Irene Sperber

It’s official. Downtown finally has a foothold on resurrection. Like Osiris and the Phoenix, this Magic City is sloughing off the last remains of it’s long dead sleep. Artists have rubber-stamped our central real estate as their now and future outpost of the day. It’s all a cakewalk from here as corporations have noted the obvious reason a neighborhood takes off and offered, up, donated, rented, leased or given over, various venues to attract the Golden Goose of success. Artists profit and the community benefits from this synergistic largess.

Miami WorldCenter is one such benefactor for Downtown ArtHouse, a four pronged creative edifice encapsulating a quartet of founding organizations:

1. BFI Gallery, an artist (Naomi Fisher, Jim Drain, Javier Hernandez) run space for free expression and innovative thinking, and home of the artist led bus tours, Weird. Miami
2. Turn-Based Press, a work/gallery space to promote print: artists books and works on paper
3. Dimension Variable, exhibition space for the “exchange of ideas between our city and the international community”
4. TM Sisters, Natasha and Monica Lopez de Victoria, multi-media artists (ArtHouse is now joined by the non-founding Michael John Gallery)

The Downtown Development Authority matched these original four space-needy groups with Miami WorldCenter Associates and its 25,000 foot building, left empty several years ago by the long held Capt. Harry’s Fishing Supply.

I spoke with the lead printer and co-director of Turn Based Press Katheleen Hudspeth (Thom Wheeler Castillo is co-director/associate printer) and queen bee of this hive of a membership supported community printshop. An accomplished printmaker, Hudspeth purchased several presses with “a vision for the Turn-Based Press. Print makers need space and equipment to work and I started thinking of opening something on a scale of a university press. Print makers need a collaborative environment.” Hudspeth is a Knight’s Challenge grant winner and subject, along with four other winners, of a Knight Foundation regional Emmy winning documentary (Ideas in Motion) of their artistic journeys.

Along with Executive Coordinator and Assistant Printer Denise Monge, this tripod of pressing needs keeps the necessities of people like Vice Versa Press publishing’s Julia Arredondo and record label mogul-in-waiting Emilie Milgrim of Other Electricities in business.

I then ambled across the small courtyard (ok, it’s a parking area) to visit Dimensions Variable exhibition space. The three artists responsible for DV are Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Frances Twombly and Adler Guerrier (exhibiting in PAMM Aug. 7 thru Jan. 25).

I conversed with the current exhibitor, Havana-based Candelario whose installation tower, Personal Luggage at Dimensions is poignantly relevant to the gallery’s mission statement of international communication with our magic-ness that is Miami. “You can call anywhere from this piece (his installation)”

Indeed, Candelario proceeded to talk to Havana via a bluetooth connection through radio waves which serves as a link between the art piece and an interactive interface.“It will help me to communicate with Cubans both here and there,” Candelario explained as I watched him carry on a viable chat while staring into his lighted high-rise artwork, which is installed in the center of the gallery room. Candelario “develops ideas in different media from my neighborhood, St. Augustin in Cuba. Lasa Laboratorio Artistico of St. Augustin is my artistic project space.”

Through June 22 at Dimensions Variable, he will further his experimental idea begun at Lasa. He will continue to speak to Miami Cubans who have connections with St. Augustin, spending two months at the admirable Fountainhead residency on this project.

He has the first TV studio in Havana called MAC/SAN TV for live performances, public projections and recording studio.

The MiamiWorldCenter Associates who own and temporarily donated the Arthouse space explains itself as “vertically integrated real estate and land development organization “.

Their future idea for Miami comprises, (and I quote): “A dynamic urban core of diversity and excitement, Miami Worldcenter brings a new energy to Miami with a compelling blend of exceptional retail, hospitality, and residential offerings in one unique location. World, meet Miami.”

This mega-proposal involves a a 30-acre tract of prime Miami land plonked just on the northern fringes of downtown Miami’s inner circle. As a wordsmith of sorts, I’m lovin’ the “vertically integrated” coining.

Miami is rising figuratively and metaphorically. Restaurants and bars are popping up, looking distinctly “Bushwick-ish” (not that we want, nor need, to be a copy of anything, dahling) before soaring into the stratosphere as highminded developers plot Miami’s lofty course for the future.

Downtown ArtHouse, 100 NE 11th Street Miami, 33132. Web: www.turnbasedpress.com