Rcs: Rocking Chair Sessions

Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, a native Floridian, has lived and worked in Miami, FL since 2009. She is an artist, educator and community organizer. She works across performance, installation, sound, sculpture, photography, and video within a wide variety of contexts including nightclubs, gardens, bathrooms, empty lots and fire stations; as well as, museums, commercial galleries and non-profit art spaces. https://www.feleciacarlisleart.com/

Milly Cardoso was born and raised in Miami, Florida and is the Director and Curator for the University of Miami Gallery in the Wynwood Art District. Prior to joining University of Miami, she worked for the Miami Art Museum (Pérez Art Museum, Miami) and the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Private Collection.

Sammi McLean seeks out a particular sense of longing that seems impossible to satiate, bringing that which feels absent to the surface through the act of creating. In some ways, her work functions as the only physical tie that she has to significant people, places, or things that have gone. While the subject matter has transformed over time, the need to expose that yearning and resurrect what’s been lost remains. https://www.sammimclean.com/

Gabriela Gamboa is a visual artist working with a broad range of media, including photography, video and performance, sound and printmaking. Though she was born in Pittsburgh she has spent the better part of her life in Venezuela. Her work draws strongly on current affairs and the effect of disruptive political agendas resulting in displacements and upheaval, of which she speaks from the heart. http://gabrielagamboa.com/

I was born in the center of the Caribbean, where, according to the writer Junot Diaz, the fukú originated, Santo Domingo, where waves and palm trees were always saying something to me with their particular rhythm. Then, looking for new lights, I settled in the city of Miami, where the coast still wanted to talk to me, to offer me its insular imaginary, from the edge, the border. In my work, I explore the poetics related to the construction of a new imaginary in the contemporary Caribbean through video, photography, performance, painting and installation, crisscrossing it with my family history. I focus on ritual, and on the idea that we can eradicate the silences in which these contexts and imagery have been constructed. I call my practice integrating Afro-Caribbean folk traditions and participatory social practice “Art of Uncertainty.” http://www.charooquet.com http://www.edgezones.org

Elisa Turner has been called “Miami’s art critic.” Probably a lot of other things too, but we won’t go there. She was an art critic for The Miami Herald when it was still owned by Knight Ridder, which no longer exists. Now that her Herald byline no longer exists either, this award-winning journalist is for sure not shutting up. Here's where to find her most current writing: Artburstmiami and Biscayne Times. In 2019 she won the Leadership Award from the Florida Chapter of ArtTable, Inc. http://artcircuitsartcentric.blogspot.com/ http://elisaturnerartcrit.blogspot.com/ http://inspicio.fiu.edu/video-categories/elisa-turner/ https://www.artburstmiami.com/ http://www.biscaynetimes.com/

Atomik is a 100 percent Miami artist. Atomik, trained in graphic design, is a big name in the Miami art scene. The graffiti legend, part of the infamous MSG crew, a group of local graffiti heroes, has been painting the city for quite some time. While growing up in the emerging Miami graffiti scene of the 80’s, Atomik witnessed for himself at a young age what would later become his profession. Famous for his iconic orange character which emerged as a response to the demolition of the Miami Orange Bowl ,the artists also marks the walls of Miami with his sleek hand-styles, graffiti and lettering. https://www.instagram.com/atomiko

After graduating from Florida International University with a bachelors in photography, Monica began collaborating with her sister on videos, large-scale installations, performance art, clothing, VJ sets, and fanzines. A video piece at Bas Fischer International that featured 35 local artists passing on "creative energy" to each other gained the attention of critics. Since then, TM Sisters work has been featured in the second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and at Performa07 in New York. Locust Projects selected the pair from an applicant pool of 72 artists to receive the Hilger Artist Project Award. They were also included in the international exhibition "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium" curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum, and Gunnar B. Kvaran (Miami New Times). https://www.instagram.com/monicatronica

Thomas Bils’s paintings are a result of his interests over epistemology of memory and the ontology of its subjects, using his adolescence in central Florida as the base position of introspection. Working in photorealistic oil painting he references the mnemonic properties of the photograph and translates the image as an act of nostalgic contemplation. During the translation process Thomas assumes the role of the unreliable narrator, embellishing upon minute details or events, leavening the image with narratorial unease. This falsification accounts for the deteriorating truths of a reconsolidating memory. https://thomasbils.com/

Evan Robarts (b. 1982) lives and works in New York and Miami. He graduated from Pratt with a BFA in sculpture in 2008. He has previously held solo exhibitions at Berthold Pott, Cologne (2017); Galerie Jeanroach Dard, Brussels (2016); and The Hole, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Abstraction & Architecture, Université de Strasbourg (2018), See the Moon?, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2017); and the Fountain Head Residency Show, Miami (2017) organized by Kathryn Mikesell. This fall, Robarts will hold a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Kunsthalle Kunstverein Bremerhaven in Germany. http://evanrobarts.com/

Giannina Coppiano Dwin lives and works in South Florida. She has been the recipient of grants and awards such as the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists funded in part by the National Endowment for the Art, the Women in the Visual Arts Award; as well as, several sponsorships and grants including research in Spain and Brazil. Her work has been included in national and international exhibitions as part of solo and group shows. Some of her more notable exhibitions include solo installations at the Fundacion Valdes-Salas in Asturias, Spain, Project Space in The Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, the contemporary wing of the Museo Municipal de Guayaquil, Ecuador; Ornare, Miami, as a collateral event during Art Basel; the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs; Illegal Gallery, Florence, Italy. http://gianninadwin.com/

My work has always had an organic, visceral aspect which I consider to be part of my concern with life issues, like vulnerability, passion, and the uncanny. Drawing in notebooks is my lifeline to my work. I keep one handy at all times and my hand goes where it wants in these visual journals. After I complete one, I reconnoiter, selecting and tearing out what might be used for inspiration. http://www.sarastites.com/

Rafael Rangel was born in New York in 1978. Lives and works in Miami, Florida. He graduates with honors in Visual Arts at Pratt Institute in 2001. That same year, he works as an assistant for Matthew Barney and starts his exhibiting career. From then, has participated in group shows in Germany, Canada, Spain, United States and Venezuela. In 2013 he had a mayor solo exhibition at the museum Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo, Venezuela. His works has been exhibited in Venezuela at the most important museums such as Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas MAC, Galería de Arte Nacional, Museo de Bellas Artes, Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo and MACZUL. www.instagram.com/rafaelrangelserrano

I grew up on a small blueberry farm in the middle of nowhere Georgia. I got immense satisfaction roaming the woods, gathering materials for little sculptures, and creating stories for myself, but the desire to connect with people, to explore, to learn was pervasive. After graduating at the top of my class, I caught the first ride to Athens, Georgia where I fought doubt and questions relentlessly to get my BFA at the University of Georgia. Clay became my conduit for processing my experience in this world, as a woman, in the South, and it gave me a way to speak, and often, to scream. http://alex-hodge.com

Photographer Manny Hernandez has captured Miami's flash and moments of pizzazz in decades worth of candid images. His photographs chronicle the Magic City's celebrity-driven tipping point of the late 1980s and 1990s. https://www.wynwoodbooks.com/

Agustina Woodgate creates art across multiple disciplines, her primary focus being the interplay between human beings and their surroundings. Born in Buenos Aires, Woodgate moved to Miami in 2004, where she gained recognition for covertly stitching labels inscribed with poems into thrift-store clothing (“poetry bombing,”) and for her work made with human hair. Today, her practice ranges from objects—human hair sculptures and kaleidoscopic rugs assembled with the pelts of recycled stuffed animals—to site-specific, context-based installations and performances. Striving to create work that fosters human relationships, Woodgate has produced public works such as park benches and color-changing billboards and bus shelters. Exploring an interest in residue and ephemera, she has sanded down the walls of an unused classroom and similarly, erased maps from a world atlas, both times collecting and cataloguing the dust. https://agustinawoodgate.com/ http://radioee.net/

Timothy R. Rodgers, PhD, is the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. Rodgers, who joined the Museum in July 2020, has nearly 20 years of museum-leadership experience, including 11 years as a museum director. Prior to joining the Museum, he served as director of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, where he oversaw the creation and implementation of a new strategic plan and expansion for The Wolfsonian’s future.

Born in 1967 in Chicago, while still an undergraduate, Tina La Porta developed a body of work photographing the Pro-Choice movement in Chicago, Milwakee, Waashington D.C. and New York City. In 1992 Ms. La Porta moved to New York's East Village to persue her Masters of Fine Arts Degree at The School of Visual Arts where she studied with Lisa Spellman, Sarah Charlesworth and Nan Goldin. During that time she interned at Pace/McGill Gallery and for Historian, Naomi Rosemblum while she wrote her book A History of Women Photographers (Abbeville Press). Her intial post-graduate work was immersed within the global internet art movement where she created several internet specific art works such as: net.works + avatars, distance and Re:mote_Corp@REALities. After 9/11 she shifted her attention to mediated representations and coverage of war where she found the "Veil" to be the perfect metaphor. Most Recently, Ms. La Porta's work has turned inward and paradoxically comments on consumer behavior in regards to everyday use

https://www.instagram.com/frepojo

Derek Hunter b. 1988 | New York, NY is an entirely self-taught painter, sculptor and muralist. His work explores the language of architecture and crystallography as a means to challenge expectations around site-specificity and urban construction, questioning how architectural spaces interacting with and designed in the likes of the natural world directly impacts our well-being and informs our sense of self. Hunter works and resides in South Florida. http://derekhunterart.com/