This solo exhibition on view through November 21, shows her nesting instincts in this immersive site-specific installation and works on canvas that speaks to her journey from a young female, LGBT artist tagging the rough streets of Colombia to her current position as a globally recognized muralist who has created collaborations with Disney.

One of the most prominent artists of the Latin American graffiti scene, Bogota-based Diana Ordonez is known as Ledania. This is a pseudonym she derived from the Greek mythology character Leda who was seduced by Zeus, in combination with her name Diana, the Huntress in Greek mythology.

With vivid palettes, she celebrates color and nature in scenes populated by imaginary creatures who resemble owls or sprites. Her improvised world is magic and mystical, linked to expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

“I love to travel and explore the world so that I can create graffiti with feeling,” says Ledania.

Her characters have no race or gender, there is no political or religious syntax in her work.

“I create places that are pure happiness by changing a structure in the city, intervening in it, adding my perspective, and changing how people who walk by there every day react to the space.”

In the Wynwood show called Private Spaces, she conjures up a cozy bedroom, painting furniture, and walls, and even making stained glass – a medium you rarely see in the graffiti world. A living moss wall and succulents grow at the foot of the bed, as nature is an integral part of the room.

“I am thrilled with the exhibition,” Ledania says “as it perfectly represents the juxtaposition of private versus public spaces, which is always on my mind as a public painter in the streets who mainly leaves her work outside. The tropical colors and native plants serve as a nod to my country and its inhabitants, who are my inspiration every day.”

She even prints her art on the bed’s comforter and pillows, backed by lush midnight blue velvet. There are layers of paintings on the bed headboard, the wall behind the bed, and then a large painting hanging overhead. An armoire contains the photos she took of departed friends.

A vintage music radio player emits the sounds of birds and the metallic rattling of spray cans – the sounds she hears as she paints outdoors. A patterned rug adds yet another layer.

The themes are nature with intertwined trees, shapes that invoke feathers, and woodland creatures.

It’s a room to get lost in, and dream in color, one that intertwines the female urge to nest with her wild hair of creativity.

Her roots loom large in her art.

“For me, Colombia is happiness itself in many aspects. Take Carnival, for example, and the celebration it represents. And also our ancestors and how they explored decorative traditions in their craftsmanship, which also began incorporating European influences following colonization. I too am the product of that melting pot.”

Classically trained, Ledania earned a master’s degree in Visual and Plastic Arts at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. She is a multimedia artist who expresses her creativity through street art, photography, graphic design, advertising, and artistic makeup. She also expresses her creativity in the implementation of her themes and motifs into clothing and accessories.

Ledania’s murals are displayed worldwide across 22 countries, from Colombia to the United States, Spain to Japan. Her art has been featured in several international exhibitions.

More on the artist at www.instagram.com/ledania

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On exhibit through November 21st at The Museum of Graffiti, 276 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127. Online: Instagram @museumofgraffiti

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The wall at Respectable Street was home to a huge Black Lives Matter mural that people congregated around and added their own statements to. That mural was transformed into a figurative portrait of some of the best-known – and less-known – figures of the Civil Rights movement.

“For the project, we partnered with the West Palm Beach Arts & Entertainment District, the West Palm Beach DDA, and Subculture Group to bring the project to life,” says Caron Bowman, Street Art Revolution director. “The mural shows the history of the civil rights movement through positivity and hope utilizing portraits and quotes.”

The mural is a collaboration between Street Art Revolution artists Dahlia Perryman, Eduardo Mendieta, and artists Tracy Guiteau, and Nate Dee with curation by Caron Bowman. The artists combined styles and work practices to create the mural using both spray paint and hand brushwork.

The figures are accompanied by some of their most powerful quotes that give truth to power.

The artists have collaborated with Street Art Revolution in the past and everyone’s artwork needed to blend. The idea to show the history of the civil rights movement thru positivity and hope by utilizing portraits and quotes is to teach history in a new way.

The iconic figures in the mural include Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, Augusta Savage, and Ella Baker.

(Click on the photos to enlarge them)

Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer rose from her humble beginnings in the Mississippi Delta to become an important, passionate, and powerful voice of the civil and voting rights movements and also a leader in the efforts for greater economic opportunities for African Americans. Hamer was born in 1917 in Mississippi, the 20^th and last child of sharecroppers. She grew up in poverty, by age 12 she left school to work but could read and write. In the 60s Hamer was incensed by efforts to deny Blacks the right to vote so she became an organizer. In June 1963, after successfully registering to vote, Hamer and several other Black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station in Charleston, South Carolina. At the jailhouse, she was brutally beaten.

Undeterred she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which challenged the local Democratic Party’s efforts to block Black participation. By 1968, Hamer’s vision for racial parity in delegations had become a reality and Hamer was a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation.

Artist Augusta Savage was fostered by the climate of the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1930s, she was well known as a sculptor, art teacher, and community art program director. Her father was a poor Methodist minister who opposed his daughter’s early interest in art. My father licked me four or five times a week,” Savage once recalled, ​“and almost whipped all the art out of me. I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.”

Ella Baker was an activist largely behind-the-scenes as an organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and W.E.B. Du Bois, an influential African American rights activist during the early 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and wrote ‘The Souls of Black Folk.’

While Baker criticized charismatic leadership; she promoted more grassroots organizing and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. Baker has been called “one of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the Civil Rights movement.” She is known for her critiques not only of racism within American culture but also of sexism within the civil rights movement, a double burden.

“We are at a critical moment in our history, where we desperately need the beauty of art, culture, human kindness, and understanding,” says one of the artists, Dalhia Perryman. “Yes, this project is an opportunity to celebrate both well-known and lesser-known icons of black history; and I honor that, but on a deeper level, it is an opportunity to invite the community to learn from us and each other while engaging in respectful dialogue.”

In the years that Perryman has been here, she has very rarely seen mural walls that highlight the African diaspora that spans several decades and focuses on lesser-known, but no less valuable contributions to black history.

“To see this visual depiction in a prominent, multicultural, well-traveled location, curated and created by people of color is breathtaking,” says Perryman. “I am extremely honored both as a woman of color and an artist to be given the opportunity to celebrate several of the people whose labor and work gave me the opportunities I have today. I stand on all of their shoulders.”

The powerful mural will stay up for a few months in a spot that has become ground zero for creative, political art in the heart of the Arts District in West Palm Beach.

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West Palm Beach mural celebrates icons of the Civil Rights Movement

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The beloved Miami-based street artist, whose real name is David Anasagasti, has a distinctive look with his heavy black and gray beard, gold grills, multiple gold chains, and pendants made from his designs. When not painting walls, storefronts, and canvases, he hosts “Cyber Trap Boutiques” at various locales either from his Roach Coach truck or by transforming an empty place into a popup such as he did 2 years ago at Churchill’s. There he took over a backhouse attached to the funky Miami dive rock club, painting the walls, floor and ceiling and selling limited-edition items for fans – pillows, shirts, hand-drawn empty cigarette packs, and flip-flops – who might not have the bucks to spend on one of his more traditional artworks in an “effort to leave no demographic behind,” he says. “The idea is to take the unique place, flood it with my highly recognizable eyeball pattern, and make it look nothing like it did before with ghettofied, boutiqueish, worthy, limited-edition run of apparel and other collectable, handmade, affordable items.”

Now a new mural and book at the Museum of Graffiti in Wynwood will celebrate the opening of Biscayne World, an exhibition by Ahol. He says the new work is a love letter to Miami and its cast of characters, culled from three years of riding the bus (!) up and down Biscayne Boulevard.

“From rich people to poor people and all the characters in between, Biscayne Boulevard is a petri dish with the perfect cross section of this awesome city. In the same Biscayne that’s typically underappreciated and taken for granted, I saw as a reservoir of untapped shit that served as unlimited inspiration. I listened to the conversations, the coughs, the cries, the many languages of the bus. I breathed in every smell possible, and I took the happiness along with sadness. We were all trying to get somewhere. That’s Biscayne World,” he says.

“The Museum of Graffiti was built to celebrate stories of people like David Anasagasti, one of Miami’s most recognizable public artists whose roots are entirely punk and street and whose pseudonym, AHOL SNIFFS GLUE, yells out anti-conformity,” said Alan Ket, co-Founder of the Museum of Graffiti.

In his show Biscayne World, and new book with the same title, viewers get a close-up into his work ethic, his illustrations, his desire to show the drawings that make up his Miami – scabs, bullet holes, dirty clothes and all.

“His choice of subjects and illustration style are outrageous but so is Miami and its people,” said Allison Freidin, co-Founder of the Museum of Graffiti.

Published to coincide with the exhibition, the new limited-edition book, “Biscayne World: The Art of Ahol Sniffs Glue” will be for sale exclusively in the Museum gift shop for $50, with only 100 copies made.

From a young age, he started on a path toward art-world notoriety with persistent sketches in his notebooks.

“I was around friends that got me into painting on stuff that wasn’t a traditional surface like canvas or paper. I did these whole civilizations of characters,” he says. “One day, I just decided to take their eyes and make a pattern out of it.”

His art evolved “with practice and patience. Things get better. The mind gets sharper. Everything in Miami inspires me. The good and the bad. Miami Full Time.”

Asked if he thinks his art makes people see Miami differently he says “I don’t really know how they see Miami. I just make sure they see my work. One way or another.”

Ahol has become fiercely protective of his turf, having been in two high-profile lawsuits to defend his art. In one he sued Rich Wilkerson, Jr., a celebrity pastor who married Kim Kardashian and Kanye West after he used Ahol’s murals to promote his church without permission or compensation.

He also went after American Eagle Outfitters alleging that the teen apparel brand used his work in a global advertising campaign without permission. They photographed models against a wall of his work and then used that background extensively in ad campaigns. Anasagasti’s suit ended in a confidential settlement.

The lawsuit claimed, “Given that he hails from the counter-culture world of underground street artists, Mr. Anasagasti’s reputation as an artist has been founded, in part, on a public perception that (he) doesn’t ‘sell out’ to large corporate interests.”

The suit said, “the eyes are decidedly anti-corporate. They represent the working class, who struggle and are good people. They may look a little droopy, a little sad, but it’s his way of saying, ‘You may be down today, but you’ve got to keep going.’”

Ahol agrees. When asked what his future plans are he answers ”A little bit of everything. Stronger every day.”

Tuesday, December 1 | 2020

BISCAYNE BRUNCH: The “First Look” of the new show begins at 10 am with VIP invitation-only, and open to the public beginning at 11 am with timed ticketing strictly enforced.  Tickets available at museumofgraffiti.com

BOOK RELEASE + SIGNING: The artist will host a celebration and book signing at the Museum from 5 pm to 8 pm December 1, with timed ticketing strictly enforced. Tickets available at www.museumofgraffiti.com/events

Museum of Graffiti | Wynwood

299 NW 25th Street

Miami, FL 33127

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“The Museum was founded in Wynwood, Miami in 2019 by myself, Alan Ket, and Allison Freidin,” says Ket. “I am a New York native and moved down to Miami to immerse myself in graffiti and street art soon discovering the need and opportunity for educating the people that visited Wynwood. When I met Allison, a Miami native, we connected and had a similar passion for education, art, and exhibitions. Soon after we began our plans and the rest is lots of work and history.”

Located on a choice block of Wynwood, the Museum of Graffiti exhibits art inside and out, with murals that change often and inside interactive exhibits with photos, videos, sculpture, and murals that explain the colorful outlaw history of graffiti and the artists that started it all as well as the ones that continue the journey.

“The artists that are shown and on display in the Museum currently are an integral part of the history of this art movement,” Ket explains. “There are thousands of artists that need to be displayed, taught, and discussed and we are just beginning. As the curator, I look for contributors that have had a significant impact on the overall art movement and start there. Before we opened, I reached out to my peers, over 100 artists, with a survey asking for input on who should be included in a museum of this type. Their feedback was invaluable and affirming. The names that were recurring such as Phase2, Blade, Dondi, and Lee are all represented in some way in the Museum.”

While initially, graffiti was often cartoonish or name tagging, it has evolved into serious political statements, decrying injustices from the street level of neighborhoods. A current exhibit at the museum is called “Fabric of America: Artists in Protest,” which finds art messages emblazoned on the backs of denim jackets. Over 30 South Florida graffiti artists and illustrators were invited to create protest themed art on denim jackets in the tradition of the protest signs seen at marches.

“We wanted to be in the moment and in solidarity with the protests taking place around the world,” Ket says. “After some brainstorming, we landed on this concept and pushed forward in contacting artists. It has been growing as we speak to more artists and consider different causes that need to be discussed. The generosity of artists in recommending peers has helped us reach more artists than originally planned.”

Providing a platform for artists to contribute to the national discussion is important to the Museum and a way for local artists to join the conversation. These artists work in the streets but Allan Ket and Allison Freidin have invited them indoors to engage in a dialogue of resistance with their audience.

“These wearable artworks articulate what you believe in at all times, without you having to say a word,” said Allison Freidin, co-founder of the Museum of Graffiti.

Included in the show is an audio/visual installation that counts down to 0 from 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the time a Minneapolis police officer had his knee on George Floyd’s neck and video works by Chintz and Alan Ket. Internationally recognized artists Futura 2000, Tristan Eaton, and Cey Adams contributed new posters and prints that are in line with their outspoken dissatisfaction with what has become the country’s situation.

The new exhibit ties in with the recently created large-scale mural titled AMERICAN HISTORY on the walls of two adjacent buildings at NW 25^th Street and 3^rd Avenue. Focusing on the Black experience in US history starting in the early 1800s through the current day, the giant mural, curated by the Museum of Graffiti, with several artists contributing, tackles the subjects of police brutality, racial injustice, and resistance.

The local artists taking part in the exhibit include Chillski, Crome, Tackz, Disem, Ahol Sniffs Glue, Cash4, Rasterms, Klass, Cyst, Grab, Tragek, Delvs, Quake, Ticoe, View2, Chnk, Jel Martinez, Etone, Rage, Krave, June, Keds, Junk, Meta4, Drums Brown, Santiago Rubino, Cale K2S, Ruth, Faves, Blackbrain, Emerald, and Tierra Armstrong.

Another part of the exhibit presents the photographic works of Pablo Allison, a human rights worker and documentarian who since 2017, has been following the migrant trail from Central America to the USA. Each photograph depicts instances of protest graffiti that Allison captured on the trains used by migrants to escape inhumane conditions.

As for the future, the museum is continuing to evolve with the times.

“We are focused on surviving COVID-19 and pushing digital exhibitions and talks since Wynwood is quiet,” Ket says. “We have tremendous shows coming up with Lady Pink, Gustavo Oviedo, Rasterms, Noc167, and LA2 planned over the next 6 months.”

The Museum of Graffiti is open to the public with safety-first procedures, including an admission system that only allows for 6 people to enter the premises every 15 minutes. Guests must purchase tickets in advance at museumofgraffiti.com

Catch up with the Museum of Graffiti on Instagram @museumofgraffiti

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Museum of Graffiti: A visit to street art past and present

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“I liked art school because after teaching some of the basics they said ‘Just do what you want!’ That really appealed to me so I started teaching art as a career after getting my degree at FIU but felt I needed another outlet for myself. I saw people starting to paint murals and I realized that’s a great way to get my work out there.”

Her first mural was technically illegal – not that art is ever illegal – but then the next one she made by request of the building owner in Little Havana got her lots of attention. She learned by watching friends and getting tips for gridding and outlining such a large space.

Her style is decidedly feminine – exotic fairy-like women with flowing hair and flowers and waves trailing in their perfumed wake. The first mural took her 2 weeks with one assistant. And who are these girls?

“I always loved dolls and dressing up when I was little and now I have a little girl that I dress up. I love fashion and Disney Princesses. I just take my cues from that and then add in my own inspiration,” she says.

Once the mural was done it gave her career a big boost.

“Of course I tagged it and was flooded with requests and Instagram tags, that was really exciting.”

She has a studio on top of a popular bakery in Little Havana, the hallway lined with her colorful work. One striking series is of portraits of her students – all innocence and flowers in their hair. A large mural of three bonita chicas – one of them smoking a Cuban cigar –  marks the Eighth Street entrance. One girl has a Cuban flag hair bow, a beautiful Black girl has Fuschia pink hair, and a redhead Latin holds a citrus print fan.

Didi Rok has been working non-stop painting murals for restaurants, the Miami Book Fair, music festivals, and a really big score – for Warner Brothers Pictures for the premiere of the blockbuster film “Suicide Squad.”

“It all started when Amanda Valdes and I were lucky enough to get the attention of the film’s PR team,” she says. “It was a complete surprise to get that email! We’ve collaborated on murals in the past, so when they mentioned they wanted us to work together on a Suicide Squad-inspired mural, we started brainstorming right away. I knew, though it was hot in Miami and I was 6 months pregnant, that the piece was going to be a perfect fit for us. Amanda and I dove right into the project full force. We read up on the characters, watched all the trailers, listened to the soundtrack, and started sketching. Amanda and I typically reference women as our subject matter, so including male characters allowed us to really do something different.

They mixed classic comic book elements from the film into the mural by incorporating wheat-pasted posters into the piece. The mixed media feel seemed to fit into the urban landscape of Wynwood. The mural was up for over a year until someone painted over it without permission, enraging the building owner. But such is the nature of street art.

Contreras’s primary medium is oil when she paints on canvas, but as the wall cabinet of spray paint in her studio attests, that’s her choice when doing murals. An outline is drawn with black, then large areas filled in with a roller. Details are done by hand with different size brushes.

She has a solo show coming up in October, though a big show in Dubai was canceled due to the pandemic. But with two toddlers, she has her hands full. “My kids love art, and my husband comes and helps with my murals, so I have lots of support. We go to the mural fests together so they can see life outside Miami.”

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Miami artist Diana Contreras rolls with femme street art

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It started on Earth Day (April 22) in New Zealand at 9 am NZT, including a selection of artists such as WRDSMTH (U.S.), Yulier(Cuba), and Shamisa Hassani(Afganistan).

These urban artists range from established to emerging—graffiti writers, street artists, and muralists of all generations coming together around climate change, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and other environmental issues.

The art and location of each piece can be seen in an interactive map on www.earthday.org. The project was led and curated by Meg Zany.

Watch artists create their work for this day:

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LA-based street artist MegZany specializes in stencil art and representing the struggles women face on the daily like the gender wage gap, fight for equal rights and reproductive choice. Her philanthropic causes including supporting LA’s PS Arts and the Downtown Women’s Center on SkidRow. She’s also the official Art Curator of LA’s Fame Yard and the Arsenic Gallery.

Fifty years ago, millions of protesters hit the streets to take a stand with a common goal: to protect the Earth in what was the start of the modern environmental movement. For five decades, each year on April 22 people spent this quasi-holiday to raise awareness about environmental issues.

Crisis like the coronavirus pandemic shows how important earth and the consequences when leaders ignore hard science and delayed critical actions.

Every year on April 22, people collect garbage, plant trees, clean up coral reefs, show movies, sign petitions, and plan for a better future for our planet. This year, as we face an unprecedented pandemic, art has the power to reach people personally, establishing a deeper understanding and emotional connection with what is happening to our planet.

Earth Day Network, the largest stealth global art activation in the world with more than 500 artists in 100 countries, is the stage for artists in all formats, ages, and backgrounds to have their work exhibited for the Earth.

As climate change represents the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable, Earth Day should be far more than a day. Learn how to get involved at earthday.org

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#EarthDay2020Halt: 500 street artists execute a worldwide protest

The post #EarthDay2020Halt: 500 street artists execute a worldwide protest appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.

Tony Goldman, the developer with a fondness for revitalizing historic neighborhoods – Soho in NYC, and South Beach – saw a new kind of revitalization here in 2007. There was no glamorous heyday to be restored – but the huge expanses of blank windowless walls were a perfect canvas for large scale art. He envisioned multiple murals by well known and also up and coming artists and a café to feed the viewers and maybe a gift shop and gallery with smaller works and books down the line.

Goldman, who passed away in 2012, used to say “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification”, the first line of offense into a rough and tumble place. Only this time a deep-pocketed developer would be their general. He scooped up a block of warehouses with 70,000 square feet of wall space – to be “the spine” of the neighborhood and designed them to surround a courtyard, enclosed and secure.

The murals went up fast with big names – Kenny Scharf and Shepard Fairey being the mainstays. A large restaurant with sizable outdoor space, indoor bar, and quieter booth seating, soon went in. Fairey plastered the walls with his signature orange and black and marigold colors, adding tributes to famous people – Jean Michel Basquiat, Dalai Lama, and Goldman too.

It quickly became a hot spot, with hordes of art lovers and tourists flocking to see the art. Soon everything around it blossomed too – Panther Coffee, pizza places, Wynwood Diner, galleries, trendy clothing shops. Soon a million people a year were traipsing – and Instagramming – Wynwood Walls, last year the number was close to 3 million. The hood accounted for 20% of the street parking revenue for the whole city, and over half a billion dollars was spent overall in the district.

Then came even more big money, figuring that if that many people were hanging out here, maybe they would want to live here too. Entire blocks were scooped up, razed, and marked for “multi-use residential” the big catchphrase. Bye, small galleries. Condos with gyms, pools, shops, and of course new parking garages to accommodate the autos.

Now a decade later, Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Tony’s daughter and CEO of Goldman Properties, is one of the largest landowners in Wynwood and continues her father’s mission. There are now three indoor galleries, two of them operated by Goldman Global Arts, the curating division of Goldman Properties: one is a 3,400 square-footer that opened during December 2016 and a 1,500 square-foot space that opened in 2018.

For the 10th anniversary, the Walls has curated a new show that features new works by artists Martha Cooper, Kenny Scharf, Kelsey Montague, and Michael Vasquez. There is also a coffee table book, “Walls of Change: The Story of the Wynwood Walls,” by Assouline Publishing, documenting the first decade of the gallery with photos taken by Martha Cooper and essays from Shepard Fairey, Maya Hayuk and Ron English.

The gallery show opened to large crowds during Miami Art Week, with new murals in the courtyards and many smaller sized works in the gallery, including some sculptures of sharks and faces cut from concrete.

Fairey, one of their longest, most loyal artists, has been at Wynwood during Art Week almost every year, either painting a new mural, unveiling a new line of prints, designing waiter uniforms, or accepting an award. This year he was there dj’ing a late-night party, and finishing up two new murals in the Design District – one at Hublot Watches in Paradise Plaza, and one at Eneida M. Hartner Elementary School that schoolkids helped paint. The California resident loves coming to Miami and giving back to a city that has given him much.

Another longtime resident artist is Peter Tunney, who paints stories and murals inside letters. He has a permanent gallery/studio inside Wynwood Walls and often curates shows at the galleries.

This year Kenny Scharf updated the outdoor café wall in time for Art Week with one of his signature gonzo creature murals, zooming along in bright shades of yellow, red, blue and green with wicked grins.

The Wynwood Walls Store has moved from its cramped digs near the entrance to a much larger 2,700 square foot space with a side entrance on 25th Street that used to house a juice store. They now carry lots of lesser priced items – keychains, magnets, t-shirts, stickers, as well as the new book and some higher-end prints.

With all the free art to see, Wynwood Walls is still a privately owned property, with no government or grant funding or charge for people to see the artwork. Costs have grown with the neighborhoods appeal – real estate taxes, mortgage payments, maintenance, security, insurance and staff, things not shared by the neighborhood.

Looking back at the big picture of ten years of art, growth, radical transformation and Miami’s ever-changing scene, it’s quite a feat. The growing pains include many established galleries fleeing the higher rents and increased parties that clog streets and drive away more serious business. Those people are moving either downtown or further west to Allapattah – Seminole word for Alligator- another gritty warehouse hood already the site of two museums from the Rubells and Jorge Perez, where a new livable art hood is sure to follow.

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10 Years After, Wynwood Murals Fast Track a Neighborhood

The post 10 Years After, Murals Keep Fast Tracking a Neighborhood appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.

Tribal leader and secretary Talbert Cypress chose Bunky Echo Hawk, a Pawnee Indian from Oklahoma to do the mural. The Miccosukee have a colorful history that found them at odds with the US Government in the 1950s when they applied for Sovereignty. The Government wanted to only grant that status to the larger Seminole Tribe, so the Miccosukee, led by Chief Buffalo Tiger, asked other countries to recognize them. When that request was honored by Fidel Castro and the tribe went to Cuba for a proclamation signing, the US changed their minds and gave them the status as long as they renounced Castro.

At the unveiling Cypress said that the tribe had been making a concerted effort to connect to the South Florida community and was reaching out, “like an olive branch,” to show that they are still here and that this mural of faces and cultural patchwork clothing and their environment represents them more than just a casino or whatever else people think of. “There are people and a community behind it,” he said.

This is the first public art the tribe has done outside of their reservation and it came on the heels of Miami Art Week’s and Art Basel’s global audience that will be attending here. Echo-Hawk, 44, was their first choice, Cypress said, “because he’s very thought-provoking with his art and he’s well known throughout the country.”

The mural depicts the words “The Everglades isn’t just our passion, It’s our home and more needs to be done to protect it. Learn more about the Miccosukee Tribe at www.Everglad.es.”

It shows the strong proud face of Chief Buffalo Tiger wearing traditional Seminole patchwork clothing in vibrant shades of turquoise and red and yellow. Next to him is a Miccosukee woman also in traditional garb, her neck ringed with rows of beads. A row of patchwork runs along the top border of the mural. The adjacent image is a powerful political one as a gas-masked Native reaches out to a growling open-mouthed alligator.

The colors are a lurid toxic green, alluding to the recurrent green algae blooms that have been threatening Lake Okeechobee and the oceans on both coasts. The blooms arise from polluted water infested with fertilizer runoff that has killed wildlife, marine life and damaged Florida’s tourism and fishing industries. The artwork had to both entertain and inform as well as be brilliantly selfie-worthy for the Instagrammers, but also promote dialog about the tribe and their work as Florida environmental advocates.

“I am humbled and honored to be selected by the Miccosukee Tribe to install the mural in Wynwood,” Echo Hawk said in an email a few days after the unveiling. “I was excited to create the work that reflects their rich culture, history, and heritage, and that also illustrates their ongoing, longstanding battle to protect the Everglades. It blows my mind that I got to paint this wall and create space for the Miccosukee Tribe; not only because it’s Wynwood, but because Wynwood is in the homeland of the Miccosukee. In this era where, as indigenous people, we don’t see parity in mass media representation, it’s great to see a bold, giant wall that celebrates our complex modern identity. I hope people will be inspired to learn more about the original locals, as well as join allegiance in protecting the Everglades. We need allies!

“We wanted to pick someone who would do the best job to represent us,” said Cypress.

A member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Echo Hawk grew up in the Pawnee tribal community and in Colorado, which was the western boundary of ancestral Pawneeland. The son of a traditionally artist mother and an artistic, human rights attorney father, Bunky witnessed both art and fights for justice throughout Indian Country. His art has always carried that marriage of Indigenous culture and a larger sense of justice.

As a live painter, he has performed in major venues throughout the country raising much-needed funding for indigenous programming needs. He has worked with Nike, serving as the Design Consultant for the Nike N7 line since 2011, and has recently partnered with Pendleton Woolen Mills to create a blanket for the American Indian College Fund. Through his art and strategic partnerships, he has aided in raising millions of dollars for Indian Country.

The mural and its message will be up for a least a year. The Miccosukee hold their annual Indian Arts and Crafts Festival at their reservation on December 26 to January 1.

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“Miccosukee Heroes” Mural in Wynwood Honors Tribe and its Challenges

The post “Miccosukee Heroes:” New Mural in Wynwood Honors Tribe and its Challenges appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.

Local artists Cayla Birk has completed a large mural named “Technical Difficulties” and you can find it on the west side of the former Macy’s building, now The Culture Lab, a cultural arts center and experiential creative space which is part of CityPlace’s urban revival and new cultural agenda.

Birk’s mural transcends the confines of mixed media art that we are used to seeing, yet it is a vivacious approach to the modern world of social media we can’t escape from.

Each of the panels of Cayla Birk’s large mural in CityPlace named “Technical Difficulties:”

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Cayla Birk’s Large Mural in CityPlace Named “Technical Difficulties”

The post Huge Mural Covers the Walls of a Building in CityPlace appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.