Formally the Miami Art Museum (MAM) – the new Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has been under construction in Downtown, Miami and preparing for a grand opening scheduled to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach in December. The new Perez Art Museum is racing to the finish with stunning views of Biscayne Bay and downtown Miami – not to mention the restaurant, bar, gift shop, hanging gardens and a unique, functional front door – the PAMM is the most anticipated addition to Miami’s evolving arts and cultural habitat.
After two and a half years after breaking ground, the museum is remarkably close to being finished, more than 9o percent completed and on track for a December Art Basel debut. The Perez Art Museum is a modern and contemporary art museum dedicated to the 2o and 21st centuries, it is designed to achieve silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. The new Perez Art Museum will be an anchor of the 29-acre Museum Park overlooking Biscayne Bay and will include a public gardens and sculpture installations.
Museum Park, a vibrant mix of green space and cultural offerings, is Miami’s urban redesign vision for the area now known as Bicentennial Park. The museum is located on the northeast side of the park, bordering I-395. This vital downtown park was a catalyst for the transformation of the district and is central to the efforts to strengthen Greater Miami’s momentum as an emerging global capital. In addition to the landmark new facilities for PAMM, Museum Park is also the future site of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science.
“The opening of Pérez Art Museum Miami is a major moment in this city’s cultural history, and as part of Miami’s collecting community, it is important to us to contribute so that this city has a significant collection and public art resource.” Dennis Scholl
We took a ride on the MetroMover this weekend (adding a new stop right in front of PAMM soon) and got a great view of the construction progress:
Collection
The selection and presentation of artists, collections, and commissioned projects for PAMM is guided by the Museum’s mission to create dialogues across and through local, regional, and international contexts. Its curatorial program examines the interpretation and appropriation of cultural and political identities, economic structures, and commodities generated by Miami’s diverse population and its position as a cross-cultural hub.
The Museum also emphasizes artists and projects that engage with traditions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and is particularly attuned to the work of local artists and designers. As a young, immigrant city, Miami is a nexus for the transnational exchange of people, resources, cultures, and ideas, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami has developed its collecting and exhibition program to respond to and reflect the dynamic interchanges that shape and feed the city’s identity.
PAMM: Community Days
To celebrate, from December 4th through December 8th, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) opens it’s doors to the entire community and invites Miami-Dade County residents to visit the museum for free (with valid ID) for Community Days.
The inaugural exhibition schedule features wide-ranging roster of exhibitions examines the interpretation and appropriation of cultural and political identities, economic structures, and commodities generated by Miami’s diverse population and its position as a cross-cultural hub.
Below are Tropicult’s highlights…
LOS JAICHACKERS: Night Shade/ Solanaceae
For the opening of Pérez Art Museum Miami , LOS JAICHACKERS are debuting a new multimedia project, Night Shade/Solanaceae. This work builds on their previous performances and collaborations and responds to Miami’s unique cultural and visual landscape, which they have explored in multiple visits to the city during the last year. Night Shade/Solanaceae takes its title from a family of flowering plants indigenous to the New World. It references the history of trade, particularly the import and export of new and exotic fruits and vegetables, which linked South and Central America to Europe.
LOS JAICHACKERS’ performative project will include sculpture, video and music. It will transform the museum into a site of cultural collisions, where music and art reflect Miami’s influence as a site of exchange and metamorphosis. LOS JAICHACKERS is a collaboration between Eamon Ore-Giron and Julio Cesar Morales, artists based in Los Angeles and Phoenix, respectively. As part of their multifaceted practice they create music, film, video, sculpture, installation and performance, as well collaborate with other artists and musicians.
Producing programs that ‘trace the global DNA of emerging musical subcultures in Latin America, the border, the United States and abroad,’ LOS JAICHACKERS attempt to create a mirroring effect between local and global commerce, drawing abstract connections through North and South American histories and cultures in order to reveal the presence of powerful aesthetics in our collective subconscious. Their piece, Night Shade/Solanaceae, has been specially commissioned by PAMM for its inaugural opening and is the first program of the Museum’s new time-based arts initiative.
Ai Weiwei: According to What?
Ai Weiwei: According to What? is the first major international survey of this vital artist’s multifaceted artistic oeuvre. This exhibition reveals Ai’s practice as emerging from an ever-questioning dialogue with the social, political and cultural positions of his native China and the world at large. Ai (b. 1957) works in a range of media, including architecture and design, and this exhibition will feature work of the last 20 years, including photography and the large-scale sculptures for which the artist is best known. These sculptures, often made from modified found objects, suggest the irreverent nature of Ai’s project and reconfigure materials in new and evocative ways.
With a broad formal range, Ai has continuously challenged possible meanings and modes of art making, most recently employing the Internet and its global reach as a platform for activism and expression. His provocative and beautiful works of art and architecture are an exploration of the transformative potential of contemporary art, which he said is “not a form but a philosophy of society.”
AMERICANA
The collection of the Museum is displayed thematically within six Collection Galleries located throughout the two floors of the building. Collectively titled AMERICANA, these six galleries present artwork produced by artists working in North America, South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The bilingual title evokes North American vernacular collecting traditions, as well as a hemispheric perspective that looks across national or regional borders. This focus on the Americas serves to emphasize the strengths of the collection, while additionally seeking to reflect the diverse publics of the museum, the majority of which have cultural ties to these areas of the world.
The six galleries that make up AMERICANA are arranged thematically, each space developed in the form of a short essay, offering a focused view on a particular issue or set of preoccupations that have engaged artists from the Americas since the mid-twentieth century. These presentations include: Desiring Landscape, Sources of the Self, Formalizing Craft, Progressive Forms, Corporal Violence and Commodity Culture. Rather than organized chronologically, these spaces combine artworks produced across geographies and at various historical moments over the last eight decades. The specific pieces and themes explored in AMERICANA will change over the course of eighteen months, as these galleries are periodically re-configured to showcase new acquisitions, as well as the collection’s many other works.
Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico
The first major U.S. retrospective on Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960), the exhibition will feature the artist’s large-scale abstract paintings inspired by Brazilian and European Modernism, Baroque forms, popular culture, and the decorations of Carnival. During the early 1990s, the artist developed an unusual painting technique, in which she adhered separate images executed in acrylic paint—such as flowers, arabesques, lace patterns or peace-signs—onto canvases in a style that references collage, graffiti, and plastic decals. This practice results in richly textured surfaces that appear prematurely aged. The exhibition will include works produced over the last 25 years of the artist’s career and examine their evolution from softer, more decorative forms to harder-edged abstraction.
Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes
Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes is an exhibition project involving a series of new works generated over the past year by the Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (b. 1954). Known for his innovative adaptions of traditional Haitian iconography, which he engages in order to address contemporary social and political conditions, Duval-Carrié is presenting a series of large-scale paintings and sculptures. Contrasting his signature use of strong colors, this project presents works executed entirely in black and silver glitter.
Involving extensive research, Imagined Landscapes presents lush tropical scenes that reference specific nineteenth-century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. These paintings, by artists such as William Heade and Frederick Church, were commissioned as part of Colonial interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. The artists used pictorial effects, imagination and fictions to present the Caribbean as the “New Eden,” a fertile land of possibility. Duval-Carrié’s works translate these historical images into his own contemporary aesthetic language, in order to address the manner in which the tropics of the Caribbean and Florida continue to be sold as tropical paradises, in ways that often obscure economic and social disparities that continue to be perpetuated in these contexts.