Fresh Art International

This flashback to Norway 2017 features our sonic encounters and conversations with artists, curators and cultural producers in the capital city of Oslo and in Tromsø, a small town north of the Arctic Circle. In 2017, Fresh Art International founder and artistic director Cathy Byrd traveled to Norway as a new member of the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT), an organiza...

South Florida’s subtropical wilderness inspired us to stage a remote radio broadcast from the Everglades. On February 24, 2019, we brought live and pre-recorded conversations with artists, scientists, rangers, educators and Miccosukee activists to a live audience on the porch of the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center.   Voices in Part Two (alpha order): Warren Abrahamson, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Robe...

South Florida's subtropical wilderness inspired us to stage a remote radio broadcast from the Everglades on February 24, 2019. We brought live and pre-recorded conversations with artists, scientists, rangers, educators and Miccosukee activists to a live audience on the porch of the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center. This episode is Part One of our two-hour program. Voices in Part One: AIRIE Creative Di...

The 2019 documentary Pahokee is a landmark project for filmmakers Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan and a sign of hope for the rural South Florida community whose story they tell. An official selection in 2019 Sundance and South by Southwest Film Festivals, Pahokee won the Miami Film Festival’s 2019 Knight Made in Miami Award. Perched on the Southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades, f...

Miami-based sculptor Robert Chambers lived in Everglades National Park for one month in 2018, as a Fellow in the Artist in Residence in Everglades program. In the darkness outside his studio one night, the artist tripped on the roots of an ancient plant: The Saw Palmetto (in Latin, Serenoa repens), That’s when a hidden world began opening up to him. In fact, the small palms are everywhere you look...

In 2018, when the annual Creative Time Summit unfolds in Miami, we’re thrilled to participate. On Archipelagoes and Other Imaginaries: Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World brings together artists, thinkers, activists, and cultural producers whose practices stimulate change through planetary thinking. The nearby Caribbean Archipelago serves as the perfect context within which to question colo...

Artist Bill Fontana has a long-time relationship with sound and space. He's known for relocating sounds to create site-specific installations around the world. Fontana describes his practice as "composition by listening." In this episode, we talk about what has inspired and informed his public art projects through the decades—from his 1981 Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns in San Francisco, to his...

Art with a Sense of Place considers creative projects that respond to a physical space and those that react to or embrace a historic moment, a cultural environment, a socio-political tension, or a psychological space. Emerging in the 1960s, site-specific art sought to transcend what was perceived as the over-curated, almost clinical context of the art museum. Artists rebelled by creating their own...

Art with a Sense of Place considers creative projects that respond to a physical space and those that react to or embrace a historic moment, a cultural environment, a socio-political tension, or a psychological space. Emerging in the 1960s, site-specific art sought to transcend what was perceived as the over-curated, almost clinical context of the art museum. Artists rebelled by creating their own...

Argentine architects Rosario Marquardt and Roberto Behar share their passion for creating emotional monuments. Their billboard-size greetings of Peace and Love and Besame Mucho at the Miami International Airport, Supernova at the 2018 Coachella Music Festival, and WOW, a new skate-able sculpture for the Lauridsen Skatepark in DesMoines, Iowa, are just a few of the iconic landmarks they've produced...

In 2018, a city-wide public art experience lures us to the capital of Argentina. Organizers of Art Basel Cities Week Buenos Aires, invited Cecilia Alemani, director of the public art program for New York City’s High Line park, to curate Rayuela (Spanish for Hopscotch). Crisscrossing Buenos Aires, we discover historic plazas, parks and museums, abandoned buildings, architecture and industrial sites...

Rodrigue Mouchez, founder of the artist-run curatorial platform known as AGUAS, talks about choreographing encounters with art. Mouchez introduces People Moving Through Space, an array of installations he created and staged with AGUAS collaborator Julie Escoffier and other artists for the seventh edition of Untitled, Miami Beach art fair.  Based in Mexico City and Brussels, AGUAS seeks to establis...

In Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood, we meet poet Aja Monet, legal justice advocates Meena Jagannath and Alayah Glenn, and artist Eddie Arroyo to talk about how art and poetry are giving voice to urban communities fractured by gentrification. Arroyo's paintings reference photographs he takes to capture the character of vanishing cultural landmarks. Monet is founder of Smoke Signals Studio, a musi...

Artist Joyce J. Scott is a legend—among the first to reposition craft as social commentary. In 2016, a MacArthur Genius award recognized her vital creative force. For Art Basel Miami Beach 2018, Peter Blum Gallery presented rarely seen early works that reveal how the artist has always delved into the extremes of human nature—from humor to horror, and beauty to brutality. In her fusion of craft aes...

This year, tons of inventive projects unfold during Miami Art Week 2018 outside the established and emerging art fairs. Individuals and collectives passionate about public art and performance, film, video, music and social engagement will animate an upscale development on the beach, a luxury mall in Miami’s business district, the former Gold Dust Motel on Biscayne Boulevard, and an Asian bodega, a...

Italian artist Paola Pivi takes us on a tour of Art with a View, her latest solo exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach. Pivi is a nomad. Cultural references in her projects are so diverse that they might seem to come from more than one creative mind. Our first stop is a massive, minimalist installation that dominates a large gallery on the museum’s second floor. The work titled World R...

Inside Miami's sound chamber, sound artist, designer and composer Gustavo Matamoros introduces to his latest creation: four audible experiences of sound moving through space. Legendary artists inspired Small Sounds Up the Wall (for Alison Knowles), Everglades (for Charles Recher), String Solo (for Vito Acconci) and Eighty-Five Audible Moments (for Pauline Oliveros). Venezuela born Matamoros made t...

For the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro challenges the norm. Rather than explore an overarching theme, he invited seven artists to curate exhibitions featuring their own art. Likewise, the twelve solo projects that he curated suggest we look closely at individual creative practices. Purposefully choosing not to direct our gaze, this biennial allows us to explore freely, to...

In 2018, Fresh Art International broadens engagement in the Caribbean, traveling to the Dominican Republic for Tilting Axis 4, the fourth annual meeting of the roving arts program that brings together artists, curators, and culture makers from across the region. This year’s theme was Caribbean Cultural Ecologies: Connecting Pasts, Presents and Futures. The artists, curators, writers and educators...

What does it mean to make art collectively? How does art speak to our shared destiny? Where does sand intersect with art and community? In the studio at Jolt Radio, with Miami-based curators and artists, we speak of art at the intersection of sand, smells and social behavior. Curator Quinn Harrelson and artist Troy Simmons introduce Collectivity, a site-specific exhibition at the Bakehouse Art Com...

Creative Time, the force behind ambitious public art projects in New York City and beyond, takes its annual summit to Miami in 2018. We invite Creative Time director Justine Ludwig to talk about the focus of this year's convening. On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World is the poetic title and subject of the 2018 Summit, with the idea of coalition as a cent...

From Port of Spain, Trinidad, we live stream a special radio program about the significance of digital media as a contemporary cultural space in the Caribbean. Joining us in our pop up studio are artist and writer Christopher Cozier, architect Sean Leonard, writer and media producer Janine Mendes-Franco, journalist and podcaster Franka Philip, and artist designer Kriston Chen—all based in Trinidad...

In the world today, many consider capitalism a fraught economic system. Some believe that capitalism is the cause current international trade wars, accelerating student debt, the bankruptcy of entire countries, the growth of virtual currencies and the reason for coded security systems. Artist Hilary Powell and filmmaker Dan Edelstyn, an inventive couple based in London, have decided to wreak a bit...

Today, we invite artists, curators, a media specialist, and an invigilator to talk about complex art that challenges the resources of traditional exhibition spaces. Their backstories reveal how building relationships—through eco-systems, architecture, choreography, media archaeology and virtual community engagement – make exceptional art encounters possible. Featured voices: Brian Sonia-Wallace, S...

We meet Los Angeles based artist Mark Bradford—known for connecting art with the real world—when he represents the United States in the 57th Venice Art Biennale. While preparing for Tomorrow is Another Day, an exhibition of his signature layered abstractions, he launched a small business venture with members of the island city's hidden prison culture. His six-year collaboration with Venice social...