400 South Pointe
DVCAI is a non-profit organization with a mission to promote, nurture and cultivate the vision and diverse talents of emerging artists from the Caribbean and Latin American Diaspora through our alternate space exhibitions, artists in residence, international exchange programs, and outreach activities that celebrate Miami-Dade’s rich cultural and social fabric. Programs are supported in part by Miami -Dade Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, The Miami –Dade County Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners
DVCAI is a non-profit organization with a mission to promote, nurture and cultivate the vision and diverse talents of emerging artists from the Caribbean and Latin American Diaspora through our alternate space exhibitions, artists in residence, international exchange programs, and outreach activities that celebrate Miami-Dade’s rich cultural and social fabric. Programs are supported in part by Miami -Dade Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, The Miami –Dade County Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners
PERFORMANCES BY
Aisha Tandiwe Bell was born in New York City but spent her early childhood in Bull Bay, Jamaica. Inspired by fragmented identities, Bell’s practice is committed to creating myth and ritual through sculpture, performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Bell holds a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute, and a MFA from Hunter College. In addition to receiving an NYFA in Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Work, she has held artist residencies at Skowhegan, Rush Corridor Gallery, Abron’s Art Center, LMCC’s Swing Space, The Laundromat Project, and BRIC. Bell has exhibited at the Rosa Parks Museum, Columbia College, Space One Eleven, Rush Arts, MoCADA, and Museo De La Arte Moderno. She participated in International Cultural Exchanges with DVCAI between 2012 and 2015, and in 2017.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Jenna Efrein received her MFA from Alfred University School of Art and Design in Sculpture/Dimensional Studies in 2009, and is a full-time lecturer of glass and sculpture art at the University of Miami. She is currently a resident at Bakehouse Art Complex in Wynwood, FL. Since moving to Miami from Philadelphia nearly four years ago, Efrein has participated in nine exhibitions and mounted two solo shows. Her work engages the co-existence between social structures and the environment through material use, reclamation, and installation. Through objects and installations, Efrein creates bridges with individuals to expose communal vulnerabilities.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Onajide Shabaka has studied at California College of the Arts and received his BFA in photography from Florida Atlantic University and MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His research-based practice—investigative and self-reflective—engages the trajectory of historical and biographical themes related to indigenous and hybrid peoples, and material and social cultures of the African Atlantic and the Americas. His body of work includes multimedia, drawing, photography, sculpture and filmic forms that evoke intimacy and visceral personal connections. Shabaka lives and works in Miami, FL.
Rosa Nada
Rosa Naday Garmendia is an interdisciplinary artist who produces work at the nexus of contemporary art and social action. Committed to creativity, activism and social change, her practice reflects on and critiques the norms and values of society, and is drawn from her experience as a woman, an immigrant, and an industrial worker. She sees history, not as past, but as present. Her recent projects critically view the role of police, acts of racism, poverty in the United States, and growing military intervention abroad.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born, New York City-based multidisciplinary artist. Her sculptures and installations reflect her interest in the folk-art traditions, art rituals, music and dance of Latin America, The Caribbean, and Africa. Cortés uses a wide variety of materials and sculptural methods in combinations with found objects to reimagine art as sites of memory and of cultural symbolic meaning. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at manyvenues including: Neuberger Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum of Art, El Museo Del Barrio, MoMA PS1, and Museum of Contemporary Hispanic
Art. Internationally she has exhibited in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Spain and Greece.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Jean Blackwell Font is a mixed media artist living in Miami, FL. A self-taught practitioner, Font has learned from artists she knows personally and studies the art of those whose work she admires, including Francis Picabia, Romare Bearden, Wangechi Mutu, and Joseph Cornell. Her work develops a visual vocabulary to express ideas and concepts through painting, collage, and mixed media. Font’s earlier work addressed themes of media-driven self-making, female relationships, and the “everyday woman.” Font works to reveal the diverse beauty, mystery, and inherent power of simply being female.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Active as a composer and performer, Molly Joyce’s music has been described as “impassioned” (The Washington Post), written to “superb effect,” (The Wire), and “vibrant, inventive music that communicates straight from the heart,” (Prufrock’s Dilemma). Her works have been commissioned and performed by several distinguished ensembles including the New World Symphony, New York Youth Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and the New Juilliard, Decoda, and Contemporaneous ensembles. Additionally, her work has been performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon and VisionIntoArt’s FERUS Festival, and featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, WNYC’s New Sounds, Q2 Music, I Care If You Listen, and The Log Journal.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Asser Saint-Val was born in Haiti in 1974 and moved to South Florida in 1988. He earned a BFA in painting and graphic design from the New World School of the Arts and from University of Florida. Saint-Val’s work, which has been exhibited in Florida, New York, and throughout the Caribbean, is also featured in numerous private collections including the Rubell Family Collection, Francie Bishop Good, Lisa & Mosquera Collection, and Carlos Sanchoo. His work, Cosmic Dilemma, was selected as the signature piece for the 2004 Miami International Film Festival. Twice awarded the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, this year he received a residency grant from Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) to Santiago de Cuba. He has also received four Community Grant Awards for Artinthesky, an ongoing public art installation series project supported by Miami-Dade County Public Affairs.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Alette Simmons-Jimenez is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and a cultural organizer. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She is a recipient of numerous grants including the Knight Arts Challenge Grant and a Florida Artist Fellowship for Painting. Her career has taken her to New Orleans, Miami, and the Dominican Republic, where she was the first women to exhibit video installation art in the country, and was awarded the First Prize in Video during the 1992 Biennial of Visual Arts. Simmons-Jimenez is active in the Miami arts community, and in 2004, founded and directed the artists’ collective, Artformz Alternative. She
served three years on the national board of ArtTable, a New York-based organization for women leaders in the art industry, and at the helm of the ArtTable Florida Chapter. Recently she was awarded an Exchange Grant to The Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Palma de Majorca, Spain. She is currently developing final designs for a private commission to be installed at Place de la République Dominicaine in Paris, advocating non-violence against women.
d 2015, and in 2017.
Lauren Shapiro holds an MFA from the University of Miami and a BFA from Florida Atlantic University. Her process tests the capabilities of plaster and porcelain clay while exploring the idea of strength versus fragility, and often plays with the transformative fabrication line between the two elements. Her work pays homage to a time in art and industry when objects were produced by hand rather than machine. She has been resident artist at the Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute in Jingdezhen, China, home of the world’s finest porcelain. Shapiro’s exhibition history includes the Lowe Museum of Art, The Bakehouse Art Complex, the sculpture garden of the Whitespace Collection, the Art and Culture Center/Hollywood, and Art Bastion in Wynwood. Her work was recently showcased in Art Basel Switzerland at Projectraum M54, an independent exhibition project for contemporary art to cultivate artistic exchange between the different cities.
