New Work Miami at the Miami Art Museum
Party on the Plaza Thursday, December 6, 2012
MAM Ball  Saturday, December 8, 2012.
Miami Art Museum
101 West Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33130

Featuring Site-Specific Installations, Sculpture, Painting, and Photography, New Work Miami 2013 Exhibition Celebrates the City’s Artists and Marks 12-Month Countdown to Miami Art Museum’s Move to New, World-Class Facility

New Work Miami 2013 Focus of MAM’s Art Basel Miami Beach Events On view from November 21, 2012 through May 12, 2013

In celebration of the tremendous creative energy of the local artist community, Miami Art Museum will present recent and newly commissioned work by approximately a dozen Miami-based artists in New Work Miami 2013. The exhibition will highlight the diverse and innovative practices of Miami’s artists, featuring site-specific installations, sculpture, painting and photography. The exhibition will be among the last presentations in MAM’s current facility, marking the 12-month countdown to the Museum’s reopening in fall 2013 as Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in a new, Herzog & de Meuron-designed building in Museum Park.

New Work Miami 2013 will be the focus of MAM’s Miami Art Week activities, when Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Miami, Design Miami/ and other art fairs attract an estimated 50,000 members of the international art community to South Florida. The exhibition’s opening celebration will take place during Party on the Plaza, the Museum’s signature Art Basel Miami Beach event on Thursday, December 6, 2012 and will be on view during the MAM Ball, the Museum’s major annual fundraiser, on Saturday, December 8, 2012.

Two artists, Consuelo Castañeda and Emmett Moore, have been invited to create an immersive environment within MAM’s plaza-level gallery that responds formally and conceptually to works by each of the other participants. This experimental approach aims to capture the collaborative spirit that infuses local artistic production, while envisioning a more active role for artists in shaping the conditions under which their work is seen and experienced. In keeping with the organizational method explored in the galleries, the museum has invited an artist run nomadic space known as SPRING BREAK to contribute to the development of the exhibition’s accompanying programs, which will include film screenings, discussions, workshops, site-specific projects and other time-based experiences.

“The work coming out of Miami’s flourishing arts scene is fresh and ingenious. It challenges us to develop new ways of engaging with the arts community and our many constituents,” said Miami Art Museum Director Thom Collins. “New Work Miami 2013 is a salute to the incredible growth in Miami’s cultural landscape and represents the Museum’s commitment to supporting the continued growth of the arts in our area. We are delighted to present this exhibition and, as we prepare to move to our new facility, look forward to creating new programming commensurate with Miami’s incredible artistic activity.”

The New Work Miami series is indicative of the strong bond that has formed between the Museum and the city’s artists. It encapsulates MAM’s dedication to supporting the local artistic community, while signifying the vital role that the Museum will continue to play in nurturing the growth of the arts in Miami.

Among the featured artists are:

Gideon Barnett, who employs the language of traditional documentary photography to create quasi-anthropological, conceptual projects that examine Miami’s unique cultural landscape;

Bhakti Baxter, who presents a series of paintings drawn from images of masks and figurines from around the world; the work explores the ways in which visual conventions and cultural beliefs influence our collective understanding of human history.

Sinisa Kukec, who uses found furniture, resin, pigment, graphite and other materials to create sculptures that display jewel-like effects while teeming with oozing, organic surface textures;

Odalis Valdivieso, who employs experimental digital photographic techniques to subvert modernist painterly traditions; and

George Sánchez-Calderón and Tom Scicluna, who will create newly-commissioned outdoor works.

Co-organized by MAM Associate Curators René Morales and Diana Nawi, the exhibition explores ideas pertaining to the local built environment; the city of Miami as both a historical object and a psychological state; site-specificity and the nature of display within domestic versus museum contexts; and the dynamic relationship between artistic and curatorial practice.

“With this project, we have asked artists to intervene in the exhibition design and other functions that normally fall within the purview of museum staff, from programming to marketing," said Morales. "In part, this is meant as a nod to the collaborative, artist-driven initiatives that have become so ubiquitous in Miami, constituting one of the defining tendencies of the local art scene."

“As someone who is new to Miami, I’ve been incredibly impressed with the depth and diversity of artistic practice here,” said Nawi. “Organizing this exhibition has been an invaluable opportunity to explore the city’s rich and varied arts scene and to see how the unique context of Miami has shaped artists who live and work here.”

New Work Miami 2013 is organized by Miami Art Museum and co-curated by MAM Associate Curators René Morales and Diana Nawi. Support is provided by Nedra & Mark Oren and Dorothy & Aaron Podhurst.