Articles by

Fernando González

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    Opa-locka and the art of renewal

    Published February 12, 2015 by

    Artists and urban planners collaborate on an ambitious public art master plan for Opa-locka, Fla. Photo coutresy of the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation. The images of Opa-locka, a small, blue-collar city 10 miles north of downtown Miami, speak of hard times — but also possibility. The Knight Arts Challenge is nurturing that potential.  In 2012 the nonprofit Opa-locka Community Development Corp. won an Arts Challenge grant for an arts festival and exhibit. The resulting “Art of Transformation,” which took place Nov. 12  to Dec. 14, 2014, included dance, music, public art and a street festival, and celebrated Opa-locka’s revitalizations efforts. Last year, the Opa-locka Community Development Corp. also won a new Arts Challenge grant to engage artist and landscape architect Walter Hood to turn Ali Baba Avenue into a large-scale public art project and, as the grant description notes, “work with residents to transform the avenue – currently wide, barren and unappealing to pedestrians and drivers – with painted interventions.”
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    A musical collaboration, across the miles

    Published February 9, 2015 by

    Michael Tilson Thomas workshops with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra via Internet2 in NWS' 2015 Town Hall Master Class and Side-by-Side Concert. Photo courtesy of New World Symphony. The future was on display during a remarkable evening of music, education and technology at the New World Center in Miami Beach Wednesday night. Titled a “Town Hall Master Class and Side-by-Side Concert,” the annual event, part public workshop-demonstration, part concert, brought together this year the New World Symphony and students from middle and high schools in South Florida and beyond. It featured Michael Tilson Thomas, co-founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony;  marimba player Charles Comiter, from the A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach; clarinetists Daniel Bermúdez Tamayo, a student at the Academia Filarmónica de Medellín, Colombia; New World Symphony fellows; and music students from Medellín; members of the Metropolitan Youth Symphony in Portland, Ore.; and students from South Florida. The young musicians from  Medellin and Portland were participants in New World’s long-distance teaching programs. The South Florida players had auditioned for the Side-by-Side concert and, as part of the experience, were able to spend time, virtually and in person, working with New World fellows.
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    El Knight Arts Challenge para el Sur de la Florida ya está abierto a nuevas propuestas

    Published January 26, 2015 by

    Photo courtes ed the  Screening Room. More than 8,900 ideas, 241 projects and 25 million - only since 2008. Figures from Knight Arts Challenge South Florida, which receives requests from today, provides an overview and a general idea of ​​the program - but not tell the whole story. There was support for projects as diverse as   mobile libraries , efforts to preserve rare, a traditional style of Haitian music, workshops to nurture love for film posters to bring Everglades City  and a program to interest children in the jazz projects winners in the seven years of these challenges provide a detailed snapshot of a multicultural, creative and dynamic community.
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    Knight Arts Challenge South Florida opens for entries

    Published January 26, 2015 by

    Photo courtesy of The Screening Room. More than 8,900 ideas. 241 projects. $25 million. All since 2008. The numbers of the Knight Arts Challenge in South Florida, which opens for entries today, provide an overview of the program — but they don’t tell the full story. There has been support for pop-up artists’ bookstores, preserving Haitian rara music, developing the local film community, bringing the Everglades into the city with billboards, and bringing kids to jazz. The winning projects from seven annual challenges offer a richly detailed snapshot of a dynamic, multicultural community. “What is very important to us is that we don’t tell the community what we are seeking; we ask the community what they are interested in,” says Dennis Scholl, vice president for arts at Knight Foundation. “That’s the beauty of the contest.” It is a simple process. The challenge, which closes Feb. 23, has only three rules: The idea must be about the arts; the project must take place in or benefit South Florida; and the grant recipients must find funds to match Knight’s commitment.
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    Lil’ Buck and the art of jookin’

    Published January 23, 2015 by

    Lil' Buck performs during the YoungArts Salon. Photo by World Red Eye.  The question to dancer and choreographer Charles “Lil’ Buck” Riley laid out what many in the room had been wondering: “How do you do this? Are you Superman?”  “I’m really glad you asked. The cat’s out of the box,” Riley deadpanned, without missing a beat. “I came here from Saturn …” The audience at the sixth National YoungArts Foundation Salon exploded in laughter. The Tuesday night conversation, one of a series sponsored by Knight Foundation, provided a short introduction to Riley’s graceful and athletic style. But for anyone familiar with his astonishing mix of classical dance and jookin’, a style of hip-hop dancing developed in Memphis, Tenn., the question, and the answer, sound perfectly logical and possible. In full flight, Riley, 26, glides across stages with a liquid ease. He mixes fluid movements with sharp angular breaks, and arms evoking classic ballet swan gestures. He constructs narratives mixing freestyle steps and en pointe work in high-top sneakers, often bending and twisting his ankles in impossible angles. At pauses, his body seems to vibrate to the music like a plucked string.  
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    MUSAIC, a musical meeting house for the world

    Published January 20, 2015 by

      Gil Shaham leads a master class of Brahms' violin concerto, 1st movement.    It’s a place where, a few keystrokes away, you can find cellist Yo-Yo Ma offering insights about the structure and interpretation of Bach’s “Suite No. 5 in C minor” for unaccompanied cello; have a former principal flutist at the Boston Symphony Orchestra give you some pointers on practicing scales; or just simply listen to a performance of Steve Reich’s modern classic “Music for 18 Musicians.” In fact, the recently launched MUSAIC, an online community of classical musicians and video library curated by the New World Symphony, is that, and more, including master classes, conferences, live virtual hangouts and webcasts of events. Co-founding artistic director of the New World Symphony “Michael [Tilson Thomas] used to talk about creating a global musical meeting house,” says Howard Herring, president and CEO of New World, while discussing the origins of the project. “We know about meeting houses. [It’s a place where] there are a lot of collisions, a lot of conversations, a lot of ‘Hey, do you know that piece? Do you have trouble where I have trouble? Let’s figure it out.’  Michael’s vision was ‘What if you can do this at a global scale?’ and in fact the digital world allows you to do it. So we started to experiment. “
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    GardenMusic Festival at Fairchild is an adventure in musical discovery

    Published January 6, 2015 by

    Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, one of the treasures of South Florida, is also the setting for one of the area’s most intriguing musical events. Now in its third year, Fairchild’s GardenMusic Festival, a 2012 Knight Arts Challenge winner, offers chamber music—with a twist. The festival, which runs Jan. 9 through 18, includes four concerts with a distinct theme. Overall, they showcase a range of musical styles, from chamber and folk music to jazz and Latin music. The program also includes two children’s concerts Jan. 10 and 17. The Sixth Floor Trio developed and directs the festival, which began in 2012. Its members include Teddy Abrams, a conductor, composer, clarinetist and pianist, Harrison Hollingsworth, bassoonist and violinist, and clarinetist Johnny Teyssier. Drummer and educator Gabriel Globus-Hoenich coordinates the educational programming of the festival.
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    Blending of opera and cabaret gives pop soup of ‘Andy’ its flavor

    Published December 16, 2014 by

    Photo by Kate Raines. The work of Andy Warhol set the art world on its head, blurring the lines between high and low and the notions of what defined artistic and commercial work. It is only fitting then that “Andy: A Popera,” a show exploring Warhol’s life, work and legacy, started with pop-up performances of singing soup cans in a supermarket aisle, evolved into a cabaret show and is now becoming an adventurous, irreverent pop art-cabaret-opera mash-up scheduled to premiere in Philadelphia in September 2015. The piece is a collaboration between Opera Philadelphia and the experimental cabaret company the Bearded Ladies. The creative process and the intended result suggest a daring and ingenuity that truly celebrates the subject. Both organizations are previous Knight Arts Challenge winners, and “Andy: A Popera” is being developed with Knight Foundation support. Classical composer Dan Visconti, who recently completed a multi-year residency with opera companies, including Seattle Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, New York City Opera, the Glimmerglass Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, recently joined the “Andy” creative team and is charged with creating the unprecedented musical hybrid.
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    Three Miami films to screen at Sundance Film Festival

    Published December 10, 2014 by

    El Sol Como un Gran Animal Oscuro TRAILER from Dennis Scholl on Vimeo. Above: El Sol Como un Gran Animal Oscuro. Underscoring the vitality and diversity of the independent filmmaking community in South Florida, three made-in-Miami films have been accepted to the prestigious 2015 Sundance Film Festival. They include: “The Strongest Man,” a feature by writer-director Kenny Riches; “El Sol Como un Gran Animal Oscuro,” (“The Sun as a Great Dark Animal”), an animated short film directed by Christina Felisgrau and Ronnie Rivera, and “Papa Machete,” a short film about Haitian machete fencing or tire machet, a vanishing tradition, written by Jason Fitzroy Jeffers and Keisha Rae Witherspoon and directed by Jonathan David Kane. The Sundance Film Festival is scheduled for Jan. 22 to Feb. 1 in Park City, Utah. Going to Sundance “feels a little unreal,” says Jeffers, a Barbados-born journalist and musician. “Papa Machete,” which follows Alfred Avril, a subsistence farmer and master fencer, grew out of Jeffers’ personal interest in the machete as tool, weapon and symbol in Caribbean culture. “Papa Machete” is his first foray into filmmaking.
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    Serious fun at The Swamp – and everywhere – at Miami Book Fair International

    Published November 17, 2014 by

    “Live Painting With Lebo!” at The Swamp. Photo by Michael D. Bolden. The 31st edition of Miami Book Fair International, staged at the campus of Miami Dade College in downtown Miami, opened Sunday with dance, poetry, radio and authors addressing serious topics. There was also serious fun at The Swamp, a popup lounge set up on one of the campus parking lots, including live painting to music, poetry karaoke and, it being Miami, a closing set by Suénalo, a Latin funk nine-piece band. The Swamp includes an open-air space with a book sales tent, a food truck and a bocce court; a roomy, hangar-like performance space, with a stage and inside walls covered with art by local artists, a porch, and a beer stand with offerings from a South Florida microbrewery. The project, a 2013 Knight Arts Challenge winner, is just one part of Knight Foundation’s support for the fair, which is expanding the reach of the event to include live-streaming and daily coverage by PBS, a children’s theater festival, a discussion on the future of publishing, and events with notable poets and National Book Award winners and finalists. But the Swamp, as the Miami Book Fair website says, is “part funky, part fancy—all Florida.”