Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Public Art
This city has always been way ahead of the curve when it comes to public art. Miami and
Miami Beach established the Art in Public Places program way back in 1973, when it
voted to allocate 1.5% of city construction funds to the fostering of public art; since then
more than 700 works - sculptures, mosaics, murals, light-based installations and more -
have been created in public spots.
Barbara Neijne's
Foreverglades,
in Concourse J of Miami International Airport, uses
mosaic, art-installed text from
River of Grass
(by Marjory Stoneman Douglas) and waves
representing the movement of water over grass to give new arrivals a sense of the flow of
Florida's most unique ecosystem. A series of handprints representing Miami's many im-
migrant communities link into a single community in
Reaching for Miami Skies,
by Con-
nie Lloveras, which greets Metromover commuters at Brickell Station. In Miami-Dade
Library, the floating text of
Words Without Thought Never to Heaven Go
by Edward
Ruscha challenges readers to engage in thought processes that are inspired by, but go bey-
ond, the topics that surround them. The team of Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt,
hailing from Argentina, have been among the most prolific public artists in town. Their
work is deliberately meant to warp conceptions of what is or isn't public space; they cre-
ated the giant red
M
at the Metromover Riverwalk Station for the city's centennial back in
1996.
You can count among Florida's snowbirds some of the USA's best writers, such as Robert
Frost, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Annie Dillard, and every January, the literati of the US
hold court at the Annual Key West Literary Seminar.
Literature
Writers need to be around good stories to keep their narrative wits sharp, and no place
provides stories quite like South Florida, where farmers clash with environmentalists who
fight financiers, while immigrants arrive from a hundred different countries and, every
summer, a hurricane hits. This proximity to real-life drama means, unsurprisingly, many of
Miami's best authors cut their writing teeth in journalism. As a result, there's a breed of
Miami prose that has the terse punch of the best newspaper writing. Beginning with
