The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU, presents Contemporary Families in Miami: A Photo Album, an interactive project between Lorna Otero and South Florida residents. Otero, a Puerto Rican artist who also works as a theater and television producer, utilizes her talents to construct a tree in one of the museum’s galleries that extends from floor to ceiling. The leaves of this tree feature dozens of photographs taken by South Florida families engaged in shared activities such as daily meals, family outings and other routines.

To create these leaves, the artist is seeking photographs to include in the project. Families are encouraged to submit photographs featuring shared family activities.

The artist also encourages the public to visit the museum to view the resulting exhibition and to participate in its accompanying interactive components. Conceived as an ongoing project, the exhibition will allow for some of the photos to be taken inside the gallery by visitors of the museum during set times. A weekend long interactive performance by selected visitors will recreate family activities, such as shared family time over dinner and a living room setting in the first floor café space of the museum. Although many feel the demands of contemporary life decrease “family time,” this exhibition strives to create and capture the essence of shared family moments within the walls of the museum.

This exhibition also includes the artist’s interpretations and appropriations of famous female artists and their struggles with being an artist and societal and familial expectations. This latest photographic series includes such artists as Marietta Robusti, Lavinia Fontana, Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Lilly Martin Spencer and Leonora Carrington.

An earlier version of this project, Family’s Photos curated by Laura Bravo at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo MAC in Puerto Rico included photographs from families all over the world. With Otero’s latest version at the Frost Art Museum, the project will begin to travel from city to city with the objective of including family photographs of each city’s local population.

Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera, PhD & Willy Castellanos, Art Historian), this exhibition serves as an interactive community art project and as a research strategy that explores the collective images of contemporary families living in a multicultural city.

Please click here for more information on how to submit photos.