By Nina Johnson-Milewski, Miami Rail Knight Foundation supports the Miami Rail to provide arts and culture coverage about Miami for local and national distribution via print and online platforms. Below, Nina Johnson-Milewski, publisher of the Miami Rail, writes about their work from the past year. Photo by Gesi Schilling

The Miami Rail has provided a valuable forum for analytical perspectives on arts and culture. An editorially independent expansion to Brooklyn Rail, the Miami Rail’s mission is grounded in the notion that sustained and documented critical insights are necessary for vitality and growth in the arts. The quarterly newspaper has recorded, and thereby contributed to, an exceptionally vibrant period in Miami’s cultural history.

Each quarter the Rail has distributed 5,000 free copies of the printed publication across Miami, while making all of its contents available for free online.

In its inaugural year, the Miami Rail has covered internationally renowned artists and exhibitions such as Rashid Johnson at Miami Art Museum, and Rita Ackermann at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.  It has published dialogues such as that between Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates and Diana Nawi, associate curator at the Miami Art Museum (prior to his solo “Soul Manufacturing Corporation” at Locust Projects). Likewise, readers have heard directly from the pioneer of video art, Bill Viola, as he spoke with the Rail about “the power of the moment, digital humanism and the catatonia of the image.”

The Rail has offered in-depth profiles of Miami artists such as George Sanchez-Calderon and Jillian Mayer, as well as the autobiography of Miami-based Jim Drain, a creative collaboration between the artist and local poet and director of O, Miami, P. Scott Cunningham. Rail writers have also traveled to dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany, the Venice Biennale, the Havana Biennale and the Shanghai Biennale. Those visits have brought the Miami scene into direct conversation with national and international happenings.

The Rail has worked with diverse local and outside arts writers, both established and up-and-coming. Former Vogue literary editor Jill Spalding has offered her perspectives on Frank Gehry’s New World Center and reviewed Tom Wolfe’s Miami-set novel, “Back to Blood.” The Rail has also engaged authors in conversation, publishing long interviews with significant writers such as Geoff Dyer, who spoke candidly about his diverging interests and his personal reading and writing habits. In the next issue, TD Allman, freelance journalist, foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair and recent author of “Finding Florida,” will talk to the Rail.

The Rail has made significant contributions to cultural programming in Miami with its visiting writers program. These authors have contributed an essay to the newspaper, and have provided film screenings, lectures and workshops, which have been free and open to the public. While in Miami, writers traverse the area, making studio visits, meeting cultural figures and taking note of Miami’s diverse artistic landscape. Visiting writers have included: freelance curator, writer and lecturer Patterson Sims; photographer and painter Sarah Trigg; Saul Ostrow, art critic, curator and editor of Bomb magazine; and writer, filmmaker and artist John Menick.

The Miami Rail has covered everything from shows at major institutions to small galleries, as well as diverse dance, musical, literary and cultural phenomena. Now, the Rail is working to expand the visiting writers program and hopes to move from quarterly to monthly publication in the near future.

As Phong Bui, founder and publisher of the Brooklyn Rail, wrote in the first Miami Rail (Summer 2012), “The function of criticism—in addition to ennobling the spirit and elevating the mind” is to advance art through productive dialogue and interrogation. That’s the spirit that’s galvanized us to be part of the cultural discussion—and will guide us through our second year.