Miami Gardens played host to hundreds of women who gathered in protest of gender inequality and domestic violence, among many other things.
Signs proclaiming everything from “Keep your policies off my body” to “Use your voice” were on display at Saturday’s fourth annual Women’s March Miami March and Rally. Ending with a rally at the Betty T. Ferguson Recreational Complex, the event corresponded with dozens of similar demonstrations held across the country. “We are committed to dismantling systems of oppression through nonviolent resistance, direct lobbying, policy advocacy and the building of inclusive structures guided by self determination and respect,” read the Eventbrite description.
Women of all ages, identities and shades marched in solidarity with this mission, with various chants providing a soundtrack to their steps. Speakers at the rally included State Rep. Dotie Joseph, civil rights attorney Melba Pearson and transgender activist Brielle Roundtree.
“Women have to step up and get involved, and that’s one of the remarkable things that the Women’s Marches have done. We have to build continually on this momentum and this movement,” event speaker and activist Candii Reid told the South Florida Media Network.
Nearly 1 million people turned out to the first Women’s March held in Washington D.C. the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. That single event spawned similar rallies in New York City, Denver and numerous other cities.
Saturday’s march in Washington drew “several thousands” of supporters, while hundreds attended Manhattan’s gathering, according to The Associated Press.
Marching, however, was only a small portion of Women’s March Miami’s plan. The organization also plans to host a rally in Tallahassee on Jan. 22 to fight “against legislation that aims to strip us of our body autonomy and dignity,” the event description reads.
C. Isaiah Smalls II is a reporter covering breaking and trending news for the Miami Herald. Previously, he worked for ESPN’s The Undefeated as part of their inaugural class of Rhoden Fellows. He is a graduate of both Columbia University and Morehouse College.
Hundreds of people attended the Women’s March Miami and Rally at Miami Gardens on Saturday. The event drew a diverse crowd, spanning a wide range of ages and races. Transgender activist and speaker Brielle Roundtree, who led the rally portion of the march alongside activist Candii Reid, appreciated the unity of people at the event. “All different ages, all different backgrounds, all different struggles, but the unity that was provided here today, like the love and support, you could feel that,” she said.
Attendees advocated for a number of issues like equal rights, police brutality, immigration and domestic violence. Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, a local artist, marched with a “cunt quilt” draped over her back in honor of her friend, who recently died as a result of a domestic violence dispute. The image on her quilt references an image by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. “The women in our country have been under attack, for certainly as long as I’ve been alive and much longer that,” Meyer said. “So, we need to look at these larger structures and cycles of oppression”. Meyer began her quilt project after the 2016 presidential election. She collects worn out women’s underwear that are sent to her via the postal service. Feminists then sew the underwear into the quilt at gatherings Meyer calls “stitches and bitches.” “I’m really interested in the ways in which we can ask questions within our community, that are difficult and critical,” she said.
While marches in other large cities like New York drew out thousands of people, the crowd at the Miami march fell in the hundreds. “We knew it wasn’t going to be a massive thing,” said Carrie Feit, president of the Women’s March Miami.
Feit said their focus was to make the event more inclusive.“None of us are free until all of us are free and that’s what we really tried to convey today,” she said. In the past, the Women’s March as a whole has been criticized for centering on white women. “I think we’ve tried really hard to decenter whiteness,” Feit said. That’s part of the reason the event was held in Miami Gardens. “We intentionally choose Miami Gardens which is a largely black, working-class community,” she said. “And because they’re kind of an invisibalized community.” In addition, Feit said almost all of the speakers were women of color. While Roundtree believes the sort of diversity that was present at the Miami march is a step in the right direction, she added that there is still more work to be done. “Last year I wasn’t invited to the women’s march but this year I’m here so change is happening,” she said. “The important thing is we have a start.”
A sunny afternoon in Miami Gardens, more than a hundred protesters gathered for the Women’s March Miami 2020 where speakers from the diaspora lead a forum on a range of topics including criminal justice system reform, LGBTQ+ visibility, period justice, education and the road to democratic victory this Fall. Cunt Quilt (Silueta) was born on protester’s backs as demonstrators walked from the Betty Ferguson Complex past the Miami Dolphins football stadium.
Following a case of pneumonia, plans for an NYC Women’s March protest performance with the Cunt Quilt were cut short and instead the quilt appeared at the Women’s March Miami the same day as nation-wide protests gathered thousands of protesters.
Honoring our sister protester Jasmine Schutt who recently lost her life to domestic violence, the Cunt Congress protest culminated in a moment of silence after a short prayer for Jasmine after the march ended. Jasmine was victim to a violent assault and rape days before the Women’s March LA 2019, for which she lost her battle with the criminal justice system to prosecute the perpetrator; as well as her subsequent struggles with an abusive domestic partner. Despite her trained efforts to leave her own cycles of violence, Jasmine lost her life less than a year after the rape. During her vivacious life, Jasmine restored confidence in her feminist community not only with her brilliant styling skills, but with her volunteer work identifying and helping domestic violence survivors in the beauty industry exit abusive living situations.
Artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer and Andrea Preston carrying the Cunt Quilt (Silueta) at the Women’s March Miami January 18, 2020 in honor of recently fallen Cunt Quilt sister Jasmine Schutt. Days after surviving a rape and battery, fellow Cunt Quilt protester Jasmine Schutt bravely marched at the 2019 Women’s March Los Angeles carrying the Cunt Quilt (Silueta) created at a Stitch n Bitch honoring domestic violence survivors. Jasmine Schutt exhausted, photographed by Coralina Rodriguez Meyer after the Women’s March Los Angeles 2019 with her #MeToo protest sign as subtext to her bruised eye resulting from a violent rape.
Be a SuperHeroine by carrying the Cunt Quilt @ Women’s March 2020 EVENTBRITE
Performing our citizenship as an intersectional feminist movement, our super heroes will carry several Cunt Quilts at the Women’s March 2020 demonstration in Foley Square. Waving the official flags from the City of Today for Feminine Urbanism, we will kick off our Fourth year of protesting, creating and accounting for our governing bodies. Help us build a culture of consent with your dissenting bravery. We will bear Queen sized bed-sheets with quilted, worn out women’s underwear, on our backs to air our nation’s dirty laundry in this historic Whitehouse cleanse.
HONORING OUR HEROINES Come dressed as your favorite feminist historical figure or embody a new one. Our superheroines will be our astrological signs for a new decade dominated by femmes. Dolores Huerta, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisholm, Margaret Sanger and other ionic freedom fighters will be honored during our performance. We dedicate this march to recently fallen Shero, Jasmine who was a victim of femicide who spent the last year of her life transcending a toxic cycle of violence and rape. She was a fellow Cunt Quilt performer at Women’s March LA 2019.
ABOUT CUNT QUILT After the 2016 election, the artist began a national Underwear Audit to collect worn out women’s underwear through the US postal service, to sew onto Queen sized bed sheets at Stitch n Bitch craft salons. The Cunt Quilt is born on protesters backs at demonstrations as evidence of an intersectional feminist movement. Participants of all genders celebrate the political heritage of women’s work such as Arpilleras Desaparecidos, Railroad Codes, and Concentration Quilts by skill-sharing, self-caring and identity building at Stitch n Bitches. Participants will create, converse and stitch an image exploring a theme central to their community in a democratic, crowd-sourced fashion. Collaborating with a non-profit expert working in the field, the artist and participants will engage in factual and personal depth as well as image-based, critical dialog about timely topics. The most recent Cunt Quilt was created at Stitch n Bitch Gap$, and hosted by Bronx Museum Block Gallery in Soho with a representative from Democracy at Work Institute leading a discussion about closing the wage gap. A performance of citizenship in three acts; the Underwear Audit accounts for our bodies, the Stitch n Bitch builds solidarity, and the Cunt Quilt holds our governing bodies accountable. The endurance project will continue until there is a woman in the White House.
MEET @ 1030am Saturday 1/18 Cafe Lafayette 80 Lafayette St #1, New York, NY 10013 bw White and Franklin St https://goo.gl/maps/DgkcoVyN35MyMAXH8 We will walk a few blocks to Foley Square to begin the march at 11am
Q1 Stitch n Bitch (Melt) on Wednesday, January 15, 2019 will create the next Cunt Quilt addressing Environmental Justice in downtown Brooklyn.
Q1 Stitch n Bitch (Melt) will create an Enviornmental Justice Cunt Quilt for the upcoming Women’s March 2020. Wildfires rage in Australia killing millions of flora and fauna, as well as an increasing human death toll. Following the recent UN Climate Change Summit (COP25), quilters will democratically create a crowd sourced image to address questions on Climate Crisis & Denial, Environmental Justice and Energy Independence with local environmental advocates and feminists in Brooklyn, NY. Cohost artists Elaine Angelopoulos and Coralina Rodriguez Meyer will lead a discussion with ecologists, urban designers and eco-feminists to explore ways to improve environmental conditions for our vulnerable, global community.
STITCH n BITCH After the 2016 election, the artist began a national Underwear Audit to collect worn out women’s underwear through the US postal service, to sew onto Queen sized bed sheets at Stitch n Bitch craft salons. The Cunt Quilt is born on protesters backs at demonstrations as evidence of an intersectional feminist movement. Participants of all genders and skill levels celebrate the political heritage of women’s work such as Arpilleras Desaparecidos, Railroad Codes, and Concentration Quilts by skill-sharing, self-caring and identity building at Stitch n Bitches. Participants will create, converse and pin-down an image exploring a theme central to their community in a democratic, crowd-sourced fashion. Collaborating with a non-profit expert working in the field, the artist and participants will engage in factual and personal depth as well as image-based, critical dialog about timely topics. The most recent Cunt Quilt was created at Stitch n Bitch Gap$, and hosted by Bronx Museum Block Gallery in SoHo with a representative from Democracy at Work Institute leading a discussion about closing the wage gap. A performance of citizenship in three acts; the Underwear Audit accounts for our bodies, the Stitch n Bitch builds solidarity, and the Cunt Quilt holds our governing bodies accountable. The endurance project will continue until there is a woman in the White House. EVENTBRITE
VENUE Graciously hosted by Elaine Angelopoulos, Stitch n Bitch (Melt) will be located in her studio in downtown Brooklyn.
87 3rd Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11217 (2nd Floor, middle studio) bw Dean and Bergen St / Subway to Atlantic Avenue CALL for ENTRY 305-742-7054 or 646-491-1252
COLLABORATORS
Elaine Angelopoulos is a Brooklyn based artist, activist and member of WAC Womans Action Coalition whose interventions with Act-UP NY, The Lesbian Avengers, ILGO, and WHAM since 1991 have transformed public space and institutional critique. Her work bridges the studio to audience participation, installations and performances. Coralina and Elaine met on a building ethical communities #MeToo panel at Pratt. http://elaineangelopoulos.com/
Betsy Damon is an international water artist with a focus on ecological works. She founded Keepers of the Waters, a nonprofit organization that serves as an international community to encourage “art, science and community projects for the understanding and remediation of living water systems”. Her work has been commissioned by UNESCO, the Women’s Caucus for Art and is featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.keepersofthewaters.org/
Jennifer Bolstad is an urban designer, educator and community organizer. She is the founder of Solar Libre, a grassroots initiative to bring solar energy and green jobs to Puerto Rico by decolonizing the grid. Her Brooklyn based landscape architecture and urban design firm provides sustainable and resilient design for city and sea. http://coastalmarine.orghttp://www.localofficelandscape.com/
Art Forum announces artists awarded grant funding from Oolite Arts for community projects in Miami. Artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer Mother Mold project receives grant for a pilot program to improve maternal health outcomes in low income communities of color. After experiencing increased risks during her pregnancy and labor, the artist was shocked by the alarming rate of injury and death amongst women of color in Miami as compared to the white population. She is launching the Mother Mold project including a series of prenatal workshops called Mama Spa to build birthing confidence for first time mothers. The workshops combine community care resources and skill building with documentary sculpture and photography. Healthcare workers such as Doulas, Nurses, OBGYN, nutritionists and Birth Justice activists will collaborate with expecting parents and community members to skillshare and create sculptures that capture the birth experience by, of and for the procreative community.
Oolite Arts, the Miami Beach–based arts organization formerly known as ArtCenter/South Florida, revealed tonight the winners of the Ellies, Miami’s Visual Arts Awards. A total of $500,000 will be divided among forty-five local artists who will use the funding to stage large-scale exhibitions, create public installations, host workshops, produce documentaries, build sound machines, and write cultural criticism.
“Ambitious and innovative, these projects show the depth in Miami’s visual arts community, and the talent that has helped to define this city,” said Oolite Arts president and CEO Dennis Scholl. “Oolite Arts was created to ‘help artists help themselves,’ as our founder Ellie Schneiderman likes to say. This funding helps their ideas, and careers, take flight.”
The Ellies are divided into three categories: The Creator Award, which offers project grants ranging from $2,000 to $25,000 to realize a visual arts project; $5,000 Teacher Travel Grants, which enable art educators to experience another city or country in order to enrich their teachings in the classroom; and the $75,000 Michael Richards Award, which honors an artist who is “achieving the highest levels of professional distinction in the visual arts through their practice.”
This year’s Michael Richards Award, which is named after an artist who was killed in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, was given to Karen Rifas. The Chicago-born artist draws from architecture and minimalism to create paintings and sculptural forms that play with geometric shapes and one’s percption of space. In addition to the $75,000 prize, she will receive a commission from Oolite Arts that will be exhibited at the Bass.
Upon receiving the award, Rifas said: “This is an honor for the whole community. It’s the story of my being able to succeed as an artist here, to be educated here, work here, make art here, and teach many of the people who are working artists in Miami today.”
The full list of awardees is as follows:
Creator Award Winners Aja Monet Bacquie Germane Barnes Cristine Brache Liene Bosquê Neil Brideau Otari Oliva Buadze Linda Chamorro Clifton Childree Yanira Collado Rose Marie Cromwell CYJO Dana De Greff Morel Doucet Marcelo Ertorteguy Liz Ferrer Torrance Gettrell A.G. Gaspar González Brookhart Jonquil Carl Juste David McCauley Juan Ledesma T. Eliott Mansa Yucef Merhi Coralina Rodriguez Meyer Emmett Moore Ernesto Oroza Christina Pettersson Terence Price II Maria Corina Ramirez Martha Raoli Freddy Rodriguez Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova Gabriela Serra Frances Trombly Tom Virgin Federico Uribe Agustina Woodgate Octavia Yearwood
Teacher Travel Grants Winners Elysa D. Batista Johnnie Bess Jennifer Gifford Mary Larsen Maggie Vidal-Santos
First year graduate students exhibited their work for critique in the Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design gallery at Florida International University on July 24, 2019 as a final review for a conceptual drawing seminar taught by Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. The exhibition of over 30 students work (mostly triptychs) combines media in 100 drawings created in response to a historic sight in Miami with political and personal architectural significance.
Ranging from Calle 8 to the Freedom Tower and many locations encompassing the mostly immigrant identity of the student body and the city at large, the drawings capture a diverse and intersectional architecture.
On Friday, September 13, over 100 artists presented work for Collabo 6 All In, a one-night show presented in downtown Miami. Hundreds of attendees traversed a now-defunct three-story Payless shoe store on Flagler Avenue in conjunction with the Mana Contemporary at the 777 Mall next door. The show represented a selection of Miami artists working in varied mediums and was curated by Justin Long. Photography by Monica McGivern
American Idol Coralina Rodriguez Meyer & Matthew Thomas 2019 Interactive video sculpture Installation activated by audience participation in piñata massacre 14’x9’x7’
Welfare Queen & Super Predator Piñatas: Spray paint, braided rope (white Oxford shirts), zip tie handcuffs, police baton, broomstick, graffiti, cast newsprint, gold paint Traumas & Treasures: brass ammunition shells, 99¢ store candy, tampons, condoms, cigarettes, cocoa butter, lube, glowsticks, Black-n-Milds, potato chips, CupONoodles, bath toys, plastic crown, Koolaid, glitter, lipstick, acrylic nails, pacifiers, fake flowers, crayons Video Loop: digital video collage of body parts, choreographed violence performance by artists, drawings from Love, Sex and Drunk Texts
Matthew Thomas and Coralina Rodriguez Meyer have been comrades since they were painters at Maryland Institute College of Art together in 2001. American Idol is their first collaborative project.
Matthew Thomas is a painter and filmmaker based in Memphis, TN. After completing his BFA in studio art at Maryland Institute College of Art, he held residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and received grants from NYFA, HTC, Canon and RedBull Studios. His professional film work with Ridley Scott and Elevation filmworks has been awarded internationally and featured on HBO, Fox, ESPN, Food Network and Aspire. Matthew’s personal, narrative short film “That Day” was awarded at Sundance, Canon Creators Festival and Starz Independent Film Festival. Matthew’s artwork has been exhibited at Kentler International Drawing Center, Memphis College of Art and Canon Creators Tokyo as well as appearances on Steve McQueen’s films, The Exorcist and Empire on Fox. Matthew’s most recent illustrated novel “Love, Sex and Drunk Texts” is a vulnerable biopic mining the treasures and traumas of Reaganomics in the rural South. It was featured in Huffington Post and is currently exhibited at Ross Gallery in Memphis.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a Colombian-American, Brooklyn and Miami based artist who translates structural violence into minority heirlooms. Raised queer between the rural U.S. South and the Caribbean; Coralina mends her indigenous, mixed-race, Latinx identity into satirical booby-traps. She performs citizenship by engaging viewers to build their humorous, hysteric future from a minority GPS. Her City of Today for Feminine Urbanism (Femilia) project was founded in 2009 to build intimate solutions for urban scale problems. Her background in architecture and urban design informs her research in American Mythology. Recent works reclaim the didactic as a site for political discourse- in the form of IUD/IEDs scaled to the Statue of Liberty’s uterus; Building Tampons in S (Liberty), M (Chrysler), L (Empire State), XL (WTC) absorbency, and suburban Uterine Cul de Sacs with fallopian tube poolside lounges. Her recent Cunt Quilt project transforms discarded underwear into city flags at intersectional protests. Coralina studied painting at MICA and completed her architecture BFA at Parsons The New School (2004), and studio art MFA at Hunter College CUNY (2013). She completed fellowships at el Museo del Sitio Peru, SU Florence, Italy and the UDK Berlin to study Nazi utopian urban design with Hito Steyerl. She has been a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. Coralina received awards from VSA Arts, the Kennedy Center, NYFA, Scholastics and Young Arts. She has been featured in the NY Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Paper Magazine, Univision, Nylon Magazine and Jezebel. Coralina’s work has been exhibited at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Smithsonian Museum International Gallery, Miami University Museum, Kunstlerhaus Brethanien Berlin, NYU Kimmel Center, Bitforms, Andrew Edlin, AIR gallery, KMAC Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Back to the Futureis a provocative evening of performance art on Saturday 9/15/19 7-9pm curated by Matti Havens including: Marie Christine Katz, Felix Morelo, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Susannah Simpson, Joseph Sledgianowski, Furusho von Puttmakker
The performance artists in Back to the Future aim to inspire thought and discourse and encourage the debate about new ways forward, ones that are progressive, inclusive and frequently surprising. They construct new visions of what may lie ahead and examine how our current technology and political ideas will affect our future. This diverse group of artists seeks to present ideas outside of the existing capitalistic and patriarchal systems that dominate the world today. They also seek to examine our chaotic present in order to envision a diverse future. These key ideas are addressed with drama, humor, satire and metaphor and allow the viewers time to contemplate the challenging ideas presented.
The cumulative affect of the artists’ perspectives and experiences form a multi-faceted idea of our collective future. A discussion of our current administration’s anti-immigrant stance and the repercussions of climate change form the core of Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s deadpan and subversive presentation. Susannah Simpson explores the future of embodiment as relates to the growing, changing Earth, social consciousness, destruction, multiplicious revolution, technology, the future of love, and the future of sex. Concern about our collective future is a common theme that most of the performers address. Marie Christine Katz’ performance is based on sentiments shared by participants during public actions that began on the first day of the new administration. Felix Morelo confronts viewers with both performance and ephemeral chalk drawings on the street to express our hopes and anxieties for the future. Furusho von Puttkammer, as her alter-ego Anchovy, manifests our feelings of frustration through a distinct and concrete performance. Joseph Sledgianowski onsets our contemplation of these emotions and concepts with a deep and introspective distortion of time and perspective with an abstract sound performance. The accumulation of the varied approaches to performance and the broad scope of ideas presented by these adventurous artists makes for a thoroughly provocative investigation of the troubled times to come. – Matti Wim Havens
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s City of Today for Feminine Urbanism (Femilia) performances are satirical reenactments of patriarchal, urban design allegory and structural erection. During the Back to the Future program, her Ethnic Ethics performance (in the form of an investment pitch proposal) will imagine a dystopian, historic fiction where children’s concentration camps are immigrant purification superstores, Poststructuralism reads as a border-crossing Palimpsest and participants can escape rising seas in weightless cities. Previous Investment Pitch Proposals imagined the City of Today for Feminine Urbanism as a 1:100,000 scale model of a woman’s body as chocolate cake to be divided and conquered by participants in the vein of Hitler’s division of the Baltic region in geographic black forest cake. Over the past decade, the City of Today for Feminine Urbanism has been performed in bank vaults, conference rooms, vacant construction sites, city parks and on the streets to reclaim the didactic as sites for political critique.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a Andino-American, Brooklyn and Miami based artist who translates structural violence into minority heirlooms. Raised queer between the rural South and Caribbean; Coralina mends her indigenous, mixed-race, Latinx identity into suffragist masterplans. Coralina’s background in urban design and architecture informs her work. Her research based practice manifests in sculptural, digital, performance and social practice forms. She performs her citizenship by engaging viewers to builsd their humorous, hysteric future from a minority GPS. She began building the City of Today for Feminine Urbanism (Femilia) in 2009 to propose intimate solutions for urban scale problems. Her works are made in the lineage of her Andina ancestors as navigational tools to survive American Mythology. Manifestations of her sculptural work include IUD/IEDs scaled to the Statue of Liberty’s uterus; Building Tampons in S (Liberty), M (Chrysler), L (Empire State), XL (WTC) absorbency, and suburban Uterine Cul de Sacs with fallopian tube poolside lounges. Her most recent Cunt Quilt project transforms worn out women’s underwear into city flags at intersectional protests.
Coralina studied painting at Maryland Institute College of Art and completed her architecture BFA at Parsons The New School (2004), and Combined Media MFA at Hunter College CUNY (2013). Coralina held fellowships at the Artist’s Institute NY, SU Florence Italy and the UDK Berlin to study Nazi utopian urban design with Hito Steyerl and Gregor Schnieder. In 2012 she researched her Inca heritage at the Museo de Sitio Machu Picchu fellowship, to create works connecting the Quipu social structures to North American iconography. She has been a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. Coralina received awards from VSA Arts, the Kennedy Center, NYFA, Scholastics and Young Arts. She has been featured in the NY Times, the Guardian, London Review of Books, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Paper Magazine, Univision, Nylon Magazine and Jezebel. Coralina’s work has been exhibited at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Miami Art Museum, the Smithsonian Museum International Gallery, Miami University Museum, Kunstlerhaus Brethanien Berlin, NYU Kimmel Center, Bitforms, Andrew Edlin, AIR gallery, KMAC Museum and the Corcoran.
