You Are Here—
The phrase “You Are Here” is commonly seen on directional signs in commercial buildings, indicating your current location in the surrounding architecture and urban design. However, in this particular case, we want to be present in place.
The artists in this exhibition are both conscious of the here and now by simply working here, but also by the historical mark they left—they’re still here. They inhabit this place and commit to it, leaving behind a network of connections both current and in the past.
You Are Here is curated in conjunction with Making Miami in the Design District, a project celebrating the artists and cultural producers that helped make Miami the international art city it is today.
Fabian Peña
Fabián Peña was born in Havana, Cuba in 1976, and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. Fabián’s work adopts the Shakespearean interpretation of a corporeal “pound of flesh,” acknowledging beauty in the grotesque. He uses animal fragments such as cockroach wings, crushed house flies, and hand-scripted text to inform man-made objects and environments.
Vickie Pierre
Vickie Pierre is a multimedia artist, born and bred in Brooklyn, New York where she graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. The artist currently lives and works in Miami, Florida.
Frances Trombly
Frances Trombly born in Miami, FL and lives and works in Miami, FL. Trombly received an BFA Degree from Maryland Institute, College of Art, 1998. Her work considers the relationship between textiles and painting, exposing history and labor by deconstructing and liberating the canvas. She continues her art practice celebrating the importance of fiber as a material in contemporary art.
Selected solo exhibitions include “All This Time” (2020), Emerson Dorsch, Miami, Florida; “Material and it’s Making” (2016). Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California; “Frances Trombly: Everything and Nothing” (2011), Moore College of Art & Design, Goldie Paley Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. Selected group exhibitions include “#Fail” (2022), Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; “Illusions are Real, Manif d’art, Québec City Biennale” (2022), Quebec City, Canada; “united states” (2012), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
Trombly received ArtPace Residency (2022) San Antonio, TX; Oolite Arts Residency (2019) Miami Beach, FL; Hambidge Center Residency (2019) Rabun Gap, GA; Ellies, Oolite Arts Grant (2019)
Chris Byrd
Christopher Byrd was born in Melbourne, Florida, and lives and works in Miami, Florida. Byrd received a Master of Fine Art from American University (2004) Washington, DC, and a Bachelor of Fine Art (1992) from the Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. The artist’s work is composed of a rigorously structured geometric abstract language that is simultaneously hard-edged, ordered and rational, yet fluid, lively and emotional. With such a dualistic approach, the artist explores multi-faceted ideas of Beauty through a dynamic allegorical language. Selected solo exhibitions include “ From Observation” (2020) Dimensions Variable, Miami, Florida, and “Adventureland” (2006) David Castillo, Miami, Florida. Selected group exhibitions include “Interaction” (2019) Art and Cultural Center, Hollywood, Florida “I See The Spotlight In You” (2018) Emerson Dorsch, Miami, Florida and “Searching For Love And Fire” (2006) David Castillo, Miami, Florida. Collections include the Watkins Collection at American University, Washington, DC, and Saks Fifth Avenue, San Francisco, California
Karla Kantorovich
Karla Kantorovich is a mixed media artist from Mexico City-based in Miami, FL. She works with paintings, textiles, hand-made paper, and assemblages, leaning into the importance of texture and dimensionality to explore renewal. Karla’s art is a testament to the transformative power of nature. She brings the outside world into our realms, allowing us to explore the profound togetherness that binds us to the natural environment. By deconstructing and reassembling sustainably sourced materials, Karla creates a visual language that speaks to the ephemeral nature of life, the beauty of decay, and the intricate layers that compose our collective story.
Kantorovich received the Ellies Creator Award 2021 from Oolite Arts, leading to her immersive art installation “AMATE” at Piero Atchugarry Gallery in 2022. She also received an Honorable Mention at the XIX Bienal Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, exhibiting at the Museo Rufino Tamayo and the MACO Museum of Arte Contemporaneo in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has showcased her work nationally and internationally, including at the XIX International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence, the MFA Exhibition at the Frost Art Museum, the Mexican Consulate in Miami, and the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach.
Kantorovich holds a Master of Fine Arts from Florida International University. Actively engaging with the community is of utmost importance to her; she works as a teaching artist aiming to inspire, connect, and provoke meaningful dialogues, embodying the potential for regeneration and growth.
Charo Oquet
Oquet has had numerous solo exhibitions in Museums and galleries around the world such as the Bass Museum, Miami Beach; Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca, Convento de Santo Domingo, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain ( curated by Antonio Zaya) and Oquet’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, Museum of Latin American Art. Long Beach, Ca, 2017; Gaga Now! , Art, Race, and Fluidity in Dominican Republic and Haiti, Martin E. Segal Theatre, CUNY, New York, 2016; 1st. Asuncion Biennial, Salazar Museum, Asuncion, Paraguay, 2015; Be.Bop European Body Politics , Spiritual Revolutions & the Scramble for Africa: Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin Germany and Art Labour Archives, 2015; 1st Afiriperfoma Biennial Live Art Festival in Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2013; Art, Religion and Politics, Pavillion of (2005) curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, Mami Watta, curated by Henry Drewal at the Fowler Museum at UCLA,(2008); Subliminals, Beijing , China; (2007); Away, at the UNESCO Head Quarters – Paris (2006); After Columbus.com, Kunstnerne Hus, Oslo, Norway, (2003); V Biennal del Caribe’03, ’01, Museo de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo; En Ruta PR’02, M&M Projects Puerto Rico, curated by Antonio Zaya; Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, (CAAM) Gran Canarias, Spain as well as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, N.Z.
Onajide Shabaka
Onajide Shabaka, is an multidisciplinary cultural practitioner and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. Through a well developed research based walking practice working both outdoors and in the studio Shabaka explores the environment and its biology allowing site specific histories and the human influenced environment reveal hidden or untold narratives mostly from the mid 1800s to today.
Solo exhibitions: “Her touch smooths rough waters,” site specific commission, MOCA Plaza, N. Miami, FL, “On the edge of tomorrows…,” (2022) and “Alosúgbe: a journey across time,” (2019) Emerson Dorsch, Miami, Florida; “Floridian Lacunae,” Art and Culture Center/Hollywood, Hollywood, Florida (2019). Group exhibitions: “On Samara’s Wing,” Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, Pembroke Pines, Florida (2021); “Still Life,” The Franklin Outdoors, Chicago, Illinois (2022). Artist Residency Awards: Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas; Everglades National Park, Florida; IS Projects Bookmaking Residency, Miami, Florida. Art Collections: FIU Frost Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Miami- Dade Art in Public Places; Arturo Mosquera Family Collection. Grant awards: DVCAI Residency Grant, Miami, FL; Florida; Wavemaker Grant Locust Projects, Miami, Florida; Oolite Arts Ellies Grant, Miami, Florida. Shabaka is represented by Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, Florida. Shabaka was awarded an MFA from Vermont College of the Fine Arts.
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova (b. 1973 Havana, Cuba) is an Artist, Curator, Co-founder and Co-director of Dimen- sions Variable (DV) and Fulano Inc. His work has been exhibited widely at Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Arts Center and White Box in New York; Museo de Bellas Artes and Factoria Habana in Havana, Cuba; ZONA MACO Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, Mexico; Capri Palace and Villa Lena in Italy; Prosjektrom Normanns in Stavanger, Norway; PAMM, Frost Museum, The Bass, MOCA, DV and Locust Projects in Miami. His work is in many public and private collections around the world and institutions like PAMM, Frost Museum, Cintas Foundation, and The Bass. He has been written about in the New York Times, The Miami Herald, Art Nexus, Arte al Dia, Artforum, Artsy, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperaller- gic, The Miami Rail, and Miami Magazine. Since founding DV in 2009, he has organized and curated many projects by local and international emerging artists.
Joyce Billet
Joyce Billet is a French-American artist living and working in Miami, FL. Her background in architecture has encouraged her to play with material and scale in an effort to mix the sensations of painting and sculpture. Adhering to a strong craft tradition, she employs plywood as her main material and challenges the evolutionary trajectory it has undergone in the process. Billet embodies each piece with value and meaning, and in doing so, the highly industrialized plywood once stripped of identity and connection to nature, is repurposed in a second life. Billet graduated with a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Pratt Institute in 2008, and later received a Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University in 2010. Before committing to her artistic practice full-time, Billet worked as an architect. She has been featured in multiple exhibitions between Miami and New York, working with curators such as Karen Grimson, Omar Lopez Chahoud, Heather Darcy Bandhari, and others.
Francisco Masó
Francisco Masó (b. Havana, 1988) is an AfroLatinx visual artist living and working in Miami. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Stage Design from the Instituto Superior de Arte (2014) and is a graduate of both the Behavior Art School (2009) and the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts (2007). Maso’s artwork delves into the contemporary understanding of socially shaped “unconscious behaviors” and challenges what is accepted by society as natural, necessary, and normal. He examines the concept of power and the relationships between blackness, civil rights, and the police system through the lens of his personal experiences in Cuba and the United States.
T. Eliott Mansa
T. Eliott Mansa (b. 1977, Miami, FL) is a multidisciplinary artist creating assemblages, paintings, and sculptures that incorporate the aesthetic of amalgamation found in visionary Southern vernacular sculpture. Mansa’s intention is to trigger the radical imagination of viewers, encouraging them to subvert the status quo and find socio-political agency in their own communities. Mansa attended the Yale School of Art (2013) and received his MFA from CUNY Hunter College (2018).
In 2019, he received a Creator Award from Oolite Arts and the Miami Foundation, and in 2020 had his debut solo presentation at LnS Gallery titled, For Those Gathered in the Wind, (December 2, 2020 – February 27, 2021) a sobering exhibition centered around themes Black mourning and grief in response to racism and extrajudicial violence. Awarded residencies include the five-week Home + Away residency through Oolite Arts at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas (March 2021), and studio at Oolite Arts in Miami Beach, FL (2020 – 2022). He is currently an Artist in Residence at Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, FL, and his work forms part of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Liene Bosquê
Liene Bosquê is a visual artist and art educator based in Miami. Bosquê’s installations, sculptures, site-specific projects, as well as social engaged practice works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States; at MoMA PS1 in New York, Frost Art Museum in Miami, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, among other places. Her artworks were also included in international exhibitions in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, and South Korea. Bosquê is artist in residence at Oolite Arts 2023/24 in Miami. In 2019 Bosquê received the Ellies Creator Award to present HamacaS. This socially engaged project was shown at Museum of Contemporary Art of North Miami in February 2020. Liene Bosquê holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from the São Paulo State University, and a BA in Architecture and Urbanism from Mackenzie University in Brazil, where she is from.
Marisa Telleria
Born in Nicaragua, Telleria moved to the United States in 1978. In 1993, she earned a BFA from Florida International University in Miami and in 1996, a MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, both magna cum laude, after receiving several awards and distinguished fellowships. She has lived and worked as a professional artist in Washington DC, New York City, Managua and Miami. Her work has been shown in solo as well as group exhibitions in museums and galleries in the US, Latin America and Europe. Selected museum shows are The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Albright Knox Gallery, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Frost Museum of Art, The Perez Art Museum and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Her work is represented in several private collections and in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Women in the Arts both in Washington DC, the Frost Museum of Art in Miami, Fl, and the Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC. Her work has also been included in biennials at the Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, the Contemporary Museum, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Fundación OrtizGurdian, Managua, Nicaragua. She currently lives and works in Miami.
Robert Huff
Born in 1945 in Kalamazoo, MI, Robert Huff grew up on the west coast of Florida in a family of builders who spent their spare time hunting, camping, and fishing. These activities were to fuel his passion for the man-made and the natural worlds. After earning his MFA from the University of South Florida in 1968, he moved to Miami to accept the position of sculpture professor in the visual arts department of the then Miami-Dade Community College South Campus (now Miami Dade College Kendall Campus). In 1979 he became chair of the department, a position he held until he retired in 2005. Over the years he exhibited widely with his work included in various public and private collections. He received numerous individual artists grants and public commissions. He took part in residencies and exchanges including two trips to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. He loved to travel and explore and took immense pleasure in the natural environment. He thought of himself as a landscape artist, but his was a personal landscape that he abstracted and filled with various impressions and memories. Materials driven, Huff delighted in the challenges of new products and processes. He had a great appreciation for problem solving and was skilled at adapted new techniques. His mastery of a broad range of media provided him the freedom and flexibility to work in a cross-disciplinary manner to formulate his ideas. Art critic and historian Helen Kohen once referred to him as a “colorist, architect, inventor, chart maker, tracker.”
Over the years, he built a number of three-dimensional tower pieces in wood and in metal. Towers also appear in his two-dimensional work. In the natural world, man-made towers like watch towers, fire towers, bell towers, shot towers, and cooling towers, sentinel or guard structures often function as navigational tools providing critical direction or orientation. Guard loosely references many towers that Huff had seen or steered by, but may also draw from his fascination with wooden crab traps.
Lynne Golob Gelfman
Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944-2020) was born in Waukegan, IL and grew up in New York. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, (BA, 1966) and the School of the Arts, Columbia University, (MFA, 1968). She taught art at the Dalton School from 1968 until 1972, the year that she and her husband started a flower farm outside Bogotá, and moved to Miami, an import gateway for the flowers. For Gelfman, who had loved Bogotá as an American Field Service student in 1961, the culture and landscape of Colombia as well as the diverse, subtropical world of Miami, are important influences, along with her strong ties to New York. In Miami, she taught at various colleges and universities, including Florida International University (FIU), University of Miami (UM), and Miami Dade Community College North (MDCC). She was a dedicated arts educator at the Barnyard Children’s Art Collective in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami for fifteen years and was passionate about providing access to the arts to children from diverse backgrounds and communities.
Ruben Millares + Antonia Wright
Ruben Millares was born in Miami, Florida in 1980. As a visual artist he is medium agnostic as he attempts to define balance as a concept. Through the use of sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, print‐making, painting, music and video he is able to capture the essence of an idea without limitation. For Millares time, more than an inspiration, is a powerful raw material. As an artist with a formal educational training as a Certified Public Accountant and Financial Planner, as well as in art and music, Millares is in a constant search for the fusion between practicality and imagination. Informed by two opposite worlds, his work gives an impression of great poetry with a serious yet playful airiness.
Antonia Wright is a Cuban-American artist born in 1979 in Miami, Florida. Wright received her MFA in Poetry from The New School in New York City as well as at the International Center of Photography for photo and video. She has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad and has participated in artist’s residencies both nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include shows at The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., The Perez Art Museum Miami, Pioneer Works in New York, The Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Spinello Projects in Miami, FL, Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, The National Gallery of Art in Nassau, and Ping Pong in Basel, Switzerland. In April 2012, she became and founded the first artist-in-residence at the Lotus House Shelter in Overtown, Miami. She recently won a 2019-2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium Award and was a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship finalist awarded to artists with Cuban heritage. She is represented by Spinello Projects in Miami, FL and affiliated with Luis De Jesus Gallery Los Angeles. Wright’s work has been presented in publications including The New York Times, Artforum’s Critics’ Picks, Art In America, Hyperallergic, i-D, New York Magazine, Daily News, Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and The Art Newspaper.
