Lenguas Espinas Descolumnas AIM Biennial solo show 12.1.2023 – 1.4.2024

Lenguas Espinas Descolumnas I Spiny Spineless Tongues
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer solo show of Mother Mold monuments from Mama Spa Botanica
AIM Biennial @ Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum

3225 NW 8th Ave Allapattah Miami FL 33127
Reception Fri Dec 8 2023 11am – 2pm
On view December 1 2023 – January 4 2024

Nesting voyeurs within a verdant Foliage Obscura retablo from artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s multidisciplinary Mama Spa Botanica collaborative project (2007-present), Lenguas Espinas Descolumnas reflects the neon rituals, fertile flora, vulnerable fauna and endangered activists vibrating in Queer, Latinx and Caribbean diaspora immigrant communities in America. A tropical sanctuary installation of Mother Mold monuments at the Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum in Allapattah Miami FL for AIM Biennial and Linea Negra photographs at Prizm Art Fair during Miami Art Week 2023, illuminates full spectrum cultural care from Indigenous American mummification rituals from the Andes to Caribbean fertility effigies of the Caribbean preserved by Miami matriarchs.
The Mama Spa Botanica documents in Mother Mold sculpture, Linea Negra photography and immersive Foliage Obscura retablos, conflicting reproductive health and climate crisis in America where LGBTQIA+BIPOC pregnant people are dying at 10x the rate of white women birthing in Miami hospitals. Fertility effigies are monuments to survivors made by, of and for diasporic families in agency building workshops lead by matriarchs, doulas, historians, herbalists, midwives, griots, quipucamayocs, educators, archivists, advocates & environmental activists. The Mama Spa Botanica workshop builds civic agency, restores dignity to under-resourced yet unvanquished colorful communities in a co-creative photography and pregnancy casting process. Transgressing violent American statutes and deadly statistics with vibrant fertility effigy statues; the works critique structural violence in American mythology while celebrating ancestral life cycle traditions that preserve and restore social habitats to historically redlined communities hovering above tidelines.
Artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s social justice practice in collaboration with full spectrum Doula/Griot Nicky Dawkins (Menstrual Market, Period Miami, Southern Birth Justice Network) delivers lifesaving reproductive healthcare and matriarchal interdependence strategies through cultural advocacy and direct-action community organizing on the front lines of democratic fertility in America. Linea Negra photographs are on view at Prizm Art Fair at Omni Building 1501 Biscayne Boulevard Miami and Mother Mold monuments are on view at Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum
3225 NW 8 ave Allapattah Miami Dec 5-10 2023 10am – 5pm during Miami Art Week.

AIM BIENNIAL MIAMI 2023-24
“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” ― Paulo Freire
The 2023 A.I.M. Biennial, returns during Miami Art Week 2023 and will feature 56 site-specific installations throughout South Florida, created by diverse group of visual artists, dancers, activists, and performers. Organized by william cordova, Marie Vickles, Gean Moreno, Amy Rosenblum-Martin; the A.I.M. Biennial is an alternative to more mainstream commercial ventures. The mission of A.I.M is to disrupt and realize different ways of perceiving how art can be realized and function in public places through independent channels of distribution. The A.I.M. Biennial is a conceptual program promoting outdoor ephemeral, virtual, and physical art projects by cultural practitioners based and affiliated with the state of Florida. The A.I.M. Biennial proposes a democratic platform and outlet for artists and public that mediates on current themes addressing, ecology, migration, economy, race, violence, survival, healing, closure, and transcendence. Participants created temporary installations, performance, or documentation of existing three-dimensional work that relates to the A.I.M. Biennial concept. Physical address location and maps invite the public to seek and experience each piece through out South Florida and partnered cities, States and Countries. The A.I.M. Biennial was founded by cultural practitioner, william cordova and initially developed with artists/curators, Gean Moreno, Marie Vickles and Amy Rosenblum-Martin. The A.I.M. Biennial is sponsored by the organizers and generously supported by The MIA (Miami Individual Artists) Grants Program. Our goal is to creatively channel collective concerns and ideas utilizing practical and resourceful methods to realizing works that provide greater artistic agency between artists and community.
Locations: Homestead, Dade, Broward, Palm Beach Counties, Miccosukee, Seminole Indian Reservations, Gainesville, FL. Satellite Locations: Georgia, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Cuba, France, Pensilvania. Ayti, China, Nigeria, San Diego, Mexico, Chicago, IL.
http://www.aimbiennial.org

AIM Participants 2023-24

Aida Tejada Alejandro Valencia André Leon Gray Arturo E. Mosquera Carol Pereira-Olson Carol Todaro Carolina Cueva Charles Humes Jr. VantaBlack (Chire Reagans) Chris Friday Coralina Rodriguez Meyer Corinne Stevie Cynthia Cruz Dinizulu Gene Tinnie Ernesto Oroza Eugenia Vargas-Pereira Gonzalo Hernandez Herve Sabin Aka GAALO Jean Chiang Jessica Gispert Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow John William Bailly José Garcia Julio Mitjans Kandy G. Lopez Karen & Harold Rifas Kayla Delacerda Kayla Henriquez Kevin Arrow Liliam Dooley Loni Johnson lou anne colony Marcos Valella Marisa Telleria Michael Loveland Michelle Grant-Murray Michiko Kurisu N. Masani Landfair Najja Moon Nathaniel Donnett Nicole Combeau Nyugen E. Smith Onajide Shabaka Patrick De Castro Phillip Karp Priscilla Aleman Rachel Eng Rose Marie Cromwell Sonia Baez-Hernandez Sophia Lacroix Sue Montoya Tara Chadwick T. Wheeler Castillo Voices of the River of Grass Warren Bailey Yanira Collado

ARTIST BIO
Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, and raised Tinkuy (queer) between a rural US Southern immigrant neighborhood and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race indigenous Andinx (Colombian Muisca/Peruvian Inca), Brooklyn and Miami-based Quipucamayoc artist, architect, activist. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, Coralina has collaborated with reproductive justice and climate leaders working across disciplines including architecture, activism, archives, education, documentary sculpture and moving images. She studied painting at MICA and anthropology at Hopkins and holds a BFA in Architecture from Parsons and MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College. Rodriguez Meyer received awards from National Latino Arts & Culture, Oolite Arts, VSArts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA, South Arts, Miami Dade, and Young Arts. They have been a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. She was a research fellow at Museo Machu Picchu Peru, Syracuse University Florence, Artist’s Institute NYC and Universitat Der Kunst Berlin studying Nazi Utopian urban design with Hito Steyerl. Coralina taught architecture and urban design at Florida International University prior to completing a recent artist & scholar in residence program at Miami Dade College where her work in the University of Miami Kislak Americas collection culminated in her 2023 Voladores solo show at MDC Koubek Memorial Center. Rodriguez Meyer has exhibited at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, Smithsonian Museum, Kunsthaus Brethanien Berlin, Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum, CAC New Orleans, and Bronx River Art Center among others. Coralina’s current Mother Molds solo show at University of Maryland (Sept 13- Dec 8 2023) combines 2 decades of her Mother Mold monuments, Linea Negra photographs & Foliage Obscura paintings from the Mama Spa Botanica with 2 centuries of African Effigy Figures from the Jackson collection archives.

HOST PARTNER
The Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum includes a collection of Spanish Colonial art featuring works from throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean, particularly the art centers of Cusco, greater Peru and of Mexico City, and Europe during the Colonial Period. A significant portion of the William Morgenstern Estate collection was gifted to the museum recently. Dating from the pre-hispanic period in the Americas, as well as late 16th to the early 19th century paintings and sculpture express the unique heritage of Latin America with an. Often Baroque aesthetic. The art installed at La Merced Chapel is complemented by the Chapel’s hand-carved architecture and 23.5 karat gold-leaf decoration, applied by master Cuban artisans on site. The wide-ranging collections at La Casa include: Colonial and European Paintings, Icons, Engravings and Sculpture along with a research library of original books related to the social and political history of Florida, the islands and the Americas. Uniquely situated in the Allapattah neighdorhood of Miami on site of the Catholic Archdioses, the museum encompasses works from waves of families who call Miami home. The collection includes documents and memorabilia related to Cuba from its beginnings through Independence original documents and manuscripts such as a 1492 letter from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, memorabilia related to the Spanish American War and the relationships between the United States and the Philippines. Polymitas, Machetes, the lost art of tobacco: engravings, posters, prints, tools of the Cuban revolution are a view into the complex story of Miami’s heirlooms. Accesible by appointment are also original maps including the newly-discovered New World. Decorative Arts: silver, porcelain, furniture, tapestries, religious vestments made or used in the Americas, from XVII to XX century. The Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum collection is directed by Ray Zamora. Contact RRGZamora@aol.com 305-
303-5855 to schedule an appointment. https://www.corpuschristimiami.org/culturalcenter

ORGANIZER
The AIM Biennial The 2023 A.I.M. Biennial, returns during Miami Art Week 2023 and will feature 56 site-specific installations throughout South Florida, created by diverse group of visual artists, dancers, activists, and performers. The A.I.M. Biennial is an alternative to more mainstream commercial ventures. The mission of A.I.M is to disrupt and realize
different ways of perceiving how art can be realized and function in public places through independent channels of distribution. The A.I.M. Biennial is a conceptual program promoting outdoor ephemeral, virtual, and physical art projects by cultural practitioners based and affiliated with the state of Florida. The A.I.M. Biennial proposes a democratic platform and outlet for artists and public that mediates on current themes addressing, ecology, migration, economy, race, violence, survival, healing, closure,and transcendence. Participants created temporary installations, performance, or documentation of existing three-dimensional work that relates to the A.I.M. Biennial concept. Physical address location and maps invite the public to seek and experience each piece through out South Florida and partnered cities, States and Countries. The A.I.M. Biennial was founded by cultural practitioner, william cordova and initially developed with artists/curators, Gean Moreno, Marie Vickles and Amy Rosenblum-Martin.The A.I.M. Biennial is sponsored by the organizers and generously supported by The MIA (Miami Individual Artists) Grants Program. Our goal is to creatively channel collective concerns and ideas utilizing practical and resourceful methods to realizing works that provide greater artistic agency between artists and community. AIM Biennial is curated by william cordova (founder, cultural practitioner, NY/Miami); Marie Vickles (Senior Director of Education, Pérez Art Museum Miami / Curator-in-Residence, Little Haiti Cultural Center); Gean Moreno (Director, Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami). Amy Rosenblum-Martin (Independent Curator and Guggenheim Museum Education Staff). http://aimbiennial.org/

Art News features AIM Biennial 12.04.2023

5 Shows to See in Miami During Art Basel Miami Beach

BY CAROLINA ANA DRAKEPlus Icon

December 4, 2023 8:30am

Cornelius Tulloch, visual mockup for Poetics of Place (2023) installation at Locust Projects.COURTESY THE ARTIST

As the latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach touches down in South Florida this week, local galleries and artist-run spaces have put on a visual feast across Miami, claiming their space as a self-standing arts ecosystem and beacon in its own right. These shows are unique to Miami, ranging from major showcases for Caribbean, Latinx, and Black artists to exhibitions on some of the city’s most pressing issues like rising real estate prices and climate gentrification crisis. Some of these local gems are on the mainland, and further away from Miami Beach, so less traffic is guaranteed.

Here is a brief glimpse of five of the city’s most exciting local shows to see during Art Basel Miami Beach, as well as several honorable mentions.

“Making Miami” in Design District

Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares, Patria y Vida, 2022, part of “Making Miami” sculpture garden.

Photo : Courtesy the artists and Spinello Projects

There continues to be an outsider narrative about Miami’s art history beginning when Art Basel first arrived in 2002. Part exhibition, permanent digital archive, and book, “Making Miami,” curated by Katerina Llanes and produced by Vivek Jayaram, aims to challenge this narrative. Some of Miami’s longest-running nonprofit spaces date back to the 1980s and ’90s: Locust Projects, Dimensions Variable, Bass Fisher Invitational, and Diaspora Vibe have long showcased the artists who made Miami’s arts community and helped shaped the city. Focusing on the period between 1996 and 2012, and featuring some 50 Miami-based artists, the exhibition, has five distinct parts in a 20,000-square-foot lot in the heart of the Design District. 

Artists have re-created and rebuilt 4 of these artist-run or nonprofit gallery spaces that are still standing strong. Each gallery will curate their own shows of Miami artists from a specific era. An outdoor sculpture garden will feature large works by artists such as Jen Stark, Friends With You, and Daniel Arsham’s Snarkitecture. The accompanying book contains about 90 conversations with artists, curators, gallery owners, collectors, and others who were active during that period. 

December 6–December 26, in Miami’s Design District, at 75 NE 39th St, Miami. 

“Bridge Deconstruction Site” at The Wolfsonian–FIU

Loni Johnson, 5:31 Sundown Procession (performance still), at the Wolfsonian-FIU, as part of “Bridge Deconstruction Site.”

Photo : Photo Diana Larrea

Jim Crow–era zoning laws once divided Miami, and Black people could only access Miami Beach to work but had to leave by nightfall. Multidisciplinary artist Loni Johnson, who was born and raised in Miami, sees her work as creating space for self-realization and dialogue that honors Black women and ancestors through rituals, silence, beauty, and song. Her performance, 5:31 Sundown Procession, honored a century of Black service workers who passed through Miami Beach, never being able to claim that space as their own. The gathering on December 1 met at the beach and processed into the the Wolfsonian’s Bridge Tender House building, where Johnson activated a high-spirited altar, followed by a panel. 5:31 Sundown Procession is part of an ongoing series of projects titled “Bridge Deconstruction Site,” organized by Department of Reflection, a Miami artist collective that creates art in public spaces founded by Misael Soto.

Through February 4, 2024, at The Wolfsonian–FIU, 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach.

“Reginald O’Neal: And I Think to Myself” at Spinello Projects

Reginald O’Neal The Entertainer, 2022.

Photo : Courtesy the artist and Spinello Projects

Miami-based painter Reginald O’Neal’s solo show at Spinello Projects comes hand in hand with his participation in ABMB’s Meridians section, for larger-scaled projects. Growing up in Overtown, Miami’s historically African American neighborhood, O’Neal has painted murals and artworks about how incarceration impacts the families of those incarcerated and the overpolicing of Black communities across the US. O’Neil’s art has a specific and unique texture that resembles bodies at nightfall, half-lit rooms, and the intimacy and vulnerability of tight-knit relationships. There is a fading effect in some of his paintings, which are full of emotion if one looks closely. “Painting found me,” O’Neal, who was an artist in residence at the Rubell Museum in 2021, has said.

Taking its name from a line in Louis Armstrong’s song “What a Wonderful World,” O’Neal’s exhibition, “And I Think to Myself,” reckons with modern and past struggles. O’Neal frames Blackness in all its humanity and simultaneously as it is stripped off through contemporary commodification. Video stills of a Louis Armstrong performance, a large-scale bouquet of cotton, several ceramic jazz player figurines, the shadows of half-light rooms, and shiny and sticky visual textures become a visual path toward this young artist’s reckoning with his own experiences, culture, and history.

On view December 4, 2023–January 13, 2024, at Spinello Projects, 2930 NW 7th Ave, Miami.

A.I.M Biennial

Michiko Kurisu, No great distant day, Delray Beach, FL, 2023.

Photo : Courtesy the artist

Get ready to see less commercial and more underground art popping up everywhere across the city. The artist list is chock-full of Miami magic: Charles Humes Jr, Onakide Shabaka, Najja Moon, Sonia-Baez Hernandez, and more. Founded by the artist william cordova and organized this year with Gean Moreno, Marie Vickles, and Amy Rosenblum-Martin, the A.I.M Biennial will feature 56 site-specific installations spread across South Florida, as well as other cities around the world.

In Florida, don’t miss VantaBlack’s To What Lengths activation, reflecting on legacy building and preservation as foundational to Black and diasporic culture, or a solo show for Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, an Indigenous Colombian American artist who has been exploring embodied motherhood for years. Likewise, out in the Everglades, approximately an hour’s drive from Miami Beach, the exhibition “Our Future’s Heritage,” curated by Voices of the River of Grass, a collective of Indigenous artists of Florida, stands as a powerful testament to the rich tapestry of Indigenous culture and heritage in the city with 13 artists displaying works. 

“VantaBlack: To What Lengths,” at the outdoor plaza of Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA).
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer,  at 3225 NW 8th Ave, Miami.
“Our Future’s Heritage,” at 500 US Hwy 41, Miami.
On view through January 14, 2014, at various venues throughout Miami and elsewhere. Specifics are detailed in the accompanying online catalogue.

“Cornelius Tulloch: Poetics of Place” at Locust Projects

Cornelius Tulloch, visual mockup for Poetics of Place (2023) installation at Locust Projects.

Photo : Courtesy the artist

A community space of nourishment that is fading in Miami, and across the US, is the front porch. As cities like Miami continue to be gentrified, and real estate developers continues to demolish older homes and replace them with luxury buildings or modern builds, the porch is quickly becoming an architectural feature of the past. “People and artists who had to move from Miami will come back to activate the space,” Tulloch told ARTnews of his project that will be activated this week. Through projection, video, photography, collage, performance, and architectural interventions, this exhibition will transform the gallery’s project room into the porch of a left-standing Miami home.

Tulloch focuses on space, presence, and absence and wants to recognize the history of vacant spaces in Miami, along with the history of walls and divisive infrastructure. His work opens dialogues about architectural language, Black and Caribbean aesthetics, and color palettes that make Miami what it is—but which are being slowly erased by continuous development and gentrification.

December 5, 2023–February 10, 2024, at Locust Projects, 297 NE 67th St, Miami.

Honorable Mentions

Jonathan Carela’s BAUTIZO DE FULACALETA (2023) will feature in “Hormiga Caribe” at Homework Gallery.

Photo : Courtesy the artist and Homework Gallery

Green Space Miami’s group show “DISplace” will feature 10 emerging artists exploring the theme of displacement and what home, identity, and resilience mean in Miami.

At Tunnel Projects, a small room in a basement parking lot in Little Havana, artist and architect Cornelius Tulloch (see his Locust Projects show above) will curate the group show “Woven Ecologies,” centered on the enmeshed relationship between humanity and Miami’s built and natural environments.

Artist-run space Collective 62 will present “Archipelagic Narratives of Female Metamorphosis,” curated by art historian Aldeide Delgado. The show is an ode to Miami’s diaspora, honoring life rituals, fantastical imagery, natural environments, and political bodies guiding transformation and change.

The Historic Hampton House in Brownsville will explore the meaning of refuge and congregation with the exhibition “Gimme Shelter,” curated by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, Zoe Lukov, Maynard Monrow, and Laura Dvorkin.

At Iris Photo Collective (IPC) Arts Space, “Defiance: Open Resistance, Bold Disobedience” will delve into the roots of protests with an excellent lineup of photographers and artists curated by Carl Philipe Juste.

At Miami Beach’s Regional Library, “The Vasari Project” will trace Miami’s art history from the 1970s to the present, while also exploring new perspectives in the archives with a lineup of artists and photographers.

At Mahara + Co Gallery, Gabino Castelan presents several tableaus that collapse time in his latest exhibiton, “The Dream of Ometecuhtli.”

“Hormiga Caribe” at Homework Gallery, an experimental art space, will feature the work of several Caribbean artists whose work is a testament to the spirit of Miami.

And don’t miss “Sydney Maubert’s “Queen of the Swamp,” an installation at AIRIE Nest Gallery that acknowledges Miami’s Bahamian history and its vital ties to the cultural geography of Caribbean and Southern aesthetics, its second activation at Greenspace, Miami.

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