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The Contemporary Arts Project, which began in November 2006, engages leading Miami-based and national artists in the creation and exhibition of original artworks inspired by Vizcaya. After a preliminary immersion visit to the Museum, each artist develops an original project proposal based upon his or her experience, creates and installs the project at Vizcaya, and presents related programming to the public, such as performances, demonstrations, and talks. Each installation exhibited for a period of two to three months, enabling Vizcaya to showcase significant artistic talent while also offering visitors new, stimulating, and challenging ways of understanding this historic site. The goals of this new initiative are to reinvigorate Vizcaya with the creative dialogue that characterized its foundation, develop appreciation among visitors of Vizcaya’s contemporary relevance, and provide opportunities for artists to exhibit their work to a diverse audience.
Cristina Lei Rodriguez
Struggling for Grandeur
November 8, 2007 - February 24, 2008
 In Struggling for Grandeur, Cristina Lei Rodriguez reinterprets topiaries found in Vizcaya’s formal gardens to create an eight-foot-tall sculpture for the Tea Room. Using inexpensive materials such as plastic and artificial plants to achieve a sense of beauty and grandeur, Rodriguez paradoxically mirrors Vizcaya founder James Deering’s vision through a twenty-first-century lens, referencing the struggle between natural elements and human intervention and the dynamic process of growth and decay. Intentionally sculpted to imperfection, Struggling for Grandeur represents the challenge of maintaining an ideal, neoclassical image amid the harsh realities of a subtropical climate. Given the opportunity to situate the sculpture in any location on Vizcaya’s grounds, Rodriguez selected the Tea Room for its ornate décor and garden views. With highly decorative neoclassical murals and inlaid marble floors, the Tea Room echoes the sculpture’s intricate detail. Vizcaya’s stained glass doors offer views of the formal gardens that provide the source imagery for Rodriguez’s large sculpture and create a dialogue between interior and exterior spaces. Struggling for Grandeur is the latest in a series of works exploring the ongoing conflict between nature and human efforts to civilize and constrain. Commenting on the futility of imposing order on nature, Rodriguez covers mass-produced faux materials with oozing plastic. Struggling for Grandeur underscores the transitory nature of civilization’s
triumphs and the potential for of its decline.
Artist Biography
Born in Miami in 1974, Cristina Lei Rodriguez received a B.A. from Middlebury College in 1996 and an M.F.A. from California College of Arts in 2002. She has two upcoming solo shows in 2008—one with Team Gallery (New York ) and another with Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin ( Miami ). Rodriguez was selected to participate in a group show highlighting forty young American artists, Uncertain States of America . The exhibition has traveled extensively to sites including AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art ( Oslo ), Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (New York ), Serpentine Gallery (London ), Herning Museum of Art ( Denmark ). Rodriguez has alsoexhibited her work at Deitch Project ( New York ), Mary Boone Gallery (New York ), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin ( Paris ), The Rubell Family Collection ( Miami) and The Moore Space
(Miami). Rodriguez currently lives and works in Miami.
Catherine Sullivan
Triangle of Need
November 29, 2007 - February 24, 2008
 A multi-channel film project in collaboration with Sean Griffin, Dylan Skybrook and Kunle Afolayan
Chicago-based theater and film artist Catherine Sullivan’s ambitious new work, Triangle of Need, introduces “Neanderthals,” e-mail scams, and figure skating into Vizcaya’s lush and seemingly placid environment. The resulting installation is at once visually seductive and conceptually alienating, mixing cinematic conventions with difficult and abstract ideas about evolution, human behavior, and social inequality. Triangle of Need was filmed primarily at Vizcaya and in a nondescript apartment in Chicago , the city in which James Deering’s International Harvester firm was based. At Vizcaya, Sullivan screens the Miami and Chicago apartment footage on three monitors in the Renaissance Hall. An additional monitor is placed in the second-floor Cathay bedroom, juxtaposing scenes of Minneapolis figure skater Rohene Ward against grainy images of young women celebrating their quinces (15th birthday) in Vizcaya’s gardens.Identifiable characters and distinct narratives emerge in Triangle of Need; some of these were based on Sullivan’s analysis of the Pathéscope company’s catalogue of silent films, from which James Deering ordered movies to view at Vizcaya. However, Sullivan infuses the piece with complexity and incongruity, making these familiar personalities and stories virtually impossible to comprehend. Actors play multiple roles, while settings and plots fluidly merge.
The predominant narrative revolves around three “orphans” who arrive at a bayfront mansion (Vizcaya) by speedboat and are identified as the world’s last surviving “Neanderthals.” Three specialists—women of diverse character—are recruited to breed the “Neanderthals” and reintroduce the species for practical applications, including labor. One of the women relies on movement, another on play, and the third on force—but their captives grow increasingly morose and are unwilling to reproduce under these cruel conditions. Sullivan became interested in how the scientific study of Neanderthals was used in the past to assert the superiority of Western civilization and colonization.
An intersecting narrative is built around a fraudulent e-mail that Sullivan received: the supposed sender, Doctor Obi from Nigeria , claimed that a man by the name of Harold Bowen was killed in an accident, leaving a vast sum of money without an heir. In this common scam, the sender promises to transfer the deceased’s funds to the recipient, pending the provision of identifying personal information. In Triangle of Need , the concept is liberally reinterpreted: Mr. Bowen lives and interacts with the menacing eugenic specialists at Vizcaya; and a character named “Next of Kin” (the absent beneficiary of the subject e-mail) resides in the Chicago apartment, just next door to Dr. Obi.
Vizcaya provided a relevant backdrop for Sullivan’s focus on class and the evolution of wealth in America . But Sullivan also sought to meet the estate’s “high standard for the imagination.” Explaining how the property was compatible with her approach, the artist noted: “Vizcaya is a place of great historical ‘noise,’ with a pastiche of styles and decorative chronologies; there is no singular experience of one moment in time. Histories overlap and leave behind loose ends.”
Triangle of Need is a richly collaborative project. Sullivan partnered with Minneapolis-based choreographer Dylan Skybrook to develop movements for the actors based on studied and imagined theories of Neanderthal movement. She also worked closely with Los Angeles-based composer Sean Griffin, who created the original score and invented “Mousterian,” a complex performative language spoken throughout the work. As a counterpoint to her own directorial style, Sullivan worked with Nigerian actor/director Kunle Afolayan, who filmed the scenes spoken in English.
Sullivan’s work has been featured at several major institutions including the Whitney Museum (New York); Seattle Art Museum; Tate Modern (London); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Goetz Collection (Munich); Palais de Tokyo (Japan); and Centre d’Art Contemporain (Switzerland). Ms. Sullivan is the Walker Art Center’s 2007 artist-in-residence. She holds an M.F.A. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California , and a B.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts.
Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need is co-commissioned by A Foundation, Liverpool; Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis . A Foundation’s commission is supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation. Catherine Sullivan’s artist residency at the Walker Art Center was made possible by generous support from the Nimoy Foundation. Additional support is provided by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Foundation, Miami; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels; Metro Pictures Gallery, New York ; Galeria Gìo Marconi and Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne/Berlin.
Past Installations
Anna Gaskell
Still Life
March 15 - June 1, 2007
A site-specific installation filmed at Vizcaya by New York-based visual artist Anna Gaskell.
Using Vizcaya as a portal, Anna Gaskell explores ideas about the relations of time and space, memory, amnesia and déjà vu. Moving throughout the garden the camera engages the viewer in a game of hide and seek.
A singular country, superior to all others, as Art is to Nature, where the latter is transformed by the dream, where it is corrected, embellished, recast.
—Charles Baudelaire, L’invitation au voyage
Artist Biography
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Anna Gaskell was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1969. She studied at Bennington College for two years before attending the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a B.F.A. in 1992; she received an M.F.A. from Yale University in 1995. Gaskell’s early photographs were self-portraits, but she soon began photographing girls as they collectively acted out stories, often embodying characters reminiscent of Alice from Alice in Wonderland. In her wonder (1996–97) and override (1997) series, groups of girls dressed in matching uniforms are shown in ambiguous and ominous situations. Her series hide (1998) evokes a Brothers Grimm tale of a young woman who disguises herself under an animal pelt so that she might escape her own father’s proposal of marriage; Gaskell set this story in a gothic mansion illuminated by candlelight. Recently, she has been incorporating the history of specific sites into her works’ narratives; in the photographs and short film that make up half life (2002), for example, the artist portrayed the former residence of Dominique de Menil as a sort of haunted house.
Gaskell’s first solo exhibition was at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York in 1997; she has since exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (1998), White Cube in London (1999 and 2002), Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado (2000), Castello di Rivoli in Rivoli, Italy (2001), and the Menil Collection in Houston (2002). She has also participated in Sightings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1998), Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50 at Burden Gallery in New York (2002), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Pretty Baby at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2007). She received the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 2000 and a Nancy Graves Foundation grant in 2002. She will be featured in a solo show of new films, including Still Life, at Yvon Lambert New York in May 2007. She lives and works in New York.
Gustavo Matamoros
Organic Pipes
November 16, 2006 – February 1, 2007
Vizcaya's Courtyard was open to the air and enlivened with the rich sounds of nature until 1985, when the glass roof was added to preserve the museum’s historic collections. Artist Gustavo Matamoros's sound installation, Organic Pipes, reactivates this space with “organic” tones of a different sort—those emanating from unique elements of Vizcaya’s main house.
Matamoros began by recording James Deering’s organ rolls as they played on Vizcaya's 1917 pipe organ (located in the Living Room). He then excerpted, manipulated, and combined his recordings to create five distinct tracks that are broadcast from speakers throughout the Courtyard. These tracks are of unequal duration and repeated continuously, resulting in an ever-changing composition of sound.
Matamoros designed ORGANIC PIPES to fit snugly into Vizcaya's Courtyard, giving audible expression to the relationships between the characteristic surfaces—cracks, crevices, curves—of this space. When a pebble is dropped into water it produces ripples that change shape based on the objects and forms encountered; similarly, when sound is released, the waves it produces adapt to the unique configuration of a space. Because the sounds of ORGANIC PIPES conform specifically to the shape of Vizcaya's Courtyard, your experience will be different depending on where you are standing and even how your ears are positioned.
Matamoros provides a subtle, contemporary expression to this historic place. He also compels us to consider the role of sound at Vizcaya and in everyday life.
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens’ Contemporary Arts Project is supported by The Danielson Foundation and Harpo Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Vizcayans, Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, Atwater Kent Foundation, Cowles Charitable Trust, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information about Vizcaya's Contemporary Arts Project and related public programs at Vizcaya, please call 305-250-9133.
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