Visual Arts
Bonnie Clearwater: Dean of South Florida’s Art Museum Directors
Introduction to Bonnie Clearwater. 2:56 min. Photo by Gary James. Music: Amernet Quartet. From NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale: Bonnie Clearwater joined NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale as Director and Chief Curator in September 2013. An influential leader who played a major role in Miami’s emergence and development as an international arts center, she is widely recognized for her curatorial vision, scholarship and record in administration, public education and community outreach. Ms. Clearwater spearheaded an exciting phase...
read moreZero Net Energy
Let’s Make Miami a Net Zero Metropolis ! The built environment accounts for the lion’s share of climate changing carbon emissions, whether as energy consumed by buildings, or by cars moving through our cities’ streets, or as habitat lost to development. To be better stewards of the Earth, we need to ask how we can reduce the amount of resources used to construct and operate our built environment. Zero Net Energy buildings, or Net Zero, produce at least as much power as they consume over the course of the year....
read moreA Video Discussion with
Dr. Mark B. Rosenberg,
the 5th President of
Florida International University
Introduction to Dr. Mark B. Rosenberg, 5th President of Florida International University: 1:33 min. Photos: FIU. Design: Raymond Elman. Music: Tony Succar. Dr. Mark B. Rosenberg is the fifth president of Florida International University and former Chancellor of the State University System of Florida (SUS). Florida International University (FIU) is an American metropolitan public research university in Greater Miami, Florida. FIU has two major campuses in Miami-Dade County, with its main campus in University Park and...
read moreThe Surf Club Now, 21st Century
The venerable Surf Club in Surfside, Florida, recently reopened as an ultra-luxury complex that includes a Four Seasons hotel, condominiums, two restaurants, and four swimming pools to complement its 900 feet of beachfront. The ’30s era building was purchased by developer Fort Partners from the remaining members of the club, restored to its former grandeur, and is now enveloped by glass towers designed by modernist architect Richard Meier. It could be argued that the project is recapturing the upper crust...
read moreThe Surf Club Then, 20th Century
In 2012, I had the opportunity to interview Charles Gilatt, the oldest living member of The Surf Club. Charles Gilatt: The wind used to whistle through The Surf Club because originally they didn’t have a roof over it. There was a main walkway, but it was open-sided toward where lunch was served. After World War II, Winston Churchill used to sit in the lunch area with a bottle of scotch. I was a young man, but we were told, ‘Don’t talk to Mr. Churchill. He doesn’t want to be talked to.’ The manager of the club...
read moreThe Accidental Dönmeh
Editor’s note: In 2016, Alfredo Garcia submitted a story to Inspicio about Jonatas Chimen, a Brazilian-born and raised artist, who moved to Miami at the age of 16. Though Chimen was Catholic, he was soon being asked if he was Jewish. That question, and the elusive response of his family, launched Chimen on a ten year journey, culminating in the knowledge that his family was forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism in 1492 during the Spanish Inquisition. Chimen gathered all of the paperwork he had amassed...
read moreHead Wraps
Editor’s Note: In 2016, Inspicio published a video interview with artist Firelei Báez, whose exhibition at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) featured large-scale portraits of Black women wearing headscarves. During the video interview, Ms. Báez discussed the historical significance of headscarves, noting that around the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, AfroCreole women in Louisiana were forced to keep their heads covered. In resistance, the women adopted elaborate headscarves and created a subversive form of beauty. ...
read moreFinding Purvis Young
“All my life in Florida, you know where the train tracks is: Colored Town….I been used to seeing the railroads. I’m scared that I might go to another part of America and they ain’t got no railroads! [laughs] I love railroads! I put it in my artwork. Railroads. Run-down houses. It’s all in my artwork.” Walk into the special collections archive at Florida International University’s Green Library and ask to watch VHS no. 1568. Purvis Young appears in the video, sitting in a familiar pose —...
read moreHow Berenice Abbott’s Photographs Look to a 21st Century Photographer
When I delved into photography in the mid-1970s, Berenice Abbott became known to me as one of the greats of modern photography. Her work informed and influenced my early work and still interests and inspires me forty years later. Now, having had a successful career of my own in photography, when I study Ms. Abbott’s photographs on exhibit at The Wolfsonian-FIU, I do not find them as aesthetically compelling as some of her renowned contemporaries like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Robert...
read moreBerenice Abbott Photographs
at The Wolfsonian–FIU
In 1954, photographer Berenice Abbott journeyed along the length of U.S. Route 1, capturing the road, its towns, and inhabitants. From Florida motels made out of buses to Maine potato farmers, Abbott documented communities up and down the East Coast. During the trip, Abbott shot more than four hundred 8×10-inch photographs, and over two thousand smaller images using her Rolleiflex camera, representing her largest portfolio of photographs devoted to a single subject. North and South: Berenice Abbott’s U.S. Route 1 is a...
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