The Frost Art Museum FIU, the Smithsonian Affiliate in Miami, presents a spectacular season of exhibitions and programming for this year’s Art Basel Week in Miami.
From the groundbreaking exhibition Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989. Gallery image, artwork by Keith Haring, October 20, 1985. Acrylic on canvas tarp. Photo by Michael Pittman. ©Keith Haring Foundation.
Every December during Art Basel Miami Beach and Miami Art Week, the global spotlight shines on Miami for one of the world’s leading art fairs, attracting 70,000+ collectors, cultural leaders, artists and media influencers from around the world.
The Frost Art Museum FIU is ground zero again this year for headline shows and events, including the two exhibitions Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989, and South Beach, 1977-1986: Photographs by Gary Monroe, plus on the Sunday morning of At Basel week the 16th annual Breakfast in the Park, featuring Petah Coyne this year as the invited speaker.
16th Annual Breakfast in the Park Presents: Petah Coyne
Sunday, December 8th
9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public, RSVP required in advance at this link.
This year, for the museum’s 16th Annual Breakfast in the Park (an official Art Basel event), the special guest artist will be sculptor and photographer Petah Coyne. This popular event attracts art collectors, patrons, gallery owners, cultural luminaries and artists from around the world, many visiting Miami for Art Basel.
Each year a noted sculptor is invited to speak. Guests enjoy a complimentary breakfast, informal lecture, and guided tours of FIU’s Sculpture Park.
Petah Coyne (photo by George Etheredge)
Known for her elaborately detailed assemblages that hang from ceilings and erupt from the floor, Coyne uses molten wax, silk flowers, sumptuous fabric, and pristine taxidermy to evoke gothic narratives and Rococo excesses.
Petah Coyne, Installation view: Recent Sculpture, New York, NY 1994
Her work is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Denver Art Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and many more. Awards include The Rockefeller Foundation Award, three National Endowment for the Arts Awards, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and many more. Presented in partnership with West Kendall Baptist Hospital.
Art after Stonewall, 1969 – 1989
On view through January 5th
Miami is one of only three cities hosting this groundbreaking tour de force
The headline exhibition is the first national museum show of its kind to survey the impact of the LGBTQ civil rights movement on visual culture. A bold visual history of twenty years in American queer life, the show commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings. Due to its monumental size and scope the show encompasses the entire second floor of the museum.
The Miami presentation of Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 is the first time the entire exhibition is presented under one roof, because the previous showing in New York was split up between two venues.
More than 200 works ─ photographs, paintings, sculpture, film clips, video, music, performance pieces, plus historical documents and images taken from magazines, newspapers and television ̶ are on view. The exhibition presents the work of openly LGBTQ artists alongside other artists who also engaged with the emerging queer subcultures, between 1969 and 1989.
The Stonewall Riots are a historic flash-point for the LGBTQ movement, and the first two decades of art that immediately followed the uprisings have never been explored this way before in the art world.
This 20-year period of art-making blazed with new creativity from these communities. These artists cleared a path through uncharted cultural territories, across intersections of avant-garde art worlds, radical political movements, and profound social change.
“This year for Art Week, when Miami becomes a truly international city, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU has chosen to exhibit Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 because of its global message about civil rights,” says Dr. Jordana Pomeroy, the Director of the museum.
“As a university museum, the Frost offers experiences that influence the lives of our students and offers new perspectives for our changing community. While the art fairs transform Miami for one week, the Frost transforms the cultural landscape of Miami over the course of the entire year.”
Left: anti-Anita Bryant artwork designed by Martin
The Miami leg of this tour features a chapter in history that many scholars identify as Miami’s very own Stonewall moment. In 1977, Anita Bryant led her notorious campaign to overturn Miami-Dade’s ordinance that banned discrimination against gays and lesbians. This sparked a turning point for the movement that experts in the fields of civil rights and LGBTQ studies emphasize as equally important to Stonewall.
Never before had the national media covered LGBTQ rights across the country. This mobilized activists in cities and towns nationwide for the first time in history, and the Frost Art Museum explores this pivotal Miami moment. Now, forty-two years after the Anita Bryant crusade, Miami has evolved: this show received a groundswell of local support in Miami.
Kreloff in 1977 for Alive! Magazine.
Right: Newsweek magazine cover, 1977, shows national headlines about Miami’s LGBT community.
Courtesy of The Stonewall National Museum & Archives
Original anti-Anita Bryant bumper stickers created in 1977 by Miami’s LGBT community.
Courtesy of The Stonewall National Museum & Archives
The roster of major artists in Art after Stonewall includes:
Vito Acconci, Diane Arbus, Lyle Ashton Harris, Judith F. Baca, Lynda Benglis, JEB (Joan E. Biren), Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Lenore Chinn, Arch Connelly, Tee A. Corinne, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Louise Fishman, Michela Griffo, Sunil Gupta, Barbara Hammer, Harmony Hammond, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Peter Hujar, Holly Hughes, Tseng Kwong Chi, Greer Lankton, Christopher Makos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Frank Moore, Alice Neel, Catherine Opie, Jack Pierson, Marlon T. Riggs, Jack Smith, Joan Snyder, Carmelita Tropicana, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong, among others.
Although much has been written on the impact of the LGBTQ movement on American society, fifty years after Stonewall many key artists are still relatively unknown and are brought to light.
The Government has Blood on its Hands, by Gran Fury, 1988, poster/offset lithograph
The exhibition was organized by the Columbus Museum of Art and was curated by the artist and art historian Jonathan Weinberg, with Daniel Marcus and Drew Sawyer.
This exhibition has been made possible at the Frost Art Museum FIU by Bank of America and the Funding Arts Network. Additional support has been generously provided by Our Fund, an LGBT Community Foundation, and the Art after Stonewall Circle of Friends.
Diana Davies, Untitled (Marsha P. Johnson Hands Out Flyers for Support of Gay Students at N.Y.U.), c. 1970. Digital print. Photo by Diana Davies/© The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY
South Beach, 1977-1986: Photographs by Gary Monroe On view through December 8th
Gary Monroe, Exercise group by 3rd Street Beach, 1978, gelatin silver print, Image Courtesy of the Artist
Also featured during Art Week is the work of Gary Monroe, a Miami native. In 1977, he embarked on a decade-long project to photograph the aging Jewish community in South Beach. He had grown up around this community and sought to capture the vibrancy and slow decline of this close-knit neighborhood.
This series ends in the late 1980s, the last years before South Beach rapidly gentrified, pushing out the elderly community who had made the area their home. This exhibition was curated by Maryanna G. Ramirez.
Influenced by photographers such as Garry Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Monroe traversed South Beach capturing candid moments, daily activities, religious services, and community gatherings.
Many of the Jewish residents during this time had retired from factory jobs in the Northeast. Some had survived the Holocaust and had immigrated to the U.S. from Europe decades earlier.
They came to South Beach where, even on a modest retirement income, they could enjoy an active Jewish cultural and religious life as well as Miami’s warm sunshine, and therapeutic ocean.
By the end of his project, Monroe had created a crucial historical record of a unique era in South Beach that will never be seen again.
Gary Monroe, Sixth Street by Washington Avenue, 1978, gelatin silver print, Image Courtesy of the Artist
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