Miami's Unexpected New Art Destination || via Architectural Digest
The Underline, Miami's answer to the High Line, features an impressive array of public art
TEXT BY HADLEY KELLER PHOTOGRAPHY BY COURTESY OF ART IN PUBLIC PLACES
Posted January 13, 2017
A rendering of Miami's Underline. || via Architectural Digest
There's certainly no shortage of good art in Miami. From the lauded Perez Museum, which celebrated its third anniversary this fall, to the Rubell Family Collection to the annual Miami Basel fair, during which the art-world elite descends on the Florida city for a week of art and parties, Miami has emerged in the past few years as a destination for the arts. This week the city will add to its portfolio with the opening of four public artworks along the impending Underline, a public park and recreation space below Miami's Metrorail masterminded by James Corner Field Operations, the same firm behind New York’s beloved High Line. Miami-based artists Bhakti Baxter, Naomi Fisher, Nicolas Lobo, and Agustina Woodgate have been selected to create the Underline's first round of temporary artworks, opening January 14. Their projects range widely, from "live floral paintings" to a sculptural riff on exercise equipment. To hear more about the project, AD caught up with Amanda Sanfilippo, the curator and artist manager for Miami's Art in Public Places, a sector of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs that is responsible for the installations.
Architectural Digest: How were the artists chosen for this exhibition?
Amanda Sanfilippo: When the opportunity to jointly apply for the ArtPlace America grant arose, the Underline, Art in Public Places, and Miami-Dade’s Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces joined together to consider artworks that would play an explicit role in the communities central to the Underline. We thought about artists who work with social practice and participatory concepts, as well as artists who work site-responsively. Art in Public Places, together with its Professional Advisory Committee (a rotating volunteer board of art professionals, artists, and curators), created an invitational call and recommended artists based on the strength of their proposals. The Art in Public Places Trust approved those recommendations. It was important to the stakeholders that four Miami-based artists were selected, because of their familiarity with and commitment to the city.
Nicolas Lobo's Brutal Workout. || via Architectural Digest
AD: What is unique about showing in such an unconventional space?
AS: Offering artists the opportunity to create site-determined temporary public art on the Underline gets to core issues for urban space—its challenges and assets. Access, commuting, transportation, leisure, and work are all themes that have emerged from the works. The artists needed to consider how a commuter and leisure public might utilize the Underline and elevated Metrorail above it differently, how each group might experience or encounter an artwork—whether it is an impediment on their way to work or school, or whether the artwork can be seen as a destination in its own right. Offering participatory works that the public can physically engage with became a central element as well.
AD: What does the Underline hope to achieve as a space in the city?
AS: The Underline is a major achievement for Miami; it will be what the High Line is to New York. Just as Creative Time and High Line Art have, the Underline will serve as a platform for world-class contemporary art as it continues to develop over the next few years. More exciting temporary and permanent artworks are in the long-term vision, in collaboration with the Art Advisory committee of Friends of the Underline. Additionally, Miami, a warm and flat city prime for bikers, is also experiencing massive population growth. As it develops, the need for alternative transportation has increased. The Underline will allow Miami to build visibility for commuters to these alternatives, whether they be rail or bike, and add to the cultural cachet and recognition of Miami as an internationally important city for art and culture.
A sketch for Naomi Fisher's installation, #PUZZLED, which features large-scale puzzle pieces with ballet barres. || via Architectural Digest
AD: How does the art play into its surroundings, of both the Underline and Miami in general?
AS: The ideas of activation and intervention were important to each of the artists, from reconceptualizing public workout equipment that echoes the Brutalist architecture of the Metrorail stations, as in Nick Lobo’s Brutal Workout, to the injection of tropical plants destined to be planted in the lateral park within monumental planters in the path of passengers, as in Metro Flower Power by Bhakti Baxter. Agustina Woodgate will activate the Underline in an intensive three-day bike ride, utilizing a 16-person bike to house a live broadcast of radioee.net, where she will interview dozens of experts on travel and transit issues while hijacking advertising space on the Metrorail cars. Naomi Fisher’s participatory sculpture beneath the Brickell rail station, an urban hub, incorporates a ballet barre and invites dance into the public realm while also staging performances by dancers.