caribbean village wallpaper / miami dade art in public places
The Forgotten Frontier / Archive printed Korographics Vinyl Wallpaper from original drawings / Caribbean Village / Affordable Housing for the Elderly Building / Miami Dade Art in Public Places Commission / South Miami Heights / February 2020 / 19755 SW 110th Ct, Cutler Bay, FL 33157
I am delighted to have created my first wallpaper from original drawings for a Miami-Dade Art in Public Places commission at Caribbean Village, an affordable housing development for the elderly in South Miami Heights, which just opened. It gave me the opportunity to consider how profound the Caribbean culture, ecology and cuisine has permeated South Florida, so pervasive as to be invisible, or rather identified as our own. It is seeped into our landscape, from the coconut palms to the mango explosions that herald our hurricane summers. We owe a particular debt to the Bahamian pioneers, who with them brought their knowledge of how to survive the harsh conditions of tropical living- and the literal fruits of its labor.
I am likewise indebted to the very first photographs of our South Florida landscape, and the pioneers and Seminoles within it, taken by Ralph Munroe, in the book Forgotten Frontier. It depicts a brief halcyon moment of relative peace between different people, before the railroad brought the outside world down upon it.
