Artist Participating in Heart Happening 2010
Gema Alava
Gema Alava, Madrid, Spain, 1973, has studied at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London and the San Francisco Art Institute, earning awards such as the Mapfre Foundation National Drawing Prize, the La Caixa Foundation Fellowship, and a Spanish Ministry of Arts and Sciences Fellowship. She moved to New York in 2001 and was awarded positions at both programs: AIM at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY, and EMERGE from Aljira-Center for Contemporary Art, NJ, which led to her first solo show in NYC in 2002, at Lance Fung Gallery. Alava’s work has been shown at the Rana Museum in Norway; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Queens Museum of the Arts, New York; the El Barrio Museum, New York; the Bronx Museum of Art, New York; and will be exhibited at the Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, in January 2011. In the Fall of 2010 her latest series of drawings will be published in a limited edition art book in collaboration with poet Jonathan Goodman. Alava works as a part-time Educator and Lecturer in the Education Departments of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York City.
Conceptual Artist Gema Alava will work with the Lotus House Women’s Shelter and New York’s Foster Pride to create “Circle of Hearts” transferring the expressions of the heart from one place to another in a unique collaborative wall installation at Heart Happening at the Margulies Warehouse.
Baby B Strings
Baby B Strings was founded by violinist Belinda Ho. Born and raised in rural Kansas, she has been playing music since the age of 5. After moving to South Florida and graduating from the University of Miami she began Baby B Strings, a professional string quartet, to promote and create opportunities for violin playing outside of traditional symphony concerts and wedding ceremonies. Repertoire includes the likes of modern composers such as Philip Glass, Mark O’Connor, and Jeremy Cohen. Baby B Strings currently hosts a concert series at the Lotus House, which features different musical artists each month, and plans to develop a series of string quartet performances in other nontraditional venues
Baby B Strings will be spontaneously performing the works of contemporary composers recognized for promoting the versatility of the modern string quartet.
Natasha Duwin
Natasha Duwin was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has since lived in New York, Tokyo and Miami. In her work, Duwin explores the ideas of female-ness and womanhood, and how to construct a strong female identity without falling into the traps of tradition and expectations. Duwin uses non-traditional materials, such as metals and organic matter, in traditionally "feminine" techniques, such as weaving and embroidery. She has shown extensively over the last couple of years, is included in several prominent collections, holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Florida International University, and is an Artist-in-Residence at ArtCenter South Florida (800 Lincoln Road, Studio 107, Miami Beach).
Miami based artist Natasha Duwin will use individual rope-like strands fashioned from old clothing donated to the Lotus House Women’s Shelter to create “Shedding the Shadows”, a unified tapestry of renewed life form.
David Ellis
David Ellis is an artist born into a family immersed in music. His paintings are often recorded in a form of digital time-lapse animation he calls motion painting. Like jazz, these works provide Ellis with an opportunity to combine ideas with collaborators and work solo within a form that promotes improvisation and spontaneity. Ellis often stages events when exhibiting his motion paintings, inviting musicians, performers, and sound artists to interpret the work live. His motion painting, Paint on Trucks in a World in Need of Love was exhibited at MoMA. Ellis further explores sound with kinetic installations that produce analogue sequences in rhythm. His latest work, often in collaboration with composer Roberto Lange, deconstructs the inner workings of player pianos to create sprawling sculptures that automatically play percussive rhythms with recycled typewriters, buckets, bottles and cans. Recent projects have been exhibited at The Huntington Museum of Art, ICA Philadelphia, Rice University Gallery, and PS1/MoMA.
Before a live audience on location at Heart Happening at the Margulies Warehouse, multi media artist David Ellis will create a large-scale mural painting, which mimics the ebb and flow of the journey of life that unites us all.
Ben Fain
Ben Fain was born in Wimbledon, U.K. He is best known for his large-scale public performances and parades. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He earned a full merit scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (along with the art collective Dos Pestañeos), a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency Grant. He co-ran Alogon Gallery, an independent art space in Chicago, from 2007-2009, was adjunct faculty at the School of the Art institute of Chicago in 2008 will be teaching at Northwestern University Art Department in fall of 2010.
Conceptual artist, Ben Fain and Uncle Merril Ferris, an expert on the Mayan calendar, will transform the Lotus House Thrift Store truck into a parade float/mediation center based on an ancient South Indian practice and lead small groups in short meditations focused on the power of community.
Steve Johnson
C. Steven Johnson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1968, during a rare earthquake.He has traveled much of the world with a small guitar and a notebook. He studied Fine Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute. He has since lived in New York City, but also France, London, Vermont, Czech Republic (Moravia Castle Art Residency 1996), Virginia (Charlottesville Outdoors Film Guerilla 2002), Chicago (Songs for Temporary People, film score 2002), Chile (Small Found Paintings 2003) and now Beaufort, SC. His most recent shows include: Fantastic Nobodies, Operation Shitstorm Berlin 2008 & America's Most Unwanted NYC 2009 & Pandora Miami 2009. Mr. Johnson had his first conceptual retrospective: The Museum of Modern Musical Men in 2006 in Brooklyn. He is a member of the poerty group Obstram Slabess. He currently is the Enrichment Director at E.C. Montessori and Grade School on Lady's Island, S.C. Mr. Johnson is also a musician and performs regularly with his band The Runs.
Performance + Conceptual artist Steve Johnson will transform himself into a traveling poet for the Heart Happening at the Margulies Warehouse, reciting poems “from the heart.”
Trajal Harrell
Trajal Harrell’s choreographic works have been seen at The New Museum, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, PS122, Art Basel-Miami Beach, The Margulies Art Warehouse, and internationally at Melkweg (Amsterdam), CNDC Angers, The International Contemporary Dance Conference and Performance Festival (Bytom, Poland), In Transit Festival (Berlin), PRISMA (Mexico City), Working Title Festival (Brussels), and Festival Artdanthé (Vanves, France). He remains active in many artist-led curatorial and publishing initiatives at Movement Research and Danspace Project; and in 2008 he was appointed as co-artistic mentor for that year’s DanceWeb program at Impulstanz Vienna International Dance Festival. He has created four evening length works: Notes on Less than Zero (2004), Showpony (2007), Quartet for the End of Time (2008), and Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (S) (2009). Most recently, he was featured as performer and artistic assistant in Meg Stuart’s Auf den Tisch and worked as choreographer and dramaturgical assistant for visual artist Wengachi Mutu’s Stone Ihiga ---- both projects for Performa 2009. Twenty Looks…(S) will be performed at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston November 6-7; and his next work, continuing the Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series, will premiere at The Kitchen in New York City in February 2011.
Trajal Harrell will present a contemporary form of the historical temple dance drawing upon the settings of Indian, Greek and roman Classicism.
Roberto Lange
Roberto Lange is a sound artist born in South Florida and is the son of Ecuadorean immigrants. Growing up, he was surrounded by tropical heat and hurricanes that represented the rich colors of sound and people living in South Florida. The sound of bass and late-night “peñas” in and around his house carved a deep foundation into his interest for sound and the things producing them. The “pause-tape” and a karaoke machine gave birth to his first sounds and music. With whatever he could grab, guitars, tape-loops, hand claps and voice, Roberto was slowly revealing his way of hearing things. Roberto’s musical pieces are adjusted and aligned with the moment they exist in and are constructed through improvised performances and accidental happenings. The music and sounds themselves have been over the years documented and compiled together by him and a few record labels most notably the label Arepaz based out of Miami. These “albums” are extensions of the after thought of what these songs do together as a group. The albums are based on themes that carry weight and maybe criticize an idea as an observation. Over the last four years Lange has collaborated with prominent visual and sound artist, David Ellis, to compose a new series of kinetic sound sculptures. Currently, Lange is working with famed music producer Guillermo Scott Herren in the group Savath & Savalas
Resonating his voice through a speaker floating overhead on an 8-foot weather balloon, Roberto Lange will perform an excerpt from “Helado Negro” a songbook written by the artist as a love letter derived from his personal memories and family history.
Ruben Millares
Ruben Millares is a first generation Cuban American musician, composer, visual artist and entrepreneur born in Miami, Florida. He began playing drums at the age of 3½ and soon moved to the guitar, which has remained his passion ever since. With his band Smiling Gums, he has been performing around the country for the past 10 years and this year toured in Europe. His music incorporates Afro Cuban rhythms and improvisation in rock n roll. Millares is also a visual artist, creating ethereal abstract landscape Sumi Ink drawings, and working in mixed media, exploring the interplay of man-made and natural materials in Zen inspired sculptural installations.
Artist Ruben Millares will set the tone for the Heart Happening at the entrance to the Margulies Warehouse leading a drumming circle through Afro-Caribbean and Haitian inspired beats.
The Minsky Sisters
Taking their lead from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Anita Berber to the tunes of jazz greats, like Cab Calloway and King Oliver, the Minsky Sisters have been scandalizing the international tap community for two years with their sensational brand of brisk and brilliantly beautiful tap majesty. The tap mavens continuously bring their excellence to audiences throughout New York City, performing at such parties and venues like Dances of Vice, The NYC Food & Wine Festival, New York Burlesque Festival, Foreign Affairs, The Salon, Duane Park, Public Assembly, Galapagos, Gemini & Scorpio, Jalopy Theater, Cercle Rouge, Montauk Club, and The Players Club, among others, as well as performing across the nation from Providence to Los Angeles. They've been featured in the pages of the New York Times, NY Post, Zelda Magazine, AM New York, and Providence Pulse, as well as on the big screen in "Gelber & Manning in Pictures." They are currently working with the performing arts collective The Champagne Riot, which aims to bring 1920s vaudeville back on the stage.
The Minsky Sisters, 1920s-inspired vaudevillian tap artists, will perform spontaneously throughout the evening at Heart Happening. Wearing period appropriate showgirl costumes, including large featherhead pieces, rhinestone bodices, bloomers, garters and stockings, The Minsky's will maneuver large feather clad fans into pulsating “hearts”.
Jen Zakrezewski
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Jen is a Brooklyn based performance artist and photographer. In 2007 she received her BFA from NYU. She has exhibited and performed nationally, and has worked with a number of artists, including Brock Enright (720, 2003, and Forest, 2005), Ron Athey(Untitled Project, 2006) and was instrumental in bringing Vaginal Davis' 1920s-themed club Bricktops to the city (Bricktops Takes Manhattan, 2006). She has shown work at Cynthia Broan Gallery (NY), Spark Contemporary Art Space (NY), English Kills Art Gallery (NY), South Shore Arts Center (MA), Wallspace Gallery (NY), and The Corcoran Gallery (DC), among others. She recently sat on a panel at the The 2009 Feminist Art Project in Los Angeles, which included artists Martha Wilson, Johanna Freuh, and Michelle Winowiak. She is currently collaborating with artist Kristen Rhea van Liew on an assortment of performances, as well as performing on the international
Cabaret scene as their alter egos, The Minsky Sisters.
Performance artist Jen Zakrzewski will engage the audience in an interactive performance piece called “Workout”, playing on the phenomenon of workout television and satirizing her role as an aerobic instructor. Accompanied by a team of backup dancers, her work is sure to improve your heart health and love life!
Miami Poetry Collective
The Miami Poetry Collective was founded by Campbell McGrath at a plastic table in front of Zeke’s Roadhouse Bar in November 2008. The group’s twenty-five members range from national prize-winning writers to never before published emerging poets and include visual artists as well, joined together by their shared passion for language. Members of the Miami Poetry Collective have been known to set up a store to peddle their poetry on the street, writing poetry on demand based on topics suggested bypassersby. The store challenges the notion that poetry has no connection to everyday life and seeks to demystify the writing process by de-privatizing the author-at-work. The Poem Depot has become a regular feature of Wynwood’s Second Saturday Art Walk, and has appeared in a number of other venues including the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Book Fair, in addition to being featured on WLRN’s radio program, “Under the Sun.” The MPC publishes anddistributes The Cent Journal Series: A Modern Anthology of Miami Poets, a regularly appearing, closed-submission journal, and produces an on-going, multi-voiced poem on Twitter—search for @mpc140. Many of the group’s activities are in collaboration with the University of Wynwood (universityofwynwood.com), a local arts-advocacy organization. For more information, visit MiamiPoetryCollective.com
The Miami Poetry Collective, working with the audience, will spontaneously compose poems that explore the heart-based themes of Heart Happening at the Margulies Warehouse.
Primary Flight
Primary Flight is a collaborative curatorial organization dedicated to the production of site-specific, street level, mural installations. Since its inception in 2007, Primary Flight has brought together over 100 of the world’s most influential Street Artists to install their bodies of work live in the streets of Wynwood. These projects provide a catalyst for burgeoning arts communities.
Brandon Opalka
Painting is a mix of cerebral meditation and a romantic desire to visualize beauty. The intricate details and shades of colors reflect my beginnings in street art and an appreciation for landscape painting in a historical context. My background as a graffiti artist influences the bold, graphic shapes in my work, while traditional landscape paintings become a blueprint for movement and light.
Santiago Rubino
Inspired as much by dreams as by chance encounters with complete strangers, his beautiful creatures with their pensive and melancholy expressions, evoke feelings of love, sadness and longing. Dark haired figures dominate sparse backgrounds giving the impression of characters alone in the desert or even outer space. Spanning time as well as space, Rubino draws on sepia tones paper and attires his subjects in anything from Victorian dresses to S&M spike hell black leather boots. These juxtapositions give his works a timeless quality that adds to the eeriness and universality of their appeal.
Bask
Bask is the moniker of one, Ales Bask Hostomsky, who along with his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Florida and began to soak up America’s popular iconic imagery along with the sun. He quickly began to notice similarities between the communistic iconic propaganda from his youth and the consumer advertising of his teens. Bask soon discovered that they were simply, two sides of the same coin, Each vying for our short lived attention spans, all the while selling us (or telling us?) anything and everything from Marxism to McDonalds. Seeking conspiracies and finding them embedded in the popular iconography of the mass media, Bask began painting bold, media critical broadsides to assuage his fear of being manipulated. A fear cultivated in a repressive regime, had now returned, but to the most unlikely and safest of places – The American living room. Bask’s imagery has appeared in countless publications in both advertising and editorial capacities. His work has been shown in the Florida International Museum as well as the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, which also has his work in its permanent collection.
Tatiana Suarez
A 24-year old Miami native, is a freelance artist/illustrator who also dabbles in design. Her work combines a sense of fairness and charm, evident in the stylized form of the girls she portrays. Like include, art nouveau, fashion magazines, zombie flicks and animal planet.
Cruz
Franky Cruz is an electrically charged force wrapped in a tornado of artistic fury. Born in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, currently living in Hialeah amongst bad traffic and delicious coffee. Franky Cruz allows his small sketches and giant murals speak for themselves. All aspects of the day influence and inspire the dreamlike works of madness he pours into every piece of paper and every piece of concrete.
Primary Flight graffiti artists will paint live street art from the heart at the Margulies Warehouse.
Marina Rosenfeld
Marina Rosenfeld works in sound, music composition, performance and installation, with a significant related practice as an experimental turntablist. Since the mid-nineties, her works have been widely commissioned by institutions in Europe and North America, including solo presentations at the Whitney Museum (Whitney Biennials 2002 and 2008); Liverpool Biennial 2010; Performa Biennial 2009; Stedelijk Museum; Tate Modern; The Kitchen; and Creative Time; and festivals including the Holland Festival (Amsterdam), Ultima (Oslo), Äänen Lumo (Helsinki), Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica (Linz), Wien Modern (Vienna), Musikprotokoll (Graz), Pro Musica Nova (Bremen), Maerz Musik (Berlin), Mutek (Montreal), and Los Angeles' Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, among many others. She has created scores for the Merce Cunningham and Douglas Dunn dance companies and has collaborated with artists including George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Lee Ranaldo, DJ Olive, and Anthony Coleman, among many others. Rosenfeld has been a member of the faculty at Bard College's Milton Avery School of the Arts in New York since 2003, and co-chair of its program in Music/Sound since 2007.
Multi media artist Marina Rosenfeld will create a two-sided vinyl LP incorporating voice from the Lotus House Women’s Shelter and other musical materials. Rosenfeld will weave together these gathered elements of audio into one poetic composition, which she will perform live on DJ turntables.
Jason Schmidt
Artist, Jason Schmidt explores the notion of what it means to be a functioning artist with his ongoing series of artist portraits. For the past ten years, he has been traveling the globe documenting contemporary artists from emerging to well established, in the interest of capturing them amidst the intimacy of their creative process. For Schmidt, gaining such rare access to these artists at work in their studios provides him an almost voyeuristic perspective on a practice often experienced by his subjects, in utter solitude. Through this unique perspective his camera lens serves as witness to the birth of creativity and his resulting documentation further conveys his passion for “making art out of art.” Jason Schmidt’s first monograph aptly titled “Artists” was released in 2007 by Steidl Press. This very ambitious project featured 131 artists from all over the world. Jason Schmidt graduated from Columbia University in 1991 with a degree in Art History. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, and V Magazine. Schmidt lives and works in New York City.
Photographer Jason Schmidt will once again act as resident documentarian by recording this year’s Heart Happening at the Margulies Warehouse from start to finish. In keeping with the fleeting and impermanent nature of a happening event the formal documentation is the only true evidence that it once existed aside from what lives within our memories.
Lee Walton
Often regarded as an “Experientialist,” Lee Walton's work takes many forms- from drawings, video, net-art, public performances, social architectures and more. Walton has received many accolades from museum funded projects (Reykjavik Art Museum of Iceland, ICA Boston, Rhizome at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY), public commissions (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park) national and international exhibitions (The Powerplant Gallery, Performa ’05, Island 6, Shanghai, China, The City Museum of Ljubljana) Honors (CAA Centennial, S.J. Truman Award, 8th Havana Biennial of Cuba and the Headlands Center for the Arts) and collections (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Martin Z. Margulies Warehouse, Columbus Museum, GA). Walton also curates exhibitions and events (Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), Conflux, (NY) and lectures extensively on his practice. Walton’s work is represented by Krashaur Galleries (NY). He is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Conceptual-Performance Artist Lee Walton will collaborate with Miami based dancers to create “Straight From the Heart” with silent sound and dance at Heart Happening.
TM Sisters
Monica Lopez De Victoria, 29, and Tasha Lopez De Victoria, 27, grew up in Miami and collaborate under the name TM Sisters. They work in the mediums of video, digital video performance, VJing, collage, social experiments, zines, clothing, installations, and interactive video created along with their brother Samuel. Their do-it-yourself ethic started by being home schooled together by their parents. They were raised with intense psychological and spiritual discussions regarding behavior, relationships, creativity, and truth. The sisters’ work has been included in the international exhibitions "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium" curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum, and Gunnar B. Kvaran, the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and PERFORMA 07. Their work has been seen and written about in publications like L’Officiel magazine, The Guardian, STEP Inside Design, the New York Times, Vogue Italia, and on the cover of ARTnews magazine for its 2007 “25 Trendsetters” article.
The TM Sisters with their brother, Samuel Lopez De Victoria, are programming and building an interactive video game for the Heart Happening centered around the idea of the heart, and the power, emotion and energy it holds.
Agustina Woodgate
Agustina Woodgate is an interdisciplinary artist who uses a wide range of media, including photography, installation, sculpture, video, and performance to create enchanted worlds. Her work investigates the encounter between childhood dreams and adult socialization, and how innocence, magic, and the fantastical configure our relationships to our objects, behaviors, selves, and stories. Fueled by an endless captivation with process, Agustina discovers how we naturally and unnaturally compose our rituals, memories, traditions, and narratives through the materials and places around us. Occasionally creating illogical scenarios that appear in an otherwise realistic or even “normal” setting and using whatever material suits her purpose, she constructs surreal exteriors in interior spaces and vice versa, exploring the relation between everyday objects and the overarching narratives that condition our unnatural relationship to the natural world. Agustina discovers subsequence as the continual product of an unfolding narrative process—the story of her own oeuvre. She is always in the midst of adventuring another tale, as each new piece patterns the fictions we all share. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, she now makes her home in Miami, FL. She can be found at www.agustinawoodgate.com and at the Spinello Gallery in Miami, FL.
For Heart Happening, Agustina Woodgare will bring her “department project” to the public, fashioning recycled loved teddy bears into hand-sewn, on of a kind, designer rugs.
Antonia Wright
Antonia Wright is a Miami-born artist who has lived and traveled all over the world. Her work employs photography, poetry, performance, video art, installation, sculpture, and the interaction between these forms to question the world around her. She received an M.F.A. in poetry from the New School University in New York City and is a graduate from the International Center of Photography’s General Studies Program. She has worked for Clyde Butcher, Patrick Demarchelier among others and she was recently featured in New York Magazine’s article, “The New Talent Show: Pot-Luck Culture”, on upcoming artists. Antonia’s work has been in many exhibitions including the Envoy Gallery in New York City, “Slideluck Potshow” in McCaren Park Pool, The DUMBO Art Center’s “Down Under the Bridge Festival” in Brooklyn, and Amnesty International’s exposé on Cuban-American Artists at A+D Museum in Los Angeles. Wright is currently an artist in residence at the ArtCenter South Florida. She began her artistic career as a clown at children’s birthday parties. Miami based conceptual artist Antonia Wright will invite the audience to experience “Heart Beat Bed” providing a multi-sensory experience of positive feelings of safety, home, love, and profound peace derived from an interactive process of light sound, imagery and vibrations. Wright will also lead a group in “Laughing Yoga” at Heart Happening at the Margulies Warehouse.
Wet Heat Project
Filmmakers Grela Orihuela (producer) and Bill Bilowit (director) founded Wet Heat Project LLC in 2007 to capture the unique stories behind the scenes of Miami's unprecedented evolution into an international contemporary art nexus. These stories are told with spirited documentary films, web destinations and events that reveal and evoke an in-depth experience of Miami artists and art professionals. In 2008 the Project launched a free, expanding online network of documentary short films at www.wetheat.tv, and in 2009 premiered the first of its "miamiHeights" series of feature film documentaries at The Brooklyn Museum in New York and lo Schermo dell'Arte Festival in Florence. Wet Heat Project produced the longform official documentary of the 2009 Lotus House Shelter art happening fundraiser "Hope Blossoms" (now on DVD; all proceeds benefit the Shelter), and will also produce the official film of the 2010 event, "Heart Happening".
