Artistically Social with 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
Can we finally move past that whole Miami Vice thing? I mean, enough already with the idea that we’re a gaudy, strobe-lit hinterland filled with the ultra trendy and quasi famous. Let’s ratchet down the old rhetoric that defined Miami and start focusing on the new Miami, the Miami with not one but two Herzog & de Meuron – designed buildings, a booming and (finally! interesting) restaurant scene, a performing arts center that is (finally!) packing them in and a radically innovative performance space in which young musicians can blossom.
Frank Gehry is the starchitect behind New World Symphony’s new digs. His buildings are usually about sky, steel and sexy; however, this structure is less baroque (dare I say less flashy) than his typical structures. Attending the grand opening week activities left me knocked out by something beyond the architecture: the openness and warmth of the space. In its first few days, NWS invited Miami to a picnic and Miami came. Under the stars, guests enjoyed music projected on a giant wall. For free.
Later that week, the NWS gala was aswarm with a blinged out who’s who of Miami. Between overflowing spoonfulls of frozen yogurt (passed in the lobby like blinis), an engaging performance by star of stage and screen Audra McDonald, and some quality booty shaking to Stevie Wonder on the roof with my date, I got to see a side of Miami Beach I never thought I’d encounter.
Miami was treated to a special week by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. 150 of the nation’s most talented 17-18 year old artists, spanning nine disciplines, were in Miami for YoungArts Week. Selected from up to 7,000 applicants from across the country, this week-long gathering provides gifted young artists with life-changing artistic enrichment experiences. Master classes with internationally renowned artists, workshops, interdisciplinary activities, performances and exhibitions, YoungArts Week has it all. It is designed to support students at a critical juncture in their lives, and encourage their decision to pursue a career in the arts.
Neiman Marcus hosted an artful chat about the life and work of Colombian artist Fernando Botero organized by Art Nexus’s Susanne Birbragher. Carol Damian, FIU Frost Art Museum Director and art historian and curator Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig enraptured the crowd of well-dressed attendees with insight into Botero’s personal trajectory from matador school to one of our most internationally recognized and beloved contemporary artists. Of note: Botero does not see the people who inhabit his works as heavy.(You have to love that.)
Arts for Learning, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing teaching and learning through the arts, recently hosted an annual fundraiser called Breakfast for Brilliance. The event brought together leaders, dignitaries, the business community, arts enthusiasts, the education community, and philanthropists and provided an opportunity for both individuals and organizations to support Arts for Learning. Former Mayor Manny Diaz and former School Board member Betsy Kaplan were in attendance.
Gary Nader Fine Art showcased works from Enrique Martinez Celaya’s Selected Work/Obra Selecta 1992-2010, a broad survey of work by the Cuban-born artist. The works ranged from paintings, sculptures, and drawings from all of his major projects. Martínez Celaya works in a space of mystery where literature, philosophy, religion and art inform his search for meaning and his explorations of memory and the human condition. Celaya’s studio, Whale + Star is now in Miami. We’re so lucky to have him here.
Despite bone chilling weather, 600 hard core music fans converged on Wynwood Walls (behind Wynwood Kitchen + Bar) for Overtown Music Project’s new year kickoff. The Afro-Cuban orchestra/ hip hop mash up stirred the audience to dance. (The complimentary Bombay Sapphire cocktails and musical stylings of djs Keen One and Culture Chris didn’t hurt either.) All proceeds raised from the event will go to a music scholarship for an Overtown student majoring in music at a Florida university.
Until next time…
