The Yearbook
2023
An Annual Survey of
Fountainhead Residency Artists
A Foreword
by Kathryn Mikesell
As I sit to write this, I am overflowing with gratitude. I could not have foreseen Fountainhead turning 15 when Dan and I started it back in 2008. We knew we wanted to give back to artists in an impactful way and support the growth of the city we called home but, how exactly we would do that is something we learned along the way. The growth and success of Fountainhead is inextricably tied to the incredible people—our family—who have joined us on this journey. This includes everyone from the artists who have taken part in the residency, to the curators who generously share their wisdom and time; the donors who trust and invest in our mission; supporters who attend our openings and encourage us to continue; and of course, Nicole, Francesca and our board who keep us moving forward. I hope that is how you feel in every interaction with Fountainhead.
2023 was an exceptional year. When I think of the relationships that spawned between the cohorts of artists-in-residence; the jury meeting with Lauren Kelley, Zoe Lukov, Ché Morales, and Gilbert Vicario, and how they discussed each artist’s work in such a respectful, open and encouraging way; the welcoming manner in how the artists were greeted by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Beth Rudin deWoody and Maynard Monrow, Martin Margulies and Catherine Hines, Mera and Don Rubell, and local museums and nonprofits; the attentiveness and experience given by curators and scholars like Amanda Morgan, Ana Clara Silva, Anelys Alvarez, Direlia Lazo, Elizabeth Margulies, Jennifer Inacio, Iberia Perez Gonzalez, Heike Dempster, Laura Randall, Luna Goldberg, Melissa Wallen, Mindy Solomon, Neil Ramsey, Patricia Hanna, and Tami Katz-Freiman; and the hugs given and received, my heart swells.
To all the artists who joined us in 2023, I can say unequivocally, you changed my life. You each taught me something different about the world around me and about myself. The way you opened up to one another and shared your stories was impactful for us all. Your residency is only the beginning. Please know I and the team are here to support you. Never hesitate to reach out to say hi or ask for help.
I’m blessed with an incredible team; Nicole Martinez, our associate director who not only conceived of this book but who worked with the writers, photographers, and artists to bring it to fruition; Francesca Nabors, our program manager who did double duty as managing editor making sure everyone was properly credited, and so much more. Nicole and Francesca give more to my life personally and professionally than I could ever express on this page. Jose Nava, Ali, and Majo from the Levie Creative team continue to create a fresh, unique, and truly engaging book design; and Klaus Prokop of Raff-Cantz printing worked with us to fine-tune this second edition. Thank you to Alexa Wolman, Ben Wolkov, Carole Server, David Ross, Don Savelson, Henry Zarb, Ibett Yanez, Ian Krawiecki Gazes, Jeff Flemings, Jumaane N’Namdi, Lois Whitman, Leslie Weissman, Nicole Blackburn, Spring McManus, and Teresa Enriquez, our incredible board who are always there to support our ideas and bring new ones to keep us growing, and their incredible spouses who are by their side in support.
An immense thank you to Tyler Emerson, Brook Dorsch, Ibett Yanez, Rachel Llaveria-Powell and Danny Clapp for believing in the importance of showcasing alumni artists’ work in the Fountainhead Biennial, drawing important connections between the artists-in-residence and lending their work the
critical exploration it deserves; and special thanks to the visionary Omar López-Chahoud for curating this year’s edition, Last Days of a House. Omar has been a champion and an active contributor to Fountainhead and its artists for many years, and his generosity can be felt across the global art world.
As you turn through these pages you will see the work of incredible photographers and writers. We are proud to work with them as they share their unique lens and voice. These captivating photographers are all Miami-based and include Carolina Menendez, Cornelius Tulloch, Francesca Nabors, Jayme Gershen, Karli Evans, Pedro Wazzan, Rose Marie Cromwell, and Zachary Balber.
Thank you to the esteemed writers who contributed their words and insightful critiques including Ayanna Dozier, Charles Moore, Claire Breukel, Claire Voon, Clayton Campbell, Heike Dempster, Isis Davis-Marks, Monica Uszerowicz, Nicole Martinez, Rob Goyanes, Salomé Gómez-Upegui, and Wendy Vogel.
While you unfortunately can’t see them on these pages, I also want to thank Alexa Caravia who creates stunning documentary films of each artist that are visually beautiful and truly encapsulate the artist’s work. Please visit our YouTube channel to see her videos that so beautifully complement what you will see here.
I encourage you to follow each of the creatives who lend their voice to Fountainhead, learn about their other bodies of work, and reach out to them if you have opportunities. We are always happy to put you in touch.
Everything extraordinary in life happens when you surround yourself with people you admire, share your passion, and push you to be the best version of yourself. Thank you Britta Jacobson, Philip Berlinski, and Goldman Sachs Gives, who invested in our vision and this book from the start. The Hillsdale Fund family has been supporting Fountainhead since they first learned about our program and continues to support us as we deepen our commitment to artists through initiatives like this one. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation, and the Miami Foundation were the first foundations to jump in when Fountainhead was evolving to become a nonprofit and continue to support us and encourage us to dream big.
Stijn Creupelandt and Chris Prelog for their vision to bring art onto the seas through Windstar Cruises, created a uniquely special opportunity for Fountainhead and Miami-based artists. Jessica Payne, thank you for trusting the creative vision of Eric Beare, Kandi and Katie Stirman, and Nina Surel.
Behind every major gift and foundation grant are human beings. Adriana and Ricardo Malfitano, Ann and Mel Shaffer, Belissa Alvarez, Chloe Berkowitz, Debby Bussel, Eliot Hess, George and Valentina duFournier, Grant Gittlin and Sarah Piscatelli, Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, Hesty Leibtag and Terry Verk, Jane Marcus, Jane Wesman, Jennifer Farah, Linda Schejola and Lisa Akin, Lindsey Linzer, Marie Elena Angulo, Mary McIntosh, Michael Weissman, Sarah Arison, T&J and Victoria Rogers thank you for believing in us. Alison and Jan Gerits, Emily and Chris Campbell, Griffin O’Rourke, and Sabrina Beraja thank you for introducing Fountainhead to your family and friends.
A special thank you to Alberto Ibargüen, former President of the Knight Foundation and Michael Spring, the former director of Miami Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Alberto, our community is thriving because you saw the value of investing in the arts and you personally led the way and brought others along with you. Michael, you wrote the book on how government can holistically support artists and organizations to the benefit of the entire community.
Fountainhead has certainly grown over the years. The intimacy, care, and love it was built on has and will always remain the foundation. David and Felipe, and Luna and Max thank you for sharing your family with ours. Dan, you have always been my partner in everything. Thank you for sharing your business experience and always being up for hosting an event and giving a tour. Galt and Skye thank you for sharing your life, inspiring me to keep building, and helping with everything from preparing the bedrooms to organizing the closets and literally scrubbing the floors. You are my world, breath, and my life.
With love, appreciation, and hugs,
Kathryn
Table of Contents
Finding the Core:
A Survey of 2023’s Resident Artists
by Heike Dempster
2023 was a tumultuous year around the world, with economic challenges, natural disasters from Hawaii to Libya, Kurdistan to Morocco, and political upheavals, wars and conflicts. All resulted in protests and movements for change, and artists’ voices mattered. They created and had something to contribute. Art as commentary. Art as an act of defiance. Art as protest. Art to find joy and respite through it all. Art to address problems. Art to find solutions. Art to incite dialogue. Art to question. Art to answer.
Amidst this global chorus of artistic voices, Fountainhead Residency celebrated its 15th anniversary welcoming artists from all over the world to live and work in Miami for one month at a time. This year, Fountainhead welcomed 33 artists, and they represent some of the most exciting artistic voices working today. We met Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Andrés Aizicovich, Miguel Braceli, Kadar Brock, Mia Chaplin, Chloe Chiasson, Juan Jose Cielo, Nekisha Durrett, Jenelle Esparza, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Jenny Feal, Alanna Fields, Ellon Gibbs, Baris Gokturk, Miles Greenberg, Rashawn Griffin, Julia Gutman, Olivia Jia, Devin B. Johnson, Gerald Lovell, Manoela Medeiros, Randi Renate, Christian Ruiz Berman, Ruth Patir, Alexander Russi, Curtis Santiago, Tamara Santibañez, Xavier Scott Marshall, Joaquin Segura, Adelisa Selimbašić, Victoria Udondian, Sarah Ann Weber and Furong Zhang. They represented eight U.S. states and 17 countries, from California to Texas and Pennsylvania, to Nigeria, Australia, China, South Africa and Brazil.
Fountainhead Residency is unique in that it creates space for artists to come together in a very special way. The residency first offers space and resources to create, be present in community with fellow artists, inspire each other, and experience Miami and its art community. The residency also creates a space of communion with the people of Miami, whether artists, collectors, curators or individuals who appreciate art. When these two conceptual spaces meet physically, it can be a magical experience of true community and exchange, of joy and of learning. The energy is always palpable and reverberating.
The artists inspire each other to push the boundaries of their practices and consider new ideas and processes, but also to be reaffirmed in their existing visual language and artistry. All the chosen artists have a developed and unique voice. They make important contributions by sharing their perspectives and by creating art that enriches society in many distinct ways, translated into art.
Engaging with these artists and their respective practices provides many insights into this world we inhabit. Their methods to visualize and share their perspectives vary greatly—as each artist values their own artistic language— but their work reveals recurring topics and approaches. In general, their expression goes beyond commenting on or capturing the current temperature of the world, but rather offers us a way to deal with it, whether through calls to action and active involvement in change, or through offering mental or physical spaces of rest and re-centering. Whether inspired by family life in New York, architecture and history in Brazil, Mexican politics, Cuban cultural heritage, time with friends and family, interpersonal relations, or West African Diasporic expressions, the artists found relevant points of connection and exchange with each other and their audiences.
In 2023, ancestry, family lineage and the intergenerational passing on of knowledge; the deconstruction of existing ideologies; materiality and related interrogations; and the discovery or creation of new spaces and the meaning of shared space were prevalent, recurring topics.
Whether through research, a focus on personal experiences, or material considerations tied to family traditions or cultural identity, the need to rediscover, claim and pass on ancestral knowledge has always been a part of art. The desire to uncover and uphold these traditions are in many cases fueled by climate change, migration and expressions of migratory backgrounds, ontological explorations, and persistent racial, institutional, sexual and societal discrimination. The 2023 artists in residence presented a breadth of ways to engage with these topics.
Alanna Fields’s (July 2023) work is centered around the archival image and the creation of an archive of Black queer photography from the 1890s to the 1980s that creates a new visibility for these images, along with a rethinking of what a new definition of archiving could be in terms of access points, audience and medium. In Olivia Jia’s (July 2023) paintings, “authenticity drops away, and it just becomes about representation,” as she states. She constructs narrative history using the image of the book, referencing objects within her own Chinese and American history to create metaphors for psychological space. Jenelle Esparza (July 2023) explores her family’s lineage of picking cotton in Texas, and investigates related notions of the body, pain and labor. Buenos Aires-based Andrés Aizicovich’s (May 2023) sculptures, drawings, interactive installations and performative interventions consider continuity, ancestry and storytelling in his use of smoke, signals and gestures to extend communication past the use of words. Israeli artist Ruth Patir (September 2023) is interested in bringing ancient artifacts into a technological realm to question objectivity versus subjectivity by centering the female perspective; deliberately moving the female body into the role of the protagonist, and into a position of control of movement, space and story; and Joaquin Segura (September 2023), who shared the residency experience with Patir, researches post-revolutionary political superstructure in South America, related propaganda materials, and the idea of radical otherness in a bid to investigate heritage and cultural identity.
Another recurring topic was the deconstruction of existing ideologies, whether related to queer spaces, notions of race and identity, or the connections between politics and economics. In her practice, Chloe Chiasson (March 2023) is concerned with resiliency, the depiction of queer intimacy and a general reconstruction of Southern space as queer space; while, as aforementioned, Fields’s work creates an archive and considers the legibility of queerness, creating what she calls a “Black queer dream space” through the lens of photography.
The work by Washington, D.C.-based mixed media artist Nekisha Durrett (August 2023) - in particular, her public art projects and social practice - considers the connections between land and history, especially as it relates to Black communities and their correlating histories of displacement and gentrification. Her work uncovers historical traces to make these previously overlooked histories visible. Brazilian artist Manoela Medeiros (August 2023) finds poetic ways to think about borders, architecture and history. Her paintings and sculptures ask who excavates what? Who gets to tell the story? Her approach to answering entails research on political and economic codependency, and weighs the realistic perspective against the perceived perspective of painting. She foregrounds the literal and historical truth while understanding how painting distorts or changes the realities, especially when considered within the context of the gallery space, which she, in many instances, transforms to create a site-specific environment by including the gallery as a site of architectural and historical exploration.
Kadar Brock (May 2023) is also deeply interested in the parallels between ideological and physical deconstruction, particularly around the topics of Church, pop culture, masculinity, and notions of belief and disbelief. The research and in-depth thought process behind the works is palpable, as fragments of previous ideologies are points of reference, while a gradual process of deconstruction alters the works. During this destructive-yet-productive creation process—in which he repeatedly goes through the motions of painting, sanding, priming and scraping—Brock destroys previous iterations of works, creating new compiled compositions. Materiality also plays a key role in Brock’s work as he reuses materials to find points of connection and continuity.
As a whole, materiality certainly mattered to many of the artists in residence, whether as a choice of medium, for aesthetic or conceptual texture, as a point of connection to explorations of ancestry and lineage, or to think about place and placemaking. 2023 saw multiple outstanding painters. Mia Chaplin (November 2023) paints in poetic movements full of emotion and guided by intuition that equally address sensuality, dance, and feminity. They also articulate violence in an artistic language of thoughtful words and metaphors. Also looking at the female experience, painter Adelisa Selimbašić (November 2023) shares cheeky and often humorous takes on the experiences of girls, always with a strong undertone of acceptance and body positivity. The surrealistic worlds of Pennsylvania-based Chinese painter Furong Zhang (May 2023) draw from Chinese history, the opera and his personal life, while New York painters Ellon Gibbs (November 2023), Devin B. Johnson (March 2023) and Gerald Lovell (October 2023) each have a very unique way of charting personal experiences while examining space and their place within.
Texture, either achieved through paints and other materials, or through in-depth research and layers of conceptual meaning, played a role across the board. We see this in the mixed media works of multi-disciplinary artist Adama Delphine Fawundu (June 2023), who combines photography, found objects, fabric, representational objects and West African references with performance, video installation and sound, to Fields’s use of beeswax and pigment, and the piles of research books that inform Segura’s work.
Place, placemaking and connections between land and identity are expressed via plants or seeds– like Durrett’s use of magnolia leaves, or the site specificity of many of Medeiros’s works. The images of Black identity captured by Xavier Scott Marshall (October 2023) proclaim agency and visibility while never losing their sense of vulnerability and humanity; the miniature worlds that Curtis Santiago (October 2023) created within his mixed media dioramas in reclaimed jewelry boxes all conjure his ability to find his Trinidadian roots no matter where he goes. Julia Gutman (August 2023), on the other hand, embroiders the clothing of family and friends to embody their presence, honor their existence and appreciate daily life. The meaning of shared space connected the artists throughout the year to each other, their audiences, and their communities.
Each month, three artists meet in Miami, engage with each other, and as they discover the residency, they discover the city, themselves, and their artistry.
The artists and art that converged at Fountainhead Residency challenged us all to think deeply and learn and let our minds roam freely to capture and appreciate life. Miami, of course, also leaves its mark on the visiting artists. Everyone has different takeaways, but the common denominator is always inspiration. Whether expressed in a shifting of shading to reflect a different light experience, appearances of local plants and found objects in the art, or new works that reflect Miami experiences like visiting a church, a conversation with a local individual or diving in the ocean, Miami is a fertile ground for the creative minds that engage with the city during their residency stay.
Oftentimes, artworks extend beyond the artist’s immediate concerns once a viewer meets the work and adds their layers of experiences and thoughts. As we reflect on artworks, we start extending the context and contributions of the artist, the artwork, and ourselves. In our interview, Gutman rhetorically asked a very poignant question: “What is at the core of what we are doing besides culturally staring into the pool?” The exchange at Fountainhead Residency allows the artists, and our community, to discover that core.
The Yearbook
2023
An Annual Survey of
Fountainhead Residency Artists
Fountainhead Arts
Miami, FL
Publisher
Nicole Martinez Associate Director, Fountainhead Arts
Editor
Francesca Nabors Program Manager,
Fountainhead Arts
Associate Editor
Levie Branding
Miami, FL
Branding &
Editorial Design
Kathryn Mikesell, Executive Director, Fountainhead Arts
Foreword
Adama Delphine Fawundu, Adelisa Selimbašić, Alanna Fields, Alexander Russi, Andrés Aizicovich, Baris Gokturk, Chloe Chiasson, Christian Ruiz Berman, Curtis Santiago, Devin B. Johnson, Ellon Gibbs, Furong Zhang, Gerald Lovell, Jenelle Esparza, Jenny Feal, Joaquin Segura, Juan Jose Cielo, Julia Gutman, Kadar Brock, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Manoela Medeiros, Mia Chaplin, Miguel Braceli, Miles Greenberg, Nekisha Durrett, Olivia Jia, Randi Renate, Rashawn Griffin, Ruth Patir, Sarah Ann Weber, Tamara Santibanez, Victoria Udondian, Xavier Scott Marshall
Artists
Claire Breukel, Clayton Campbell, Isis Davis-Marks, Heike Dempster, Ayanna Dozier, Salomé Gómez-Upegui, Rob Goyanes, Nicole Martinez, Charles Moore, Monica Uszerowicz, Wendy Vogel, Claire Voon
Contributing
Writers
Zachary Balber, Rose Marie Cromwell, Karli Evans, Jayme Gershen, Carolina Menendez, Francesca Nabors, Cornelius Tulloch, Pedro Wazzan
Contributing Photographers
Raff-Cantz
Stuttgart, Germany
Printers
Kathryn and Dan Mikesell, Founders
Kathryn Mikesell, Executive Director
Nicole Martinez, Associate Director
Francesca Levy Nabors, Program Manager
Clayton Campbell, Impact Consultant
Team
Alexa Wolman
Benjamin Wolkov
Carole Server
David Ross, Treasurer
Don Savelson, President
Henry Zarb
Ian Krawlecki Gazes
Ibett Yanez
Board of
Trustees
Jeff Flemings
Jumaane N’namdi
Leslie Weissman
Lois Whitman-Hess, Secretary
Nicole Blackburn
Spring Dautel McManus
Teresa Enriquez, Vice President
Support for Fountainhead is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Jorge M. Perez Family Foundation, The Miami Foundation, Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation, Shepard Broad Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, Weissman Family Foundation, Arison Arts Foundation, David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation, Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Hillsdale Fund, Windstar Cruises, Levie Branding, Lois Whitman-Hess and Eliot Hess, Britta Jacobson and Phillip Berlinski, Hesty Leibtag and Terry Verk, Adriana and Ricardo Malfitano, Joan Quinlivan, Heather and Jay Schreibman, Leslie and Michael Weissman, Jane Wesman and Don Savelson, Alexa and Adam Wolman, and Tyler Emerson and Brook Dorsch. In-kind support is provided by Estrella Damm, Gerard Bertrand and Liquid Death.