By Tami Katz-Freiman, AIRE Dana Levy, from the series “Emerging from the Swamp”, 2014

As a board member of AIRIE, I have had the privilege and honor to outline and follow the selection of the artistic program for our upcoming benefit event on Saturday, January 24^th in Pinecrest Gardens, where we will launch our new Knight Arts Challenge-supported Wild Billboards campaign. The benefit will feature Everglades-inspired art, alonglside commissioned site-specific installations and live performances – all made by artists from the 2014-15 residency program. Aspects of Everglades National Park will be portrayed in installations, performances, paintings, photographs, a tabloid newspaper and a video in this special afternoon.

Situated in the heart of South Florida, Pinecrest Gardens is the perfect setting for such a gathering. This historical landmark is a magical setting featuring huge banyan trees, shaded ponds, and outdoor theaters. Guests are invited to roam the 14 acre botanical garden, where they will discover performances, poetry readings, audio and visual site-specific installations. Local chefs will provide delightful refreshments, and guests will have the opportunity to meet AIRIE fellows and learn more about creating art in the River of Grass.

As a curator who is used to dealing with theme-oriented group or individual shows it was a unique experience for me to follow the preparations for this special one-afternoon-event and to learn firsthand from artists about their attitude to the Everglades and to see how they embrace our endangered World Heritage Site. I invite all my friends and colleagues to participate in this magical afternoon and I hope that the encounter with the art works and the conversations around ecological issues that these Everglades inspired art-works raise will contribute to AIRE’s significant mission.

Rodney Dickson, Untitled, 2014

At 2 pm, the benefit will launch in Pinecrest Garden’s Hibiscus Room, with an exhibition of work from AIRIE’s permanent collection including Rodney Dickson’s watercolors, photographs by Dana Levy, work from Susan Silas’ series The Specimin Drawer and Fellow Caterina Tiazzoldi’s AIRIELAB, an architectural experiment using palm fronds that the New York-based designer has been developing this month.

Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, still from Flow: Big Waters, 2014

On a separate screen one could watch Flow: Big Waters, a video work created by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, AIRIE Fellows in July 2014. Their work addresses the influence that the passage of human populations has had on the Everglades natural environment.

Guests will receive a copy of Miami architect and artist Elite Kedan’s Everglades Atlas: Chart 1: Selections from the Interior. The tabloid includes a selection of photographs, ephemera, data collected and work produced during her residency in the Everglades. The publication serves as a method to process the time spent in the park and its surroundings, and functions as a blueprint for a book (Everglades Atlas) to be published in 2015, an exhibition catalog documenting her residency.

Adam Nadel’s photograph The Everglades will be offered to our guests in a raffle.

The Everglades, Adam Nadel, 2014

At 2:30 we will have an official welcome and readings from Bill Maxwell, Nathaniel Sandler and Anne Sullivan in the main Amphitheater. Next, Ana Mendez will lead our guests to the Hammock pavilion where she will perform Rebecca, a site-specific solo dance, with music by Richard Vergez. Her performance was inspired by the shifting of perceptions through illusions and sleight of hand magic tricks. The choreography is a study of objects and costuming as a source of movement exploration and narrative.

Christina Pettersson as a child in Parrot Jungle

At 3:30 The garden crawl will continue to the antique cages of former Parrot Jungle, where Christina Pettersson will discuss her performance You Are My Sunshine in which a guitarist and a singer serenade to two parrots. The Parrot Jungle (now Pinecrest Gardens) was one of Pettersson’s favorite attractions as a child in South Florida. In her own words: “It felt like we had stepped into a vast jungle, with giant birds more glorious than we could have imagined. The bright flurry of feathers, the raucous cries, and the chance to have one sit right on your head kept us coming back for more. There was one bird in particular named Tina, a pretty white cockatiel, who rode a tiny bicycle across the highwire…I want to pay homage, and serenade the bird I was enamored with once upon a time.”

Regina Jestrow, Invasive Species, 2012-2015

At 4:00 we will gather near the monumental Banyan tree where Regina Jestrow will introduce us to her Invasive Species installation comprised of 900 fabric blossoms sewn onto wire, emerging from the earth, and to her Endangered Tree Snail Birdhouses – a site-specific crocheted bird houses made from cotton yarn. Our guests will be invited to pick the “invasive species” as souvenirs, take them home, and plant them in their homes and gardens. According to Jestrow, during her November 2014 AIRIE experience she learned about the endangered tree snails native to South Florida. Many species of the tree snails were collected to extinction, and all that are left are the shells and color plate drawings in the Everglades National Park collection. “The snail collectors were actually a pretty funky bunch. They would spend months collecting all the snails out of a single hammock, and then burn down the hammock so no other collector can get the same colors… I wanted to recreate the shells so the missing species weren’t forgotten. I created a pattern with crochet and color-work techniques and made them larger than life size to show off the beautiful color patterns and variations they have.”

Jason Hedges, detail from Baitfish (Various works: Mullet, Pin Fish and Pilchard), 2015

From the Banyan tree, we will continue to walk on the path along the antique stalls in the collonade, where Jason Hedges installed his beautiful marine ink on paper prints. This series of works on paper explore and present the richness and abundance of the small fish that make up part of the Everglades’ aquatic ecosystem. These works are made from direct prints of the baitfish of the Gulf of Mexico, Florida Bay, and the interior bodies of water. These prints borrow from the Japanese Gyotaku techniques but move away from directly representing a single fish to exploring patterning found in repetition of form found in a school of baitfish in the wild. Next, Jason will lead the group to the grand meadow, to view his site-specific installation Scarred Flat (Shark Point). It is a 1/3 scale recreation of a shallow sea grass flat located 4.5 miles southeast of the Flamingo Ranger Station in Everglades National Park. This location is a high traffic area between two popular fishing spots of Northern Florida Bay just outside of what is now a restricted propulsion area (Snake Bight Pole and Troll Zone), where boaters are not permitted to use any combustion engines. The lines are caused by the spinning propellers of power boats running across the shallow areas of the Bay resulting in linear trenches devoid of sea grass. These propeller scars result in habitat reduction for the small creatures that form the base of the bay’s aquatic ecosystem.

Reed Van Brunschot, sketches for Five More Minutes, 2015

Reed Van Brunschot, sketches for Five More Minutes, 2015

Reed Van Brunschot, will then introduce her site-specific installation Five More Minutes, which is made of transparent plastic sheets, tape and plastic, suspended from the vines of the grandiose African sausage tree. This ephemeral setting of a generic living room ties together the idea of childhood daydreaming or imaginary “playing house” with the fact that kids don’t play outside as much anymore.

Two years ago I curated UNNATURAL for the Bass Museum of Art – an exhibition that dealt with artificial nature and man-made landscape http://www.bassmuseum.org/art/unnatural/. I find that working with AIRIE artists about their own reflection on natural environments is an organic continuation of dealing with these issues. A significant number of artists today challenge the gap between traditional perceptions of “nature” and “culture.” In many cases, they introduce new understandings of the sublime that replaces the senses of romance and awe with a diverse range of critical, political and poetic approaches. A sample of these approaches will be seen on January 24^th in Pinecrest Gardens.

AIRIE is a unique program that provides an extraordinary opportunity for artists to reside within the Everglades National Park. This unique program was started in 2001 after U.S. Congress passed the $8 billion Everglades Restoration Plan. The artists spend a month living and working in the Park, immersed in the ecological and cultural concerns of our endangered World Heritage Site. Monthly artist talks and exhibitions of new work by AIRIE Fellows at ArtCenter South Florida and Florida International University attracted the attention of South Floridians last year. We look forward to sharing these ideas and discussing the future with you on January 24^th, tickets available at http://www.airie.org/.