Artistically Social with Amy Rosenberg
Fountainhead Residency, MOCA & Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez
By Amy Rosenberg
Amy Rosenberg is an attorney and arts advocate who founded the Overtown Music Project and the Arsht Center’s young patrons group. She is the co-founder of the environmental non-profit Dream in Green. Amy is a member of Art Basel’s Junior Host Committee and sits on the Board of the Funding Arts Network. She also serves on the New World Symphony’s Friends Committee as well as The Wolfsonian-FIU’s Visionaries Committee.
Every so often, we cynical Miamians come across an experience that enlightens, heartens and moves us. My love for Miami was renewed because of several of these recent experiences.
Local art collector Kathryn Mikesell invited me to a magical evening at the artist residency that she and her husband Dan set up in an adorable Morningside cottage near their home. The Modern Miami home, built in the 1950s, houses several artists who live and work in the space.
Kathryn is a blond dynamo who comes off simultaneously as earthy, warm and effortlessly chic. Her Fountainhead Residency was founded in 2008 to “provide artists an opportunity to find new inspiration (a fountainhead) and to introduce artists to Miami’s art community.”
I was awed by the works of current residents Miru Kim (from New York) and Craig Norton (from St. Louis). Kim was featured in Esquire’s Best and Brightest issue. Her Naked City Spleen series captures a nude Kim in industrial ruins. The fearless Kim doesn’t get permits to stand on the tops of bridges or in catacombs and tunnels. Her work is evocative and it will be interesting to see how she evolves as an artist.
Craig Norton, another Fountainhead artist, is self-taught and explores heady issues of the day through his drawings of Iraqi soldiers and immigrants. His work looks photographic but his images are painstakingly created with a ball point pen. A five inch image could take him 20 hours to complete.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami recently had two major events. Optic Nerve, the Museum’s film festival of short films and videos debuted for its 10th anniversary to a sold out audience. Audience members loved Autumn Casey’s quirky, Getting Rid of All My Shoes, in which the filmmaker literally gets rid of all of her shoes. The Museum purchased Casey’s work for its permanent collection.
MOCA also kicked off its October Mystery Dates event with a party at Area 31 at The Epic hotel. The views were as striking as the guests. Co-hosts Carolyn Travis and Erin Newberg warmly welcomed and tantalized guests with the concept behind the October event. The actual event begins with a cocktail party at MOCA where guests learn the surprise locations of their Mystery Dates dinners, and ends with an after-party at The Raleigh Hotel. Proceeds from the evening support MOCA exhibitions of emerging and experimental artists.
The talented Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, recipient of the 2009 Funding Arts Network Knight New Works Award, is presenting Elusive Landscape at give public parks until October. The work consists of multiple hand-crafted 16 mm films depicting the forms and colors of natural landscapes projected directly onto the landscapes themselves. The events are free and open to the public and take place from 8 – 10 p.m. The next editions will be at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens and Vizcaya.
Until next time…
