Fresh Art International

In 2018, Locust Projects invited the Detroit-based design duo known as root of two to bring three headless chickens to roost in Miami. For six months, Cezanne Charles and John Marshall embellish the Magic City skyline with their public art and digital engagement project. Previously presented in France and the United Kingdom, Whithervanes translate the traditional weathervane into a 21st century ra...

In 2018, seventy-five artists from thirty-three countries came together for the contemporary African art biennial known as Dak’Art. The offsite program featured more than 200 autonomous artist-organized exhibitions and events across Dakar and on the island of Gorée. The projects we share in this episode explore ideas of freedom and responsibility as they investigate colonial histories, politics, a...

What does it mean to be Black in 21st century America? The expression of Blackness in art has a history of intricate connections to civil rights and social movements. In the United States and abroad, painting and drawing, filmmaking and photography, performance and protest have long represented diverse creative perspectives on the volatile subject of race and identity in this country. Today, we he...

The BLCK Family, a Miami-based creative collective, fosters opportunities for individual artists to share their original music and poetry in intimate settings. They organize roving cultural experiences that range from occasional 'family dinners' to the monthly performance events they call Freedom Sessions. Motivated by the desire to connect communities, The BLCK Family manifesto is to encourage co...

Today, capitalism, aka the free market, is linked to trade wars, suffocating student debt, entire countries gone bankrupt, burgeoning virtual currencies and coded security systems. What role can art and artists play in this wildly unbalanced economy? In abandoned bank buildings, failed urban development projects and public squares, we discover artists and their communities in the U.S., Western Eur...

  Egyptian artist Magdi Mostafa's interactive environment for the 2018 Dakar Biennial of Contemporary African Art turns the sounds of analog technology into a vibrating aesthetic force. Acting like tiny radio receivers, his handmade electronics make audible the otherwise silent electro-magnetic fields emanating from today’s myriad digital devices. He exposes the reverberations of energy emission a...

Hong Kong Mixtape introduces our first guest producer: composer and artist Samson Young, and the sound art community of Southeastern China. Young orients us to a set of nine compositions with sonic program notes. Hong Kong—a vibrant, densely populated urban center, a major port and a global financial hub—offers rich source material. Artist composers take us to the heart of student-led street prote...

At the 57th Venice Art Biennale, Miami-based curator Tami Katz-Freiman guides us through the multi-media installation that artist Gal Weinstein created for the Israeli Pavilion. The artist used glue, mold, metal, and felt to transform the shining white cube into a monument to decay. As you listen the conversation we recorded in 2017, keep in mind the mounting tensions in the Middle East today. Con...

  What happens outside the art scene inspires many of today’s curators, filmmakers and artists. They mine the conceptual depth of personal and communal rituals and routines. Community gardens, shared ride systems, public processionals, weathervanes, home improvement projects, live streaming radio and selfies on the internet are just a few of the subjects and sites of their research, commentary and...

Around the world, a growing number of listeners are falling in love with internet radio on-demand. Audio programs on a range of subjects are easy to access on laptops, computers and mobile devices. You can listen for free to podcasts in more than 100 languages. Among early adopters of the medium (we've been podcasting since 2011), Fresh Art International is one of 500,000 shows in this growing fie...

Activism has long been a way for artists and curators, writers and filmmakers to engage with global flashpoints, inspiring new perspectives on visible and unseen causes. Over the last century, public interventions, performative protests, and works created for public marches and events have led communities to participate in art experiences and make art themselves. The Me Too Movement, Black Lives M...

Dancer choreographer Jenny Larsson enlivens our understanding of how the Far North's deep cold is essential to the balance of the Earth's biosphere. With the group known as Wild Beast Collective, she creates the interpretive dance performance Searching for Arctic Winter. “In the winters up in the arctic when there’s no sunlight and no snow to reflect the moon, all that’s left is darkness. It’s a s...

  From inside Centro Léon, Santiago, Dominican Republic, we introduce Tilting Axis, a roving arts initiative that aims to bridge the geopolitical gap between Caribbean territories by sparking creative collaborations and cultivating cultural connectivity. Organizers Annalee Davis, Natalie Urquhart, Sara Hermann and Joel Butler talk about the genesis of Tilting Axis, why they're here and what will u...

Today, we take you to meet to artist Deborah Mitchell in her studio on Miami Beach, to talk about the ways that Florida’s southwest coast inspires her. The contested landscape, endangered by encroaching urban development and sea level rise, is where she engages as an artist and an advocate for North America’s only subtropical wilderness: The Everglades. Mitchell’s mindful practice expresses her af...

Curators and artists whose passion is social engagement share their experiments in relational aesthetics—participatory performances, interactive installations, community events, and inside/outside exhibitions—invite viewers to become co-creators, to take ownership in the creative process. Curators Jochen Volz (São Paulo Biennial, Live Uncertainty, 2016), Susan Cross (Massachusetts Museum of Contem...

Today, we bring you Fresh Art International LIVE from Dakar, Senegal. We made the journey to West Africa in May 2018, to capture sounds of local art and culture and to document our first encounter with the biennial of contemporary African art known as  Dak'Art . In the first of our two live streaming broadcasts, you'll hear  Marisol Rodríguez  (Mexico City/Paris), one of the biennial's guest curat...

Trinidad-born photographer Johanne Rahaman shares hope for a better world in her  Black Florida  project—a modern archive of images that tell the story of Blackness in America today. Follow our Sunday morning drive to Perrine where we visit Flavas, the town's favorite breakfast spot, and stop by the House of God, home of the sacred steel ensemble known as The Lee Boys. Find out why Rahaman is taki...

Today’s conversations on Miami’s Caribbean Arts Remix reveal the genesis and goals of the three-year old  Third Horizon Film Festival  and the first-ever  Tout-Monde (all the world) Festival . Both initiatives aim to introduce some of the boldest of today’s emerging Caribbean-born artists, filmmakers and musicians in Miami, a portal to the international contemporary art and culture scene.   Sound...

We follow artist  Joana Choumali  from the  Ivory Coast Pavilion  at the 57th Venice Art Bienniale to  Dak'Art 2018 , as she explores the shared experience of migration and violence in her birth country. Her embroidered photographs trace stories of loss and longing—depicting lone figures disappearing from home and reappearing in foreign environments, and giving shape to the emptiness left by the c...

  Come with us to the legendary Key West for conversations about creativity on two live streaming Fresh Art International radio shows. This cultural outpost sits quite literally at the end of the road, Mile 0 of U.S. Route 1, the highway that runs up the Atlantic Coast, from Florida to Canada. At the  Studios of Key West , you'll find out what inspires the Studios’ director, why a painter who came...

Art and Sports? Curator Franklin Sirmans brings them together in  The World’s Game  exhibition at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. Immersive installations, paintings, sculptural objects, photographs and videos by forty artists reveal how the universal language of this transnational game can define beauty, make social statements, create a sense of community and express a shared passion. Timed to coinci...

Miami Marine Stadium inspires this tale of modernist architecture and Biscayne Bay, of speedboats and rock stars, of skateboarding, street art and a storm named Andrew. Advocates and artists, architects and restoration specialists tell the story.  We begin with a flashback to our 2016 episode with dancer choreographer  Hattie Mae Williams . Her creative intervention at the stadium is just one exam...

Today's conversation reveals the role of private investment in temporary and permanent public art across the U.S. Contemporary art collector Cricket Taplin, who with her husband Martin Taplin once owned the legendary Sagamore Art Hotel on Miami Beach, explains her philosophy on collecting as a mode of civic engagement. Curators Claire Breukel and Dina Mitrani tell how they introduce the work of lo...

American virtuoso  Jason Moran  is a genius jazz pianist known for performing experimental compositions in collaborative projects with visual artists—among them,  Joan Jonas ,  Lorna Simpson ,  Glenn Ligon  and  Adrian Piper . For the  56th Venice Art Biennale , artistic director Okui Enwezor invited Jason to stage and animate two sound environments. The multi-faceted artist brings the full range...

Today, we invite three women writers to talk about Cuba as a character in newly released films. Our portal to the Cuban psyche is the  35th Miami Film Festival  that brings diverse cultural perspectives to the big screen in theaters across Miami, Florida. Sharing their expertise and personal knowledge of Cuba's socio-political landscape are two sisters born in Miami, to Cuban parents: writer and f...