Knight Foundation

By Sebastian Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer The promised grand finale of the XXI Mainly Mozart Festival not only met expectations but also surpassed them, and provided pleasant extra surprises that went beyond the strictly musical. It was comforting to attend a chamber music concert at the Arsht...

Photo: Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens with Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen at the National YoungArts Salon. Credit: World Red Eye.   For any artist, working with a colleague can open new doors of creativity, as successful collaboration entails compromise. It is an art in itself, after all, to make it happen. And precisely on “The Art of Collaboration” is what the latest installment in the National YoungArts Foundation’s Salon Series was all about, with a discussion that took place on Thursday evening at the organization’s main campus in downtown Miami.

Installation of “I think it’s in my head” at Girls' Club. Photo by Teodora Dakova Downtown Ft. Lauderdale’s art night (on the last Saturdays of the month) is not called just a walk, but an “artwalk + drive,” suggesting one difference between the more spread out...

By Brenna Dixon, AIRIE I grew up a born-and-raised Floridian, knowing that if it was raining in the front yard, probably my brother and I could play in the back where it would be sunny. I watched half-eaten possums float by in the canal I fished with a childhood friend,...

By Joey Bargsten, Florida Atlantic University MelanchoLalaland™, our multimedia opera, is in full swing. Here's a few of the lighting/staging sketches we prepared to visually explain the relationship of live performer to screen for the Miami venues we are currently pursuing. The corporate-dystopia environment was built in Maya and Unity,...

Installation of Michael Jones McKean. Maybe the first thing to jump out at you when taking in the Michael Jones McKean solo show, “we float above to spit and sing” at the Emerson Dorsch Gallery, is the lighting. (It’s the first outing in Miami from the...

This item is cross-posted from the blog of the National YoungArts Foundation. On Thursday, June 26, Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen will moderate the latest installment in the YoungArts Salon Series, which is funded by Knight. The conversation will feature dancer-choreographer Justin Peck and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens discussing “The Art of Collaboration.” The event is sold out, but a video of the discussion will be posted later to The YoungArts Blog. There is something that happens when artists at the highest level collaborate. To call it magic would hint at the other worldliness of this meeting of artistic minds, but it wouldn’t come close to capturing just how awe inspiring an artistic collaboration at the highest level can be. Take Lennon and McCartney, two people brought together to create music so beautiful and powerful that it would seem their partnership was created by the universe itself. Or Rogers and Hammerstein, a pairing that singlehandedly (or I guess double-handedly) created the most legendary songs in musical theater. Of course, it’s common for us to see collaborations and partnerships happening inside of individual art forms, musicians to write a song together or dancers to choreograph the piece as a team. But when artists from different disciplines come together for a common cause, the results can take your breath away. This past May, singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens and New York City Ballet dancer and choreographer Justin Peck debuted their original collaboration titled “Everywhere We Go.” As a way to give more audiences a glimpse at the beauty of this work, director Jody Lee Lipes directed a short film depicting part of the piece. I watched this video on a train ride today from Washington DC to New York and it made me feel as if I was floating through the air while my noisy train pummeled along the East Coast. The short film captures this exact “magic” I described above and shows the intense and simple beauty that can come from a filmmaker, a choreographer, and a musician coming together to create something greater than themselves.