, who by this time was already at the forefront of the Parisian modern art scene. On visiting her studio for the first time, Brancusi told the young sculptor she was “better than Rodin!” The two became fast friends, and she turned her sculptural gaze toward him: “Two strong traces from the nose to the mouth gave him sometimes the expression of a disappointed

Petru Vintila, Miliţa (Heliopolis Editura, 1971), 46.

2 Ibid.

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child, in contrast with a sparkling energy Proust’s Mme. Cottard that a portrait of the eyes.”3 “should be like.” Petraşcu found inspiration Petraşcu’s work in the late twenties in women of all shapes and standings, and early thirties emulated Brancusi’s however, and one of her favorite muses in both form and content. She stripped was the Romanian film actress Agepsina down her sculptures to the elemental.

Macri, a smoky, shape-shifting beauty She worked in wood and rough clay. She whose arrow-like nose was softened by began to incorporate stone plinths to supthe painted Eastern orbs hovering above port her primitive shapes, most notably it. Petraşcu sculpted a number of busts and Idol, Angel, and Mask, all on display at statuettes of Macri, each one capturing the the National Museum in Bucharest. The actress in different emotional “roles.” One museum, by selecting these particular of these statues represents Agepsina as a works to present, would have you believe grieving Antigone and tops the actress’ that Petraşcu’s most important sculpgrave in Bellu cemetery in Bucharest. tures were those directly inspired by her Petraşcu continued her work in mentor’s. But while they are remarkable, funerary memorial in 1935 when she these works are not her most important. sculpted the crypt of legendary WWI That honor belongs to her figurative work: heroine Ecaterina Teodoroiu, which “Fragile and delicate or full of grandness stands in the center of the Romanian and force, in all its living states nature has city of Targu Jiu. [Note: It was Petraşcu such an overwhelming personality that who convinced Brancusi, on behalf of the you can find it wholly only in the perpetNational League of Gorj Women, to build ual movement of the portraits.”4 his famous sculptural ensemble along the Whatever the comparative merits of axis of this same city.] her elemental sculptures or modernist As a student and later as a young portraits, the division of artists into rival professor, I met Miliţa Petraşcu a numgangs seemed to have had little appeal ber of times. Despite the assuredly little to Miliţa, who moved back to Romania impression these encounters would in 1925 with her new husband Emil, a have had on her, I do often wonder what brilliant young radio engineer. [Note: By features of mine would have struck her, if the 1970s, Miliţa and Emil were reportedly any. Perhaps my nose: a thin scrim of flesh under surveillance by the Communist stretched tightly over a sharply arcing State for suspicion of leaking information armature, fixed delicately on my face like a to the Turkish government. They were by kite stuck in a tree. no means the only Romanian intellectuals The eventual jilting of representation under such scrutiny.] She made her most for abstraction in sculpture was inevitaimportant work in the 1930s, during the ble. The New Sculptors had so mastered final act of Romania’s interbelic “golden the craft of sculpting that their flawless age.” And though she sculpted men, representations bordered on grotesque. notably Brancusi, George Enescu, I. L. The welcome return of sculpture to the Caragiale, and Oscar Cisek, the heart of elemental, and the consequent drift into her work is found in her portraits of the abstraction gave the medium room to noteworthy women of her time. grow. The reason Petraşcu’s name is so TOP TO BOTTOM The actress Agepsina Macri, Her busts of the Romanian pianists often omitted from conversations about marble, 1930–35. Regina Maria, bronze. Milita Clara Haskil and Cella Delavrancea are the great European sculptors of the twenPetrascu with Queen Maria two of her most complex and stunning tieth century is not simply because she works. It is not hard to imagine Petraşcu was a woman—though this plays a role— enamored with the faces of classical musicians, the balance but because her particular talent, specifically the fixing of human between their exterior composure—the closed eyes, the pursed faces in stone, had become passé. But I do miss the days when the lips—and the fiery combustion those faces masked. She was later entire history of art could be found hiding in a single plastic gescommissioned to sculpt a marble bust of Marie Victoria, Queen of ture, one broken nose, a slight deviation from a familiar path.

Romania, a softened and kindly effigy of the British royal, whose Dr. Igor Gyalakuthy is a professor emeritus at the Universitatea pinched nose would have undoubtedly agreed with Marcel Nationala de Arte in Bucharest. In 1993, he received the national 3 Ibid., 37. medal for achievement in the field of art history. He lives in Cluj4 Ibid., 28.

Napoca with his Lakeland terrier Bausa.

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THE NATURE OF DESIRE: Dash Snow at the Brant Foundation ED W I N STE AD

Once, late at night in a hallway outside the emergency room of a Brooklyn hospital, I passed a six- or seven-year-old kid in a black T-shirt that read in white block letters across his chest NEW YORK FUCKIN CITY. Years later, bored and skimming through a massive index of authorless books (they’d been composed by computers from scraps of internet text, available through print-on-demand to weirdos and, I can only assume, other robots), I came across one titled Deaths by Heroin Overdose in New York. It is twenty-six pages long and available online at Books-A-Million for $15.84. It has a subtitle, too, which is: “Charlie Ondras, Dash Snow, Frankie Lymon, George Scott Iii [sic], Gg [sic] Allin, Jackie Curtis, James Hayden, Jean-Michel.” It cuts off there, in the middle of Basquiat’s name—just the first hundred or so characters of a list of the chapter titles, chapters that are themselves the copied-and-pasted Wikipedia articles of the aforementioned, arranged alphabetically by first name. It’s a hell of a story, all of them taken together, though in the trademark Wikipedia style it is also offputtingly bland.

I thought recently of both these things while standing next to a polo field outside Greenwich, Connecticut. This was at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, an elegant former stone barn backed up against a huge expanse of unblemished green. At first blush it might seem a strange place for Dash Snow: Freeze Means Run, an exhibition of the artist’s work, full as it is of come, blood, and downtown grime, and evoking, as it did, those two strange memories. But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. He overdosed at the Lafayette House, a boutique hotel on East Fourth Street where a room, maybe even the room, if you’re one of those sorts of people, goes for about $400 a night.

Snow was famously of the de Menil family, who are both extremely rich and prolific collectors of art, and was equally famously estranged from them, having run away as a teenager in pursuit of those all-time great fuck-yous: drugs, booze, and graffiti. So I guess it’s not the craziest thing in the world, this parabolic exportation of Snow’s work up to Greenwich, as rich and boring a place as you’re likely to find.

The upper floor of the exhibition space is dedicated largely to sculpture and collage, the lower to an excerpt of Snow’s voluminous Polaroid output and three video installations. Everything was organized by Snow’s friends Dan Colen, Hanna Liden, and Nate Lowman, along with Peter Brant himself and Dash Snow Archive director Blair Hansen. The result is somewhere between myth-making and tribute; it is a love song to the late artist on the one hand and a market-minded spectacle on the other, which, as with the geography of it, isn’t so much a jarring mistake as a reflection of Snow’s career.

Against one wall upstairs is the 2006 assemblage Bin Laden Youth, which seems a good enough place to start. It’s a chair, the kind you might find in the home of a friend prone

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Dash Snow, Fuck the Police, 2005–07.

45 framed press clippings, semen.

Courtesy The Brandt Foundation, Greenwich, CT. Photo: Christopher Burke

to dragging shit out of their grandparents’ attic, facing a stack of cinderblocks, painted black, on which are propped a rusty curved knife and a mirror covered with the eponymous phrase. Over the back of the chair is the same T-shirt I’d seen on the kid in the hospital, NEW YORK FUCKIN CITY, some studded leather straps, chain mail, and a shining medieval helmet. It’s not terribly ambiguous, this comparative barbarism, but it is interesting how central a place in Snow’s work the trauma of 9/11 occupies. He was twenty at the

time, and the abandon that he and his compatriots embraced, that became their defining trait, is often couched explicitly as a reaction to it. Interesting because it manifested less as a turn outward, toward a world and a species that could conjure disaster on such a scale, than as a borderline-solipsistic retreat inward and away.

There’s a bald anti-authoritarian streak across the board, embodied most exuberantly by Fuck the Police (2005), a series of forty-five framed newspaper cut-outs, all stories on police

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Dash Snow, Book Fort, 2006–07. 1,122 books and mixed media. Ettore and Lorenzo Nesi Collection.

Photo: Christopher Burke

corruption, abuse of power, and brutality, which Snow had jerked off onto. Much less surprising than their continued relevance is the idea that anybody thought they wouldn’t be. What stands out instead is the tendency they illustrate toward semen-as-weapon (which doesn’t take a whole lot of unpacking to seem pretty retrograde), an even more aggressive example of which appears downstairs, in the 2007 video installation Untitled (Penis Envy).

The piece takes as its jumping-off point a line from Ariel Levy’s profile of Snow and company that ran that January in New York magazine: “How much talent does it really take to come on the New York Post, anyway?” Snow printed it out, poster-size, and came on it. Then he put another enormous copy in a light box, projecting up onto the ceiling of Peres Projects, and paid a series of men who’d responded to an ad to all jerk off on that, too. This seems a very good distillation of the show as a whole: funny, possessed of a certain kind of cleverness (if often second-hand—see Dada, mid-century counterculture, Warhol’s oxidations, the ‘80s in general, etc.), and very dynamic, but so dynamic as to be almost thoughtless. However much talent is required, plenty of people evidently have it. Wrecking hotel rooms and turning them into

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hamster nests, an exercise that culminated in the famous installation at Deitch Projects, is a great way to show off your disdain for the establishment if and only if you ignore the people making minimum wage who clean it all up. Fuck the man, sure. But when you’re paying the homeless $10 to let you tag them (pretty debasing), as Snow did, then fuck you, too.

But if that thoughtlessness, that lack of expressive inhibition, is the flaw that carries through the political work, it’s also the strength of the personal. It’s hard not to want to crawl into Book Fort (2006–07), four walls of esoteric paperbacks with a little tent rising from their center, a crack in the veneer of an artist whose practice was so intensely social, despite his aversion to the press, the Internet, and phones.

The Polaroids, which occupy a significant portion of the wall space at Brant, are as tender as they are nihilistic, though it’s hard not to come back to, circumstances being what they are, a burning forehead and a parching tongue.

Most successful is the video Sisyphus, Silly Fuss, Silly Puss, recorded in 2009, not long before his overdose, by Snow on a road trip with his family upstate. It features his partner, Jade Berreau, and their daughter, Secret Snow, half-dressed in the half-light, wandering through a gravel pit, a field, some trees. It’s Edenic in every sense, innocent and sublime, and sadly presaging the fall. This is a side of Snow’s work largely obscured by all the posturing and myth, but then, what would you expect?

It’s no fault of the artists in Snow’s circle that their work shot up in value after his death, but the message was the same as it has always been, and unambiguous. We bemoan the fate as tragic— Hendrix, Basquiat, Winehouse, Snow—but embrace the mystique it confers; more to the point, we confer it ourselves. There’s a scene in The Sun Also Rises when Jake Barnes, over the course of a lunch in Madrid, drinks three martinis, then orders three bottles of wine and drinks those, then orders two more bottles after that, and it’s hard not to find it a little funny, a little exhilarating.

That’s why Hemingway exists in the collective imagination as a bearded slab of granite in a turtleneck, not a broken man with a shotgun barrel in his mouth, liver so trashed it protruded from his side like, as George Plimpton put it, “a long fat leech.” Better the genius, then. Wikipedia fodder. Better the accident, the too-bright star; lightning in a bottle, hermetic, that flashes out on its own overheated accord. Sisyphus, indeed.

Ed Winstead is a writer and editor based in New York.

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IT’S NOT TERRIBLY AMBIGUOUS, THIS COMPARATIVE BARBARISM, BUT IT IS INTERESTING HOW CENTRAL A PLACE IN SNOW’S WORK THE TRAUMA OF 9/11 OCCUPIES. HE WAS TWENTY AT THE TIME, AND THE ABANDON THAT HE AND HIS COMPATRIOTS EMBRACED, THAT BECAME THEIR DEFINING TRAIT, IS OFTEN COUCHED EXPLICITLY AS A REACTION TO IT. Dash Snow, Bin Laden Youth, 2006.

Cinderblock, spray paint, mirror, chair, T-shirt, knife, helmet, harness, chainmail, and American pin.

Collezione Il Giardino Del Lauri, Italy. Photo: Christopher Burke

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HIGH ART and the HIGH RISE LAU R A R AN DALL

Sustained charitable giving has long provided public institutions like hospitals, colleges, and museums the opportunity to strengthen their place in their communities. Today, economic changes and attitudes toward philanthropy among certain generations have weakened the stability of charitable giving—a primary support for these institutions. Despite this, the business of museums seems to be booming, with over 35,000 operating in the United States alone. Miami is a city at the forefront of this expansion, where beach commuters are reminded of the tremendous sums spent on museum buildings daily. For the past few months, highway banners along US-1 in Coral Gables advertised the incipient Nader Latin American Art Museum.

The potential home of the Nader Latin American Art Museum, Miami Dade College (MDC), has witnessed a different sort of expansion. In 2008–09, enrollment at the college jumped from 93,891 students to 146,060. In the 2013–14 academic year, MDC enrollment was at 161,632, making it one of the largest higher education institutions in the United States. According to a July 2011 report in the Miami New Times, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools issued the college a warning that the school needed to provide adequate full-time faculty for its growing student body in order to retain its accreditation.

The school’s reputation for its affordability and diversity has garnered the attention of so many politicians that it has become a town hall stage every election season for debates and campaign speeches. This spotlight has been the basis for a major redevelopment campaign by administrators and others unaffiliated with MDC. One such opportunity was posited last November in the form of an unsolicited bid by local gallerist and developer Gary Nader. His proposal for the land currently occupied by the school’s downtown parking lot includes a multitower luxury condo, a performing arts center, and a museum fitted with Nader’s personal collection. Unlike other local private collections, including the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, de la Cruz Collection, CIFO, and the Rubell Family Collection that are located on private property, Nader hopes to secure public lands for his collection. Although the prospect of a public-private facility that combines luxury condos and a museum that houses an individual’s private collection may seem odd, MDC has not dismissed Nader’s bid. Instead, the college has used it to catalyze development of the land in question.

In June 2013, Governor Rick Scott signed House Bill 85 (HB 85), legislation designed to make it easier for private businesses to enter into public-private partnerships (P3s). While Miami-Dade County

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is no stranger to P3s, these projects were previously reserved for transportation, water, housing, and municipal infrastructure. The new law permits public entities, including counties, municipalities, school boards, regional entities, and state subdivisions to enter into public-private partnerships for any qualifying project that serves a public purpose. The benefit of P3s is that they allow the private sector to fund projects like new campus facilities without placing financial burdens on the public entity. HB 85 allows for multiple financing options, public entity loans, and flexibility to use innovative financing techniques, lifting barriers that kept many P3 projects on the shelf. Under HB 85, projects can move forward with alarming alacrity. In allowing for unsolicited bids, the public entity must open a public bidding period for no less than twenty-one days, but no more than one hundred twenty days. Critics of the legislation argued the bill’s statutory framework failed to provide safeguards for taxpayers and gave the initial bidder an unfair advantage over subsequent prospective offers from competitors who would have inadequate time to prepare. The bill was sponsored by Senator Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, Representative Greg Steube, Miami Dade College President Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón, City of Miami Commission Chairman Marc Sarnoff, Made Dade College trustee and former president of the Latin Builders Association Bernie Navarro, and Chairman of the Board of Associated Builders and Contractors of Florida Carlos Adavin, along with other community advocates. The bill signing and reception with Governor Scott was hosted at Miami Dade College. “The OMNI Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Miami worked tirelessly to help make this legislation a reality. We are proud to stand alongside Governor Scott and Florida legislators in creating policies that will help to grow jobs in our community,” Sarnoff said at the signing.

In the months following the bill’s passing, Miami Dade College courted developers to expand its medical college on a 4.5-acre tract of land in the Miami Healthcare District. The current proposals for the downtown campus again provide MDC with an opportunity to expand its cache cosmetically. With the college property blocks from Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Adrienne Arsht Center, it’s clear why MDC associates new cultural centers as big projects capable of winning public esteem.

Like museums advertising new exhibitions on billboards, highway banners, and buses, Nader Latin American Art Museum— though still under consideration—launched an advertising campaign around the city last fall. The marketing for the museum

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Nader Latin American Art Museum rendering

presented the project as a done deal with Miami Dade College. In addition, from October 20 through January 21, the Nader Latin American Art Museum moved fifteen large-scale Fernando Botero sculptures to Bayfront Park. The bronzes, ranging from 14 to 166 inches in height, were situated along Biscayne Boulevard, just a few blocks south of MDC’s downtown Wolfson campus.

These were some of the same sculptures Nader placed in the same park six years ago with the help of the OMNI Community Redevelopment Agency, which donated $25,000 to the project (the agency’s main purpose is to carry out development in communities determined to be mired by “slum and blight”). City of Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado inaugurated the show the “Miami Sculptural Biennale” alongside Nader.

The preview show for the proposed Nader Latin American Art Museum is located on the second floor of the gallerist’s Wynwood warehouse. The wall text inside describes Nader’s collection as “one of the largest and most important of modern and contemporary from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.” One can think of several collectors who may also share this desription, including Latin American art collectors Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Bernardo Paz, Eugenio López Alonso (founder of Colección Jumex in Mexico City), and CIFO’s founder Ella Fontanals Cisneros. Nader owns a number of sculptures and paintings by Botero and he will donate twelve sculptures, four paintings, and eight watercolors

to the new museum. According to the catalogue for the proposed project, he will also donate three paintings and four small sculptures by Wilfredo Lam. Other promised artworks include single paintings by Diego Rivera, Jesús Rafael Soto, Rufino Tamayo, Beatriz Milhazes, José Bedia, and a painting by Miguel Angel Ríos (although it is not representative of the artist’s seminal, large-scale map pieces), as well as works by Fabian Marcaccio, Roberto Matta, and Vik Muniz. The proposal Nader submitted includes a list of 180 artists whose artworks will be donated to the museum. Perhaps notably absent from his collection are artworks by Frida Kahlo, Lygia Clark, Félix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta, Alfredo Jaar, Victor Grippo, Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco, and Doris Salcedo.

According to Nader’s proposal, in exchange for the conveyance of a fee simple title to the land, MDC will receive a cultural center that will include a museum, performing arts center, and sculpture garden at no cost to the college, with yearly art donations valued by Nader at $100,000. MDC will receive revenue from ticket sales (though university museums are generally free to students), revenue from special exhibitions, and revenue from general events. Should the culture center not yield sufficient funds to cover costs of maintaining the facility, a portion of Nader + Museu LLP will fund an endowment. Nader + Museu LLP will need to establish a Community Development District (a special tax district that levies taxes and assessments) in order to issue bonds of up to $160 million to begin the project. Museu currently estimates the cost of one tower at $350 million.

The untenable cost of college admission nationwide drives more and more students to enroll in more affordable community colleges.

This has prompted hundreds of community colleges around the nation, including five in Florida, to provide low-cost student housing.

The cost of in-state tuition at MDC is 61 percent lower than the national average, and ranks sixteenth in affordability in Florida. The net price a student pays out of pocket or finances through student loans is around $15,000 (assuming the student lives at home or works a full-time job). Seventy-eight percent of students enrolled at Miami Dade College receive aid in the form of Pell Grants. The fact that such a high percentage of the student body should qualify for federal aid is no surprise considering Miami ranks fourth in income inequality of any US city. Miami continues to rank highest among least affordable cities in the United States, with middle-class households in Miami-Dade spending 72 percent of their income on transportation and housing costs. Rather than addressing the needs of tens of thousands of students commuting to MDC’s campuses each day, MDC is helping drive up the cost of living for its students.

“Public-private partnerships are expected to create new jobs, and our students, whom we train vigorously to prepare for the workforce, will be ready to fill those needs. I look forward to working alongside Governor Scott to create and expand opportunities for our students and families,” said Miami Dade College President Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón. If approved, the Nader Latin American Art Museum and condominiums may not provide the jobs students at the college envision, but the fetching price for its residences will certainly guarantee everyone’s commute.

Laura Randall is a Miami native who holds a master's degree in art history. She works as an independent curator and writer.

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AMELIA EARHART’S HIALEAH LAYOVER ROB G OYAN E S

Palm Tree Like crackling icicles, your brittle sword-branches rattle in the small breezes of thick warm nights . . .

—EMIL A. HARTE

Maybe even our real names, in a way, are pseudonyms.

In 1937, during her final attempt to circumnavigate the world at its equator, Amelia Earhart spent eight days in Miami to repair her Lockheed Electra. This last “stunt,” as she called it, would be a test of grit and hubris, something never before done by woman or man.

One month later, 22,000 miles into the trip, she would disappear.

Mythological and yet resolutely human, Earhart was a feminist whose heart beat for humanity, however estranged she was from a normal, terrestrial life. This story is about two littleknown things about her: her time in Miami, and her poetry.

~ In 1921, Earhart was a yet-to-be adored aviator when she submitted four poems to Poetry magazine under the pseudonym of Emil A. Harte. One of them was about her newly discovered passion for flying. Harriet Monroe, the founder of the esteemed journal, wrote back to “Mr. Harte,” saying the poems were “unusually promising.” But, she added, they were “not quite—as yet.” As in, all of them were rejected.1 1 Samuel L. Morris, “What Archives Reveal: The Hidden Poems of Amelia Earhart,” Purdue University, Purdue e-Pubs, November 7, 2006, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=lib_ research.

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Earhart was both unusual and promising from a young age.

Born in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, in a Gothic mansion, she was the progeny of Puritans and pioneers, and her defiance was a precocious trait.2 When sledding down Kansan hills, boys in her town would ride lying down while girls were supposed to assume a more “ladylike” pose, but Amelia, perhaps recognizing the aerodynamic advantage, disregarded the gender norm. This may have saved her life: one day, while catching speed down a hill, she realized she was fast approaching a man with a horsedrawn junk cart, but plucky Amelia was able to zip just barely between the horse’s legs (as she told it). Had she been upright, her head would have met the horse’s ribs.3 2

Judith Thurman, “Missing Woman,” New Yorker, September 14, 2009.

3 See http://www.ameliaearhartmuseum.org/AmeliaEarhart/AEMoreStories.htm.

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Earhart’s family, of means and Victorian tendencies, moved around a lot. Her father struggled with alcoholism, and young Amelia, who was raised much by her grandparents, is described variously as a loner, frail yet daring, and a tomboy. Muriel, her sister, said the two of them were taught at home for a period of time, during which, she describes, “We omitted geography almost entirely from our studies, but we reveled in poetry far beyond our years.”4 Later, Amelia was sent to an all-female finishing school in Philadelphia, where she was meant to learn the rites and graces of high society.

She was kicked out for walking on the roof in her nightgown.

In 1921, the same year she had submitted her rejected poems to Poetry, Earhart took her first flying lesson. She had become enchanted by the idea of flying after seeing a stunt show in Toronto. As Earhart said, “‘I think I’d like to fly,’ I told my family casually that evening, knowing full well I’d die if I didn’t.” Before the year was over, she had not only passed her flying license test (only the sixteenth woman to do so5), she’d also worked enough odd jobs to buy herself a plane.

~ By 1928, Earhart was living in Massachusetts, employed as a social worker helping Syrian and Chinese immigrants. She was involved in the local aeronautical community, flying planes and writing articles about flying for newspapers when she received a call from George Palmer Putnam, a giant of the publishing world who had released Charles Lindbergh’s blockbuster memoir We the year before. Putnam asked if she’d like to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. It was as a passenger, not a pilot, but she still jumped at the opportunity.

This was no simple feat: fourteen people, including three women, had died that year alone attempting the same thing, and a treacherous flight Earhart’s turned out to be: During a thirteen-night rainstorm in Nova Scotia that left the crew grounded, the pilot got blind drunk every single night. In spite of rain and spirits, they made it, and upon her return to the United States, she was greeted by praising crowds and journalists, though she insisted, “I was just baggage, a sack of potatoes.” Earhart was christened “Lady Lindy,” a term she didn’t have much taste for, and earned the admiration of the world for her fearlessness, charm, and wholesome beauty. Putnam invited her to his home to write a book about the experience. Soon after, Putnam and his wife divorced, and he asked Earhart to marry him.

Though she said yes, and though they would remain together the rest of her days, Earhart wrote Putnam a Rilkean prenuptial letter that asserted, “Please let us not interfere with the others’ work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.”6

4

Morris, “What Archives Reveal.”

5 See http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19670093000.

6 George Palmer Putner Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers, 1931, Purdue University Libraries, http://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/earhart/id/2988.

I have seen your eyes at dawn beloved dark with sleep And lying on your breast—have watched the new day creep . . .

—AMELIA EARHART, unpublished poem

It’s difficult to describe the type of icon that Earhart became.

In 1932, in her candy-apple-red Lockheed Vega 5B, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean—only the second person to do so after Lindbergh. She was awarded honors from the United States Congress and France, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and wrote another book called The Fun of It. In a Depression-era climate, aviation was a salve for the public, and Earhart ambitiously built her stardom through a mix of powerful public relations (she and Putnam were potent business partners), product endorsements (baggage, Lockheed Martin, Lucky Strikes), and lectures. She used the platform to preach pacifism and women’s rights in and outside the workplace and to promote herself and, of course, the poesy of aviation.

Earhart had an independent, androgynous style—both fashionably and politically—and a grace that aided her career goals as aviator, clothing designer, and activist. She captured the imagination of a public that was just beginning to recognize the potential of flight. She generally charmed people, with her easy Kansan way, and was unafraid of speaking her mind. She was what might be called a natural celebrity. Yet, although her taste for adventure enamored those around her, it seems it was also a source of alienation. Earhart the hustler aviator, the women’s advocate, was as public as they come, but when it came to her poetry and personal life, she was desperate—as many of us are—for privacy.

~ In my attempt to understand Amelia Earhart, the time that she would spend in Miami, and the metaphysical effects of her disappearance, I spoke to a renowned aviation scholar. Though he agreed to speak with me and gave me permission to quote him, he asked that I keep his identity secret. “I’m not interested in engaging in a dialogue about this again,” he told me. I assured him that instead of seeking “the truth” about what happened to her, I was seeking something else, something more remote about her life and disappearance.

The scholar, relenting, first told me about her function in the aviation world: “The airline industry realized that until women got comfortable going onto the airplane with their children, the industry was never going to be successful. So her function was making women comfortable flying.” We talked about her public persona, the way it coupled with the emergence of mass media, and the mix of politics, fame, and fortune. (On a good week, her lecturing would earn her $32,000, during a Depression economy.7) Regarding what she did while she was in Miami, he pointed me to a 1996 biography by Doris Rich.

~ For her final flight, Earhart would attempt to fly around the 7

“Amelia Earhart,” American Experience PBS documentary.

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world at the equator, something no one had done. The first attempt out of Oakland, California, failed when she crashlanded in Honolulu. Her second attempt would come out of Miami, after repairs were made.

Before arriving in Miami, Earhart and Putnam stopped in New Orleans. Edna Gardner, a fellow female aviation pioneer and friend, said that Earhart looked “very tired and pale,” and that she “lower[ed] her head and stare[d] at her plate.” She said that Putnam responded to this by saying, “Stop your sniveling.”

Gardner said that Earhart’s husband, in that moment “was just as cruel as he could be, right in front of all of us.”8 (Gardner was reported to not like Putnam, and at best this is hearsay, but maybe it’s a point of insight into a marriage built on business. We also don’t how Earhart might have responded later that night, being a woman who described her marriage to Putnam as one of “dual controls.”9) They arrived at Miami Municipal Airport the next day, an airfield originally opened by Glenn Curtiss, which is now the site of a Hialeah police department and UPS sorting facility. Carl Allen of the Herald Tribune, a friend who was covering the attempt, came from Oakland. On May 29, Earhart announced her plans to leave Miami, and confirmed that she had gotten rid of several pieces of equipment to lighten the load. (Some have said she made a critical error by leaving certain radio equipment behind.) “I have a feeling there is just one more flight in my system,” she told Allen, “and this trip is it.”10 Fred Noonan, her navigator, convinced Earhart to go fishing for pompano to calm her nerves.11 On June 1, 1937, Earhart and Noonan rolled out onto the tarmac as spectators rushed the line of policemen to get a glimpse. Before taking off, Earhart had left more items behind: her parachute, a life raft, and a hair bracelet that had served as a good luck charm.12 About a month later, after completing 22,000 miles, with stops in South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, they took off from Lae, New Guinea. Her last correspondence came from near Howland Island, an uninhabited coral island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Carrion Merciless Life laughs in the burning sun and only Death, slow-circling down, shadows the aerid flesh bruised by the panther-paws of love.

—AMELIA EARHART

Following her disappearance, the US Navy undertook a giant rescue effort. No conclusive evidence was found of Earhart, Noonan, or the 8 Doris Rich, Amelia Earhart: A Biography (New York: Smithsonian Books, 1996).

9 See https://theautry.org/collections/aviation-development-in-southern-california-4.

Lockheed Electra. In 1945, in a letter to the War Department, J. Edgar Hoover related something told to him by an American soldier: “He . . . and another American soldier were being entertained by some Japanese in a hotel in the Philippine Islands. He described the walls of this hotel as very thin, enabling him to overhear a conversation in English between two Japanese to the effect that Amelia Earhart was still being detained at a hotel in Tokyo.”13 Besides this conjecture that the Japanese detained Earhart, other theories have developed over the years. There are the sensible ones: that she crashed at sea or was marooned on nearby Gardner Island. Then there are the more outlandish ones: that she was spying for FDR, that she had moved to a rubber plantation in the Philippines, or that she assumed the identity of a woman named Irene Craigmile Bolam and settled in New Jersey.

There’s also the untested theory that leaving from one of three points on the Bermuda Triangle had something to do with it.

At the core of the myth of Amelia Earhart is the essential paradox that makes a mystery: an event has happened, one that we can all confirm is based in reality, yet we’re faced with the just-as-real fact that there is no trace, no sign or indication of resolution. All possible evidence is awash—in this case, in the greatest of real voids, the ocean—and we are left staring into it, pouring our hopes and fears and selves into the abyss, hoping that meaning will follow.

Only a little bit of Earhart’s poetry survives, currently held by the Purdue University Library. In 1934, a fire destroyed part of Earhart and Putnam’s home in Rye, New York, and it is thought that many of her creative works were lost in the blaze.

At one time and another, AE wrote many fragments of verse, for she found deep pleasure in building little images with words. That aspect was very private— almost secret.

—G. P. PUTNAM

The scholar I met with told me that during his research about Earhart’s time in Miami, he came across a story about a woman who decided to be the first person to give birth on an airplane. It was 1929, and though the scholar can’t verify a direct correlation, it was the same year Earhart had come to Miami to deliver one of her inspiring lectures. The woman and her husband chartered a Pan American airplane and a baby girl was born mid-flight.

In 2009, the scholar reached out to Airline (pronounced Airleen), the baby who was, quite literally, airborne. But the woman had no desire to speak about the matter, and turned down the inquiry.

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace The soul that knows it not, knows no release . . .

—AMELIA EARHART

“Amelia Earhart’s Hialeah Layover” is a chapter from Rob Goyanes’s forthcoming book, Balalaika: An Owner’s Manual for Asif Farooq’s MiG-21.

10 Rich, Amelia Earhart.

11 Ibid.

12

“Amelia Earhart,” American Experience PBS documentary.

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13 FBI case file on Amelia Earhart, https://vault.fbi.gov/amelia-mary-earhart/amelia-mary-earhart-part-01-of-01.

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RIO CORTEZ I have written several poems that reimagine female leads from Woody Allen films as Black women. In the context of how rarely we see a Black woman’s leisure depicted on the screen or in literature, I am interested in the process of rewriting Black women into rooms of popular culture that have been closed to them. And what more privileged planet to reinhabit than a Woody Allen film?

In “Black Annie Hall,” I wrote from my memory of watching the film, using a different scene as the occasion for each stanza. What happened as the poem grew is that, even as I found myself feeling empowered by this new Annie’s freedom to do as she pleases, it became impossible not to find contrasts: a black widow, for instance, in a black-and-white bathroom, a black hat, a glass of white wine. The stanzas then became a litany of black, then white, but not always of the body until the final stanza, when Annie is in contrast with her white lover. By the end, I wondered if she was not, in this world of total contrast, an even lonelier version of Annie.

When I recall the film now, I imagine myself as Diane Keaton, and I suppose that is an outcome I also wanted: to be granted a kind of permission to see myself as a Black woman in places where there is no trace of me.

—

Rio Cortez is a Pushcart-nominated poet who has received fellowships from Poet’s House, Cave Canem, and CantoMundo. Raised in Salt Lake City,

BLACK ANNIE HALL in a black wool hat & black suspenders in line to see The Sorrow & the Pity again with khaki slacks & an afternoon free black Annie has trouble hailing a cab after seeing her analyst on her roof, black Annie drinking white wine after tennis & dewy Annie, living alone calls for help to kill a black widow spider in her bathroom black Annie is bored so she takes adult courses & can’t decide between philosophy or poetry lucky today, black Annie driving 80 on the West Side Highway with the top back, hair unmoved black Annie’s white boyfriend asks her not to smoke that marijuana cigarette in bed & outof-body

Utah, she lives and writes in New York.

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1983

The first National YoungArts Week is held in Miami with national finalists chosen in dance, music, theater, visual arts and writing.

During this signature national program, award winners visit Miami for the weeklong program, where they work with distinguished master artists.

1982

Viola Davis winner in theater.

Rachel Moore winner in dance and U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts.

YoungArts assumes sole responsibility for nominating students for the U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts (PSA) awards and presents the first Kennedy Center performance featuring PSA winners.

Ted Arison (founder of Carnival Cruise Lines) and wife Lin Arison establish the National YoungArts Foundation to identify and support young artists (15–18 years old).

1981

E R ICA A NDO

1981–2016

National YoungArts Foundation:

2015 Becomes the first African American to win an Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Drama. In her acceptance speech, she says, “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”

2010 Wins Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role in Fences.

2001 Wins Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in King Hedley II.

2015 Named President and Chief Executive Officer of Music Center, Los Angeles.

2004 Named Executive Director, American Ballet Theater.

1984 Joins American Ballet Theater, New York.

Erica Ando is an arts writer and arts advocate. She believes in mandatory arts education.

In January, the National YoungArts Foundation brought to Miami a select group of teenagers from across the country who competed for the honor in the performing, cinematic, literary, and visual arts. Throughout the week, the young artists participated in workshops and presented electrifying performances and exhibitions open to the public.

The artists radiated uncompromising commitment and passion. They also fearlessly engaged controversial subjects: the “Writers’ Readings” performance included the works of two young black men who tackled pressing issues with urgency and intensity. Antwon Funches delivered a pleading invective on the violence facing young black men: “Who’s next? Who’s next?! Answer me!!” Simbaa Gordon’s poem, addressed to an absentee father who suddenly turned up, ended in “I don’t need you,” a proclamation of defiant strength and independence. These performances inspired hope, not only for the future of writing, performance, and the arts in general, but also for the future of our society. They were powerful reminders of art’s ability to empower—both the artists and their audiences.

The level of achievement demonstrated by YoungArts winners is made possible only with solid support from families, teachers, and communities. For every “winner” there are countless “losers” who don’t belong to an environment supportive of artistic expression. While I’m still intoxicated by the energy of YoungArts Week, my hope for the future is that all young people receive artistic nourishment. I also hope that these talented young artists will continue to receive the necessary support to develop and that their exceptional art will be made accessible and affordable to all.

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YoungArts creates the New World Symphony, a separate but affiliated organization.

1986

1995

1994

Career development internships for YoungArts winners launched with Utah Shakespearean Festival, Sundance Theatre Laboratory, and Socrates Sculpture Park.

Kerry Washington awarded in theater.

Photography becomes a separate discipline within the program.

the

YoungArts establishes an affiliation with the International Association of Jazz Educators, enabling the program to add jazz music as a separate artistic discipline.

1991

Applications to the program surpasses 6,000.

In partnership with Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, YoungArts creates the Career Advancement in the Visual Arts program to provide financial support for individual visual artists through residencies in Miami Beach. The program is renamed Fellowships in the Visual Arts in 1997.

1988

1992

Dave Eggar winner in music.

1987

Desmond Richardson winner in modern dance and U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts.

Career advancement granting program for former YoungArts national finalists established.

1985

2013 Receives Emmy Award nomination and NAACP Image Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Olivia Pope on Scandal. Also receives NAACP President’s Award for special achievement in furthering the cause of civil rights and public service.

2011 Returns to YoungArts as a master artist.

2009 Appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Committee of the Arts and Humanities.

2004 Receives NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture, the first of numerous awards and nominations by NAACP.

2000 Receives Teen Choice Award for Best Breakout Performance for work in Save the Last Dance. Begins career in stage, television, and film.

2011 Nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement for his solo record Kingston Morning.

A musical prodigy in cello and piano, Eggar performed on Broadway and with the Metropolitan Opera at age seven and debuted at Carnegie Hall at age fifteen. During his career, he has performed and recorded with countless artists in diverse genres, from Josh Groban (fellow YoungArts alum) to Andrea Bocelli to Evanescence.

2015 Complexions Contemporary Ballet receives the YoungArts Residency in Dance, held at the Miami campus with an Outside the Box performance supported by ArtPlace America. Complexions cofounder and master choreographer Dwight Rhoden creates an original work that premiers at New York’s Joyce Theater. YoungArts Residency in Visual Arts at the Miami Campus hosts Emma Fee, Sarah Rara, and Michael Vasquez.

1999 Receives a Tony Award nomination for his role in Fosse.

1997 Joins American Ballet Theater, New York, where he performs the lead role in Othello.

1994 Cofounds Complexions Contemporary Ballet, New York, with the purpose of reinventing dance through a mix of methods, styles, and cultures.

1987 Joins Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York, where he is a principal dancer for seven years.

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YoungArts forms a partnership with the Music for Youth Foundation to provide $25,000 cash awards exclusively to YoungArts winners in music, voice and jazz. Film and video becomes a separate discipline.

2000

YoungArts celebrates its twentieth anniversary by presenting the first Arison Award to Quincy Jones at the annual gala. Given to an individual who has made a significant impact to the artistic lives of America’s youth, the award carries a $10,000 donation to the winner’s charity of choice. To date, Arison Award winners have included Jacques d’Amboise, Roberta Guaspari, Placido Domingo, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and others.

The $10,000 YoungArts Gold Awards established to be given for extraordinary achievement to a national finalist in each of the nine disciplines.

Martin Scorsese returns to YoungArts as a master artist in cinematic arts. In presenting awards to winners, he tells the audience, “In 1963, when I made my first film, I was lucky enough to get a $500 scholarship. It was the greatest encouragement for me and my parents. I’ve lived on that encouragement for the past forty years and I hope the same happens for the award winners tonight.”

2001

2004

2007

A regional, two-year pilot program is established, serving Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Applications reach 8,112.

Camille A. Brown winner in dance and U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts.

Applications to the program reach 7,000.

Hernan Bas awarded in photography.

Voice becomes a separate discipline within the program.

1998

1997

1996

The YoungArts Salon Series, launched in 2013, is sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and brings together creative art luminaries, offering audiences an opportunity to engage with internationally renowned artists. Previous aalons have featured Marina Abramović and Matthu Placek, Sibylle Szaggars Redford and Robert Redford, Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens, Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, Edwidge Dandicat, and others.

2015 Moderates YoungArts Salon Series conversation with Fab 5 Freddy.

2016 Miami-Dade College Live Arts presents Brown’s Black Girl: Linguistic Play.

2011 Returns to YoungArts as a master artist.

2001 Joins Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, Brooklyn. Over the years, commissions choreographic works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco!, Urban Bush Women, Complexions, among others.

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2016

2015

2014

2012

YoungArts New York regional program established.

2011

January 3–10: National Young Arts Week brings to Miami 168 finalists, selected in ten artistic disciplines. Seventeen are students from the Miami area. Artists work with master artists including playwright and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner

YoungArts celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. Applications reach a new record of 12,071.

Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner winner in music.

The HBO series YoungArts Masterclass wins an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program for “Alan Alda and the Actor Within You: A YoungArts Masterclass.”

Other YoungArts Masterclass specials have featured Olafur Eliasson, Renée Fleming, Josh Groban, Bill T. Jones, Liv Ullmann, and others.

Kira Bursky winner in cinematic arts.

The first annual YoungArts Awareness Day takes place, including a salon and exhibition in Miami, a cabaret in New York, and a disco pop performance in Los Angeles.

YoungArts expands its regional programs in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York.

YoungArts acquires the iconic Bacardi Tower and Museum buildings in Miami and converts them into the YoungArts national headquarters.

Isabela Dos Santos winner in cinematic arts and U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts.

James Allister Sprang winner in visual arts.

2008

2015 Collaborates with Camille A. Brown, 1997 winner in dance, on Brown’s Bessie Award-winning “Mr. TOL E. RAncE.”

2013 Shortlisted for Student Academy Awards with short film i, which was inspired by and set to a song by fellow YoungArts alumna Kate Davis.

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Robert Wilson

Arison Award Alumni Award Honoree is Tony Yazbeck (1997 winner in theater). Other Arison Award Honorees are theater and visual artist Robert Wilson and actor and director Rosie Perez. Perez tells the audience of 2016 winners, “Push through your fears and slip into greatness. The world will open up to you and it doesn’t happen overnight.”

March 8–13: YoungArts Miami, exhibitions and performances at the YoungArts Campus and the Colony Theatre.

Tarell McCraney, visual artist Mickalene Thomas, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Doug Blush (1984 winner in cinematic arts).

Rosie Perez

Tony Yazbeck

Miami International Film Festival presented by Miami-Dade College, March 4–13

A LOVE SONG TO TENDER FRUITION AND DECAY: HEARTS OF PALM M O N ICA USZ EROW ICZ

There is an animalistic desperation in the stanzas of Ted Hughes’s poem “Lovesong”—a neediness for the kind of escape found in a lover’s arms, where it’s easy to pretend troubles don’t exist, even the dissolve of the relationship itself. “In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs / In their dreams their brains took each other hostage,” he writes. We know of Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s own attempts to—lovingly—take each other hostage, the dissolution of their romance, the legacy their narratives left behind. That brief distance between love and need, or between love and its end, is a constant, nervous trigger of anxiety in director Monica Peña’s second feature, Hearts of Palm, which finds the words of “Lovesong” recited—in Spanish—during one of the film’s opening scenes. The unnamed protagonists, referred to only as “El” (Brad Lovett) and “Ella” (Megan Galizia), soak in resplendent sun—the light seeming to embrace them like a lover—nap, and suck on mangoes (and each other) in a tropical backyard, all with wanton bliss. Dotted with tattoos, they lay atop each other in a small, warm pile like piebald deer, seemingly too pale for the sun and too weightless for the lush flora around them. Something about this already seems too fragile. It will not last.

“Lovesong” is not the only literary or otherwise creative reference Hearts of Palm will make, as it draws on numerous filmmakers, writers, and their storied love affairs to help tell its tale—Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are given poignant mention, and Chantal Akerman, whose suicide came as the film’s production wrapped, is noted for the intimate honesty in her portrayal of women’s emotional landscapes (it’s an observable influence on Peña’s work). The most pertinent

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of these stories is Peña’s own: acting as narrator, she reveals that she, like so many male directors before her, cast a former lover as her lead, their time together ending during filming. It’s clear we are watching two stories: one in which Peña re-tells the narrative of a self-described broken heart, and the fable therein—the deterioration of El and Ella, based on some truth.

In her last film, Ectotherms—which earned Peña the title of Knight Fellow and sent her to the Sundance Film Festival in 2014—there were few obvious demarcations between fiction and nonfiction; in Hearts of Palm, our honest narrator offers commentary about the space between artifice and reality, the heartache of the directive process, the falling flat of specific moments. It’s a testament to El and Ella’s tension that, even with Peña’s literal voice—which appears infrequently enough to allow willful suspension of disbelief—we do not lose sight of her aesthetic voice. It is easy to become absorbed in the on-screen relationship, despite knowing full well its off-screen inspiration.

Portrayed in several segments, Hearts of Palm’s initial warmth is fleeting. The singing birds and slippery kisses of the first chapter, “Garden Bed,” are cut short by Ella’s vomiting. It is merciless; there is blood in the toilet and nothing with which to clean her face. Once inside the house, without the distractions of the sunshine, the architectural decay is palpable. We are trained to think of pregnancy when we see a woman, in love and on film, grow nauseous, but these two have nothing to birth. In her disgust, Ella scolds El about the state of the home (and lack of toilet paper), leaving him scoffing and stressed on the edge of the tub.

From there, a heavy ennui sets in, and we watch El and Ella in various states of repose and restlessness. Ella tries to sew the

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Monica Peña, Hearts of Palm, 2016

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tear in a curtain, quickly giving up and allowing the torn fabric to rest across her face. El reads aloud from books and traces holes in a wall with the pads of his fingers. There is a sickness growing, not just in Ella’s belly, but somewhere intangible and undetectable: plants become overtaken by parasitic bugs, dead lizards crop up inexplicably, the couple are insatiably thirsty.

Ella’s thirst is of the metaphorical kind, too: whenever the lovers are together, they speak stiltedly, maneuvering around each other dubiously until Ella propositions El with believable tenderness. She desires closeness; it is always shunned. When she slices open a watermelon, her hands frenetic, we remember “Lovesong”: “Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves / Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop.”

It’s difficult to say if Hearts of Palm unfolds over one day or many. What’s more important is that it happens in such cramped quarters, in a house that starts to take on fairytale qualities, given the unlikelihood that one wouldn’t attempt, at some point, to escape. Barring one scene, El and Ella never leave, trapped in the metaphorical tower. In his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote, “For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.” The house tells the story and creates the memory, no matter how long (or how long ago) it was. As their home begins to mime the disrepair of their love—the way one’s environment often mimics one’s spiritual interior—their awkwardness makes whatever eerie force is about to descend upon them seem increasingly sinister. How can two people, barely able to look each other in the eye, handle something dark and unknown? Worse, what if they’re the source of that great, unseen turmoil?

Throughout the dense silence, the film remains beautiful, lit as romantically as any midday afternoon in the tropics and keen in its attention to pretty, comforting detail. Everything looks rich and awash in light. Production designer Lucila Garcia de Onrubia has created a space for El and Ella—and the viewers—to dream. Lovett, who is also electronic musician Dim Past, scored the film (a few scenes in particular, as music is used sparingly), and when his character—in another moment of art imitating life—improvises a song, the constant unease is momentarily forgettable. Peña finds poetry in the day-to-day, in the ugly and redundant; cinematographer Jorge Rubiera approaches dead insects, Ella brushing her teeth, and the lovers’ early embraces with equal affection. That Miami is a character of its own becomes explicit only slowly, and Rubiera is judicious in what he shares to reveal the film’s city of origin: patches of light, the singing-roar of a train, dried centipede carcasses. We hear, intermittently, “El la amaba y ella lo amaba”—“he loved her and she loved him”—the first line of Hughes’s poem translated into Spanish. Peña is an experimental and meandering filmmaker, to be sure; to watch Hearts of Palm is to traverse, in equal strides, her consciousness, a fictional relationship, and the city of Miami.

After El and Ella find what appears to be a religious symbol drawn with mangroves (and more deceased reptiles) on their porch, they are granted reprieve from their self-imposed prison with a visit to a botanica, seeking advice and the eradication of something ghostly. Their Spanglish conversation with the

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unnamed expert and shopkeeper—local Eloisa Garcia—will be familiar to Miamians, whose city is bilingual and who understand that, if they are not bilingual themselves, body language speaks volumes. Garcia offers the pair ritualistic tools for cleansing, and together they laugh and take turns holding a dove in their palms. “For peace in the world,” they determine. Upon their return home, what follows are scenes unlike the rest, far from peaceful and wholly terrifying, severing Hearts of Palm into two distinct halves: pre-botanica and post-botanica. In this maybe-dream sequence, there is sudden noise, inexplicable magic, and, finally, a release from the apprehension. With assistance by a mystery man-cum-stand-in-Santero, played by fellow Miami filmmaker Julian Yuri Rodriguez, we learn that the impending doom of Hearts of Palm is El and Ella themselves, and there is only one way to absolve them of it—though it’s less macabre than it seems.

By the time it’s over, Hearts of Palm feels like an unnerving fever dream or deeply embedded spiritual memory. In some ways, it is: Peña has left us in the wake of a gorgeous ceremonial ritual, both the one in the film and the film itself. For a movie that owes so much to stillness and quiet, there is a whirlwind of material to be parsed through, from the depth of its cultural allusions to its backstory. Indeed, there is enough to implicate all of its references that the story could run the risk of getting lost, buried beneath its sources. Yet it doesn’t—the painful veracity of the couple’s disintegration and Peña’s narrative hold steadfast: you cannot look away. Love stories, like all stories, are multitudinous beasts, comprising too many histories to pinpoint.

Whether or not they matter in the end is anybody’s guess.

Monica Uszerowicz has contributed writing and images to publications like V, Dossier, Hyperallergic, and Artsy, and is the film and performing arts editor of the Miami Rail.

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REVIEWS Lee Miller, Irmgard Seefried, Opera singer singing an aria from ‘Madame Butterfly’, 1945. Modern exhibition digital print. The exhibition was organized in cooperation with the Albertina, Vienna. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved

The Indestructible Lee Miller NSU ART MUSEUM FORT LAUDERDALE OCTOBER 4, 2015–FEBRUARY 14, 2016

CAT H Y BY R D You might say that artist Elizabeth “Lee” Miller (1907–1977)—super model, surrealist photographer, and war correspondent—is trending. There’s talk of a movie starring Kate Winslet. Four recent and current

exhibitions in North America and Europe are featuring her photos. One of these is The Indestructible Lee Miller at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.

The exhibition follows Miller’s creative practice as it comes into focus and dissolves, beginning and ending with black-and-white photographs in which she is the subject. The first set of images reveal what happened in the late 1920s after she abandoned her role as a fashion model in New York and moved to Paris to apprentice with avant-garde

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photographer Man Ray. Miller’s mentor soon became her lover and her artistic collaborator. In most of the photographs on view here, Ray deconstructs Miller’s beauty. He obsessed on her body, often fragmenting her torso, her breasts, her neck, her lips, and her silhouette in his work. In fact, the exhibition’s title refers to one such instance. Indestructible Object, a 1923 sculpture of a metronome that Ray altered after their 1932 breakup, features Miller’s eye.

In this show, we watch Miller reverse

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the gaze by positioning herself behind the lens. Images taken in Paris and New York illustrate her own surrealist aesthetic. She achieved the energy of Exploding Hand (1930) simply by capturing one gesture—a woman’s hand opening the glass door of a Guerlain boutique in Paris that had been scratched by countless diamond rings. Beyond gorgeous, the photo seems to comment on the destructive nature of privilege and wealth.

Lee was soon to make more overt social, feminist, and political statements.

She abstracted and empowered the female body in a radical series of nude photographs.

Perhaps her most violent critique of female objectification is Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy), the 1930 photograph she composed after observing a mastectomy.

She carried the severed breast to her studio and photographed it on a white plate with a knife and fork. More than eighty-five years later, the image she printed twice to exhibit as a diptych still has the power to shock.

At a time when women weren’t permitted to serve in the armed forces, the camera effectively became the means for Miller to comment on World War II. In London, for example, she shot fashion photographs for British Vogue on the streets of a city devastated by air raids. Miller realized her fullest potential as one of five accredited female photojournalists embedded in American forces that liberated concentration camps in 1945. She documented the trauma of liberated victims, avenged perpetrators, and stunned liberators in tightly cropped scenes at Dachau and Buchenwald.

Miller is the subject of the photograph that surely represents the climax of her career as an artist. Shortly after Adolf Hitler’s suicide in 1945, his Munich apartment became a US Army command post.

She was quartered there, with friend and colleague Dave Scherman, a Life magazine photographer. Scherman took the photo that pictures Miller posing nude in Hitler’s bathtub, her muddy combat boots on the white tile floor. An official photograph of Hitler is placed on the edge of the tub. Again becoming the subject of the gaze, through Scherman, Miller remarks on her bitter fascination with the atrocities she had witnessed and recorded. As she looks directly at the camera, she acknowledges that she (and by extension, the world) will be forever marked by the experience.

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Sylvie Fleury, Eternity Now BASS MUSEUM OF ART DECEMBER 2, 2015–MAY 31, 2016

E RI CA A N DO Calvin Klein launched the fragrance ETERNITY NOW in July 2015, likening the scent to “the thrill and raw emotion of new love, when two people realize that it is the beginning of forever.” For a drop of liquid to capture such intangibles requires a designer’s facility and imagination, as well as a consumer’s purse. For a tidy $46, Calvin Klein can deliver dreams—on the condition they aren’t questioned.

While Calvin Klein endeavors to spin fantasies, Sylvie Fleury works to rattle them.

Fleury exuberantly promotes paradoxes, simultaneously catechizing and affirming brand-name aesthetics. In her Eternity Now, a site-specific neon work installed on the Bass Museum of Art’s facade, she appropriates the fragrance’s unmistakable logo, cross-examining the syrupy expression even as the scent of commercialism emanates from the neon. The artist flirts with the Bass Museum site, at once enhancing and corrupting the historically designated building.

Eternity Now, part of bassX, the Bass Museum’s yearlong project series, entices you to enter the museum, though it is currently closed for renovations. The 1930s Art Deco building was designed by Russell

Pancoast, grandson of Miami Beach pioneer John Collins. Fleury has a knack for sniffing out patriarchal tradition, even in contemporary-obsessed Miami, and then profaning it with an I-shop-therefore-I-am attitude. (She once scattered high-heeled shoes over a Carl Andre work, a gesture the older male artist censured. She responded with a video of women in their “feminine” footwear strolling across various Andre works.)

Fleury first knocked off the “Eternity” brand in 1996 and, with this work, follows Calvin Klein’s serial rehashing of it (there was Eternity Summer, Eternity Moment, Eternity Aqua . . .). Fleury reveals the fashion designer’s persistent, oxymoronic conjure of a fleeting-but-forever moment not as desire but as unpleasant contradiction. Would we really want to face our destiny at this moment? Is the future somehow better than the present?

I first saw Eternity Now on a rainy afternoon during Miami Art Week on a respite from the Convention Center’s stultifying air.

A few hours later, I would be calf-deep in flooded streets, a reminder of the impending rising sea levels that will one day drown us out. On this day, Fleury’s work transformed an advertisement for ETERNITY NOW—the liquid of new love—into a suggestion of our liquefied future. Not to worry, however.

Until the moment our dystopian dread becomes a reality, Fleury would have us light up the sky, splash through puddles in our shiny heels, and kick down the doors of old, inaccessible buildings.

Sylvie Fleury, Eternity Now, 2015. Neon, 91.5 x 122 cm. Courtesy Bass Museum of Art. Photo: Silvia Ros

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Marta Chilindron, 16 Trapezoids, 2015. Acrylic and hinges, 119 x 305 x 284.5 cm. Photo: Oriol Tarridas

Marta Chilindron: Temporal Systems ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY NOVEMBER 19, 2015–FEBRUARY 5, 2016

GREGG PE R KI N S Temporal Systems presents a suite of Marta Chilindron’s sculptural works that evoke a large swath of twentieth-century abstraction and Conceptual art, nodding, along the way, to early Russian Constructivist sculptural works, aspects of the phenomenological aims of the Light and Space movement, Minimalism’s insistence on industrial materials, and the general notion that the viewer is inherently a performer in an exhibition.

Along these lines, a central aspect of Chilindron’s works is that they can be changed and repositioned by viewers during an exhibition. For example, 16 Trapezoids (2015), is composed of teal acrylic panels and unfolds on the floor in the center of the main gallery, resembling a waist-high, jagged wave. But upon further inspecting the work,

it becomes clear that it could be also folded down, to a form resembling a set of shallow steps. The transparency of the panels also adds a compositional element constantly in flux. As viewers move around 16 Trapezoids, certain planes become more or less solid, given their distance from the viewer; those farther away—and behind several other panes—become more solid, and those nearer to the viewer begin to disappear in their transparency. Similarly, Black Cube 12 (2015) can both resemble an opaque cube when fully collapsed, but also a fence of varying lengths and shifting opacities. Both works produce a fading-in and fading-out effect of the form as viewers move around the piece; it is this effect that, taken along with the infinite mutability of these forms, is at the center of the exhibition.

Other wall and pedestal mounted works are less able to be modified by the viewer.

Sliding Circle (2015), for example, is mounted to the wall in its most spread-out configuration, but one could imagine it also furled up into a blue-and-frosted-white, neatly shaded circular form. Similarly, Black Isosceles

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Triangle (2013)—a tightly wound eight-foot band of vinyl—is positioned atop a pedestal with only its point extending away from the form, but it is harder to imagine a viewer in this context manipulating the work to more interesting ends.

Ultimately, what is most compelling about Chilindron’s mode of abstraction is that each work is inherently a moving compositional target through time. From this perspective, the work also echoes fellow South American artist Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés series (1964–79) of wearable artworks. These works were also constructed of industrial materials, were meant to have no ideal composition, and would be in constant change through time. Similarly, with Chilindron’s sculptures, each work is in fact many, given the context and composition.

The role of the viewer here becomes that of performer, not only by requiring them to walk around the works to encounter all aspects of the compositions, but also by asking them to physically determine the current size, shape, and orientation of the sculptural works themselves.

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Martha Friedman: Pore, featuring collaborative performance with Silas Riener, 2015. Installation view: Locust Projects, Miami. Photo: Christian Hernandez

Martha Friedman: Pore LOCUST PROJECTS NOVEMBER 7, 2015–JANUARY 9, 2016

MEGA N VOE LLE R It’s hard to imagine a better material with which to evoke the body’s four humors—an ancient medical theory long discarded by science—than Martha Friedman’s poured rubber. Phlegm never looked so sexy as it does in the form of a milky, translucent curtain suspended from the ceiling of Locust Projects. Next to it, a banana-yellow cascade (bile) gives off more primary color pop than you’d expect from a bodily fluid, but no matter. Sheets of black (the other bile) and blood-red rubber, stretchy and slick, complete the effect of standing inside a psychophysical abattoir.

I visited Friedman’s exhibition on an

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afternoon during Miami Art Week when twenty other spectators were pressed into the space. We were there to watch Friedman’s collaborator, dancer, and choreographer, Silas Riener, move with the sculptures. He entered the gallery nearly naked in a spandex loincloth. Each rubber sheet has an extension—in the case of cloudy phlegm, an umbilical cord of spaghetti-like tubes—that connects to a costume. (The blood sheet itself becomes a cape under which he quivered and shook.) Riener transitioned between the humors like stations, wriggling into a new garment at each and embarking on a dance inspired by the humor’s corresponding traits. Phlegm necessitated a study in passivity. Riener balanced (but barely) on a rubber block with the consistency of Jell-O strapped to his foot using loose spaghetti tubes. Black bile, conventionally linked with anger, occasioned a series

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of faintly masochistic backbends. Attached to the rubber sheet by a bodysuit, Riener played with how far he could stretch the material before it pulled him back. Friedman has said that George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments (1946) was a reference point.

Riener came closest to recalling the ballet with his pointe work during the movement devoted to yellow bile.

Friedman and Riener’s collaboration strikes a balance. Without him, her body-invoking sculptures take on a nerdy literalism.

(Beyond the rubber sheets, Friedman deploys a lot of metal tubing that seems intended to suggest veins, spines, or the titular pore.)

Without her objects, his choreography falls on the opaque side of abstract. Together they’ve created something tightly crafted, weird, and pleasingly intimate. Locust Projects wins, too, with one of the more memorable site-specific projects made for its space.

Ezra Johnson: Cut Rate Paradise Project Space: Bruce Kates: Mumbo Jumbo MINDY SOLOMON GALLERY DECEMBER 19, 2015–JANUARY 30, 2016

ERIN TH U R LOW Mindy Solomon Gallery ended 2015 and began the new year with two artists, Ezra Johnson in the main gallery and Bruce Kates (aka the gallerist Fredric Snitzer, more on that later) in the front project space.

Johnson’s show, Cut-Rate Paradise, is clearly set along the strip mall- and motel-lined highways of South Florida. He paints in a particular figurative style I associate with his birthplace in the San Francisco Bay Area; it harks back to Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn through the 1990s street art–inspired work of artists like Alicia McCarthy and Chris Johanson.

The style works just as well here in Florida to give a feeling for cracked, painted stucco facades and muddy parcels of drained swampland, all enveloped in thick humidity.

Its contrast of muddy washes and drippy pop colors along with the jury-rigged support structures epitomize the aesthetics of life along and around Highway 41.

Johnson does a dexterous job of moving between the built elements of his paintings and their painted pictorial grid. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t come off as awkward, which it often does, and it can feel a bit contrived. But there was a lot of work on view.

Like the lines of hotels that hide any chance for a glimpse of the sea, the show was knowingly overcrowded, failure presented as the equal of success.

It is worth mentioning that the faded glory depicted here may be fading, as well.

If you detect a note of nostalgia in the work, it’s because another development boom is upon us and the charms of the cut-rate paradise are being replaced with a shiny new architecture of tropical opulence. There is a resemblance to Eddy Arroyo's paintings of Little Haiti's storefronts, but where Arroyo's straightforward work details the cultural toll of development, Johnson is more winking and wry. The flexibility visible in Johnson’s work belies an artist’s survival

skills in a paradise whose semiotic structures are in constant flux.

Snitzer’s attractive assemblages in the front gallery echo the concrete aspects of Johnson’s paintings. His works have an effortless manner that can sometimes make art seem like a little work of magic, as in the floor piece, Homage to Rafa (2015). Made of found materials, mostly painted wood, they benefit from a designer’s eye and a comfortable knowledge of art history.

It’s difficult to imagine the artists weren’t scheduled together so that their aesthetics might compliment one another.

Unfortunately, as a result of their proximity, Snitzer suffers too much from the weight of comparison. Where Johnson’s best work is off-kilter, semantically destabilized, and open to possibility, Snitzer’s comes off as aloof, eschewing messiness and experimentation.

This brings me to Snitzer’s use of an alias. No real ruse seemed intended, as he represented himself in the flesh at the show’s opening reception and Mindy Solomon was almost too eager to share his real identity. But it seemed disingenuous, as it makes one wonder whether Snitzer was embarrassed to be perceived as staging a vanity exhibition at a colleague’s venue.

What might have been an opportunity to play with the performance of an identity, staging the exhibition of an unknown artist, comes off as a timid refusal of ownership. Of course, such a hoax would have been difficult, if not impossible, to maintain in Miami’s small art scene. This just made it seem a little smaller.

Fredric Snitzer, Ten Commandments, 2015. Mixed media on wood, 127 x 134.6 cm

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Gustavo Pérez Monzón: Tramas CISNEROS FONTENALS ART FOUNDATION (CIFO) DECEMBER 2, 2015–MAY 1, 2016

CATHY BYRD In 1989, Cuban artist Gustavo Pérez Monzón abandoned his dynamic creative practice and moved to Mexico. Last year, Cubans rediscovered seventy of his works from the 1980s in a solo exhibition during the 2015 Havana Biennial. Presented first at El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Tramas (Frames) traveled to the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami.

When he made the work featured in Tramas, Pérez Monzón was at his most prolific. The outcome of his mathematical art experiments ranges from temporary spatial interventions made of string, wire, thread, and vinyl to intricate numbered drawings on cardboard, dark-hued Expressionist paintings, and a set of handmade silver tarot cards.

The evidence of process is Conceptualist.

The materials point to arte povera and Minimalism (he names Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Richard Long as influences). The cards are just one example of the artist’s belief in numerology and his love for what he calls a “complex system of meanings that can be articulated from different points of view.”

What’s fascinating for me is that twice in the space of one year, in two distinctive art venues, Pérez Monzón recreated three of the site-specific, labor-intensive installations he’d first realized in Cuba more than twenty years ago. He effectively reunited with his younger self, by reenacting an artistic process in which he was once fully engaged.

My introduction to these works took place in a sweat-drenched crowd, on a stupifyingly hot night during the opening days of the biennial. I especially remember circling the periphery of one installation, gazing through it, and pondering its mysterious physics. That was Vilos (1981/2015), a roomsize constellation of wire and elastic thread, held in place by small gray stones.

In Miami, I revisited the exhibition at CIFO, where the art seems to have more breathing room. Perhaps I got that impression because I was there on a quiet Sunday morning. In any case, the beautiful Vilos has

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Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Vilos, 1981/2015. Photo: Perocles Lavat, courtesy CIFO

definitely expanded up and out, hovering so close to the walls of the gallery that viewers are not permitted to enter.

The site-specific vinyl line drawing Tramas (1989/2015) that spanned a long, free-standing rectangular wall in Havana also grew up when it moved to Miami.

Here, Pérez Monzón has doubled the dimensions of the jagged gray matrix.

Tramas stretches down one wall and around an inside corner near the entrance.

Threads (1984/2015) also seems larger at CIFO, but I’m told that’s an illusion.

In both venues, the artist rendered the same precisely calculated composition of parallel and intersecting lines in crimson thread on a white wall, anchoring each angle with a tiny square of dark red tape.

I can’t help thinking about how the exhibition demonstrates the intrinsic role that collectors play in validating artists and shaping art history. Ella FontanalsCisneros has collected and will preserve a decade of this Cuban artist’s work. The exhibition encapsulates a time in Pérez

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Monzón’s creative life when the freedom to explore was the greatest reward. It’s easy to understand how he became somewhat of a mythical figure in the Cuban art scene. The work transcends the moment in which it was made, standing outside a troubled economy, ignoring a dissipating sense of community, and refusing any doubt as to the value of making art.

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BOOK REVIEWS Steal It Back SANDRA SIMONDS SATURNALIA, 96 PP.

CLA I R E E D E R The protagonist of Sandra Simonds’s fourth collection of poetry, Steal It Back, is Alice, “a minor poet, a ‘mom’ living / at the beginning of the 21st century.” In the vein of characters like John Berryman’s Henry or Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, Alice is a third-person stand-in, a persona who enters when the “I” decides to take a break. The book’s opening poem, “Alice in America,” shows:

Alice climbing on top of a body To forget the wars and bullets There’s Alice with Mutual Fund Waldorf salads and alcohol To ward off the inevitable toward Reading these lines, I thought of Robinson, a persona invented by mid-twentieth-century poet Weldon Kees. In “Aspects of Robinson,” he vacillates between hobnobbing with New York high society (“Robinson at cards at the Algonquin . . . / Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes, / Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down”) and having a depressive breakdown (“Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson / In bed with a Mrs. Morse.

Robinson at home; / Decisions: Toynbee or luminol?”). Kees’s Robinson might as well be the Mutual Fund to Simonds’s Alice: a privileged haunter of hotels and consumer of Waldorf salads. Alice might as well be Robinson’s Mrs. Morse.

The two characters come from totally different worlds, yet both are lost souls, outsiders, critics of the culture.

Though I love Kees, and Robinson, Alice is the more relatable of the personas. Alice’s world is full of debt, McDonald’s coffee, and not enough childcare. Alice has to deal with misogynist Twitter trolls. Steal It Back tells the story

of the Mrs. Morses of the twentyfirst century—women trying to make art with few means and with the odds stacked against them. Just as, in an essay appearing on the Best New American Poetry blog, Simonds revises a paragraph from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet so that it addresses a young unprivileged poet, “Alice in America” functions as a playful yet pointed response to the ubiquity of white male narratives in poetry.

The persona of Alice, though closely tied to Simonds herself, expands beyond the personal and invites readers to consider a certain cultural type, the “minor poet,” the “mom,” as a sympathetic underdog as well as an agent of change.

In addition to several stand-alone poems, Steal It Back contains four long sequences that provide ample space for Simonds’s love of accumulated incongruities, juxtaposing the political (“Today Rick Scott fired all the scientists at water management”) with the personal (“I loved my friend but he loved someone else and I was very pregnant / with another man’s baby”), literature with pop culture (“The dream Dante has of the eagle that swoops / his little body from the Middle Ages and places it / in a burnt-out Best Buy”). The resulting world is absurd,

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drenched in a played-out capitalism.

For example, “The Lake Ella Variations” documents the environmental negligence of governments while the speaker reads T-shirt slogans and browses Barnes and Noble. The series “Steal It Back” titles its sections with treasured works of art and architecture, from a Rembrandt painting to the Hall of Mirrors to the Head of Constantine, while the poem interrogates the speaker’s place in the economy: shopping at Sephora, working in academia, navigating debt. Steal It Back will not let us forget our own complicity in building a soulless society. The juxtaposition of priceless works of art with our shoddy, big-box store culture generates an anger that is the book’s main power.

Simonds’s style is direct, her sentences both sharp-edged and fragile in their rawness. The poems are all free verse; they expand through long lines, which voraciously encompass leaps in subject matter, attempting to fulfill the command of the book’s title. Many poems take on a jagged look on the page, with lines jutting out from the left margin at intervals—a form well suited to Steal It Back’s controlled chaos.

My favorite aspect of the book is its sassy humor, often targeting the “po biz” itself: “Gave poetry book I hate five stars on Goodreads; I am such a liar!” I think I actually snorted with laughter reading these lines: Alice, girl with no belief

system ties knots into a rope

while listening to U2 on

her headphones.

What? Well, not

everyone in a poem can have good taste.

The poems in Steal It Back don’t take themselves too seriously, but, at the same time, there is something touchingly

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tragic about their refusal to own a status as high art. These poems transcend snark through the way they document the challenge of making poetry in a world that refuses to remunerate poets.

In order to write this poem,

I paid daycare $523

for the week. Make sure you premix

the bottles, bring diapers. Make it worth something, this time.

If the poems don’t take themselves seriously, it’s because culture doesn’t, either. Simonds strives to document the material conditions required to survive as an artist, postulating, “If Plath had had a Malibu beach house, / she wouldn’t have killed herself.” Steal It Back is a haunting litany of all that has been denied to women trying to make something in the world.

note to this bilingual edition, “some of them were composed in the backs of classrooms, her hand cupped to hide the marks on the page.” And though Medel has since published two more collections, two chapbooks, and a book of essays, as well as started her own publishing company, these first poems are unique because they

Broken over the rainbow, I discover rain is my only armor.

At night pools form in my shoulder while I count my freckles.

My First Bikini ELENA MEDEL, TRANSLATED BY LIZZIE DAVIS JAI-ALAI BOOKS, 70 PP.

HEATH E R PE TE R SO N Though toddlers can often be seen stomping the beach in little two-pieces, a girl’s first true bikini is a significant milestone.

This style of swimsuit is impractical, an exercise in wedgies, a small amount of material held on by tiny, tied strings.

When women tie on their first bikini, they are sacrificing functionality for form, making a concession to so-called sexiness.

This is an apt metaphor for the experience of being a teenage girl, which Elena Medel was when this collection, Mi Primer Bikini, was originally published in Spain in 2001. I was born the same year as Medel, in 1985, and reading these poems, which won the prestigious Andalucía Joven Prize the year they were published, was an uncomfortable form of time travel.

Medel was sixteen, a high-schooler in Córdoba, when she wrote most of them.

As Lizzie Davis writes in her translator’s

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feeling, a feeling of being both chased and already caught, using animal words.

What Davis translates as “rump” is, in the Spanish, “la grupa”—literally “croup” in English, a word specifically for a horse’s rear end, evoking the feeling that the narrator is not only on display, but under tack, controlled.

These poems are at their best when they play with the tension in dichotomies of the feminine. For instance, the evocation of soft, transparent rain as protection, which fills the speaker’s body’s crevices as she becomes absorbed in inspecting her own skin in this first stanza of “Candy”:

are infused with the emotions and experiences of being a girl at that age, the body ready for that first bikini, and the mind trying to make sense of what that means.

Medel evokes this feeling of being watched and consumed in the collection’s first poem, “I Will Survive.” It begins, “I have an enormous collection of lovers. / They comfort me and adore me and with them my ego / pushes through walls and reaches the rooftop.” She begins with the power of being desired, a sexual swelling of pride, but also, perhaps more interestingly, the comfort she finds in knowing she is wanted, and therefore, of value.

The next lines, however, complicate this: “When I’m with any of them, /or all of them at once, I feel the heavy burden/ of millions of pupils on my rump / and millions of insults hound my ears.” As she steps into her sexuality—pulling on the bikini—she is accepting and using her power while also exposing herself to society’s watchful eyes, to ridicule and judgment. Medel captures this hunted

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Or, this final line of “Bellum Jeans”: “And it’s a luxury to die having skipped breakfast,” which reads like the epitaph for a Hollywood starlet, a tossed-off fuck-you buried in an ode to disordered eating.

“Fishing Day” is another of the collection’s strongest poems. It is more narrative than most of the collection, which is, as in the poem “Habitat,” generally propelled more by the rhythmic engine of sound and voice (“I’m swaddled in fireflies that spill out in faraway places”), punctuated when that engine backfires into an explosion of raw feeling (“My bedroom ceiling is Hollywood. / No one will ever / see me cry in its clitoris of neon”). The poem begins with the narrator, at nine years old, telling a boy she loves him. The boy answers, without looking at her, that he wants a fishing pole. Already a servant to his demands, the narrator weakens herself further, sacrificing her usual comforts—rag dolls, a pretty dress, afternoons watching Knights of the Zodiac—to save up her money so she could buy him the pole for Christmas.

Though the gift pleases the boy, the narrator ends up with the fishing pole, spending afternoons by the river, her dress still dirty, still missing her television show. When she tries to give the pole back, the boy no longer wants it. “Tell me,” she cries, “is my body really a dump?”

He answered

calm down, your lips are the shape of a comet,

I fell asleep satisfied, naked, hugging the fishing pole,

a thread of saliva lingering on my Adam’s apple.

Now, a few years later, the narrator wonders why she is thinking about all this—what has brought the fishing pole back to mind, when she no longer cares about the same things—the pretty dress, Knights of the Zodiac. Older and able to recognize the power in her desirability, she answers her own question:

I think it’s because

I finally managed to turn myself into your hook.

At last, you bite.

All these poems are brave and raw and dangerous—delicate suspension bridges hung over caverns of sexuality, femininity, childhood, and womanhood.

When the poems are strongest, the reader can stand on them and look down into these caverns, seeing clearly where the light hits, guessing at their dark depths.

The weakest of the poems hang from cliff edges that crumble under pressure, too soft and mobile underfoot (“We’ll dive into blades of grass, / painting your ankle

with jam”). Yet even these poems maintain Mendel’s voice, which, at just sixteen, and despite the clear influences of Sylvia Plath and Alejandra Pizarnik—her predecessors in precocity—has its own, discrete music and point of view.

Davis’s translations are always serviceable, and often great, though some choices seem arbitrary. The collection is divided into three sections, originally titled, in English: “Top Less,” “Piercings,” and “Monokini.” In her footnotes, Davis explains that “Top Less” refers to the “common European practice of not wearing the top of the bikini,” and “Monokini” is the “regional term for the bathing suit bottoms that children wear.” Davis’s choice to change them in the translation to “Top,” “Piercing,” and “Bottom” seems unnecessary. It’s true that an English-speaking reader might not immediately understand the references Medel is making, but these section headings were already in English, and could be explained, as they were here, with a footnote.

“Con Las Botas Puestas,” an early poem in the collection, translates to “With His Boots On.” This is a specific idiom in English, a phrase of honor in battle, the dignity of a soldier who “dies with his boots on,” taken in the middle of fighting.

Though the idiom originated among cowboys in the American West, it has entered the Spanish lexicon as “con las botas puestas,” as in the 1985 song of that title

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by the metal band Angeles del Infierno (referring, no doubt, to the Iron Maiden song “Die With Your Boots On”). Rather than translating “Con Las Botas Puestas” to “With His Boots On,” however, Davis chose to translate it to “In His Boots.” Though this phrase has the same meaning, it doesn’t have the same idiomatic associations.

Despite these small arguments, most of the poems are rendered beautifully.

Translation is like lepidoptery: in order to observe a butterfly clearly and accurately, one must catch it, stretch it out, pin it down, while trying to maintain the memory of the living insect’s movements, the way it rides the wind, the things that make it beautiful. Medel’s language is slippery and liquid, and sometimes, in capturing its essence or meaning, certain qualities are, perhaps necessarily, lost.

Many assume the “bi-” in bikini comes from the suit’s two parts, but most likely it refers to Bikini, an atoll in the Marshall Islands where the United States conducted tests of the A-bomb in 1946. The best explanation for this is an analogy drawn between the explosive force of the bomb and the visual impact of the new style. Medel’s poems of female coming-ofage embody this phenomenon, expressing and harnessing the explosive power of female sexuality, while simultaneously evoking its heart-pounding peril.

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Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

On view Feb 18 through June 12, 2016

JOHN MILLER I Stand* I Fall

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