Articles: 2016
Zero 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.
Daniel Okrent’s 2004 New York Times Column Even More Relevant Today
Editor’s Note: In October 2003, Daniel Okrent was named the first public editor for the New York Times (NYT) following the Jayson Blair scandal. Okrent served in that position until May 2005. In June 2004, he wrote the piece below about the overuse and misuse of ANONYMOUS SOURCES. Given the current howling about anonymous sources, the constant declarations about “fake news,” and calling the press the “enemy of the people” during the Trump era, I thought it would be worthwhile to reconsider Okrent’s 2004 column and a follow-up comment he...
read moreFrom the Midwest to Miami: The Artistic Journey of Tom Seghi
Driving through miles of open fields from his hometown of Chicago to DeKalb, Illinois, Tom Seghi was mesmerized by the stark beauty and rich tones of the landscape before him. The first in his family to attend college, Seghi was on his way to Northern Illinois University (NIU), where he would discover his passion for translating the Midwestern landscape onto canvas. Originally intending to study architecture, Seghi changed his career path to become an art educator and painter. During his graduate studies at the Art...
read moreIOUs from Baghdad
The day Sergeant Cartwright’s Humvee rolled over an improvised explosive device (IED) and detonated on notorious Route Irish, we returned to the outpost to learn that Stinky, our goat, was inside bleeding, and screaming. The outpost was an abandoned school in the center of Bagdad. A large, concrete structure with echoing halls, two guard towers and a barbed wire perimeter. We lived in what was once the gym, our cots lined up like dominos; ammo, rifles, body armor and pads crowding the slim walkways between beds. I was in the...
read moreArtists’ Mothers by Alex Rocky Ferrer
Shortly after Labor Day in 1970, I moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts on the northern tip of Cape Cod, the first North American landing place of the Pilgrims (1620), in search of beauty, solitude, and a cheap place to live while I figured out my life as an artist making large-scale abstract paintings. I was so uninformed, that I didn’t know that the Outer Cape Cod towns of Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet comprised a famous productive art colony, where artists and writers such as Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz...
read moreKilling Griffin
By Anne Bernays
Excerpt from Killing Griffin, chapter one. “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” — Ernest Hemingway Union Square is to Somerville what Harvard Square is to Cambridge, that is, its very heart. There all similarities end. But that’s not quite accurate: there’s no store that sells underwear in either place. For an idea of the international character of Somerville, all you have to do is look at the range of places where you can sample the international cuisine — such as it is...
read moreMichele Oka Doner Back Then (1990)
Editor’s Note: This article by Elisa Turner was originally published in the Miami Herald in September, 1990. It highlights both the consistency of Oka Doner’s vision, and her endless need to experiment with new materials. As a child in Miami Beach, where her father, Kenneth Oka, was mayor in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, Michele Oka spent hours playing in the wet sand, sifting for the fragments of shell and coral that still fascinate her. “I’d always look for forms on the beach,” she remembers. “I’d pick up coral...
read moreBudd Hopkins at NADA Miami
Editor’s Note: Downs & Ross will be exhibiting the work of Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) at NADA Miami from December 7-10, 2017. The dualistic attitude which informs Hopkins’ work stems primarily from a dichotomy he experienced early in his career. When he came to New York in 1953 from Wheeling, West Virginia via Oberlin College it was the high-time of Abstract Expressionism. For that movement’s heroes – De Kooning, Kline, Pollack and Rothko – generalized public acceptance was just beginning, and their...
read moreKingfolk
Excerpt from Kingfolk, a novel. This excerpt takes place midway through Kingfolk, a historical novel. Kingfolk is set in 1874 in a fictional town of ex-slaves in Southern Louisiana during the Reconstruction Era. The novel follows Beah, a freedwoman traveling to the town of Banias, Louisiana in hopes of finding her mother; Prophet Moon, an itinerant vision-seer who offers to help Beah with her goal; and the founder of the town, Claude Banias, who struggles to protect Banias from bloodthirsty radicals. The three lives...
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