Gallery artist: Sue McPherson

Hello, I am Susan McPherson. It seems I have always taken

Susan McPherson

pictures, first as a radiological technologist and then picking up a camera as an empty nester. I even lived on a street named Photo Drive. 

Photography has opened my mind and soul to nature and the beauty that’s present all around us. I have also made many lasting friendships with people who share my same passion.

It’s not always pleasant getting out before the sun rises, hiking to the perfect location, or standing in the cold and wind waiting for the right time to click the shutter, so Why do I do it? Because every time I see the Milky Way in the middle of the night, see the full moon rise, look at a delicate flower or amazing rock formation, experience a colorful sunset or get a glimpse of elusive wildlife, I am amazed, and my spirit is renewed.

Card artist: Joy Lamb

Joy Lamb adores art in all forms. She especially enjoys painting in watercolor.

Joy Lamb

Having moved residences 21 times in her life, so far, she has learned to see and find art everywhere. Growing up, her family was always creating. Her mother used sewing to create wonderful projects and her father painted wall murals. When her family moved from Chicago (after a short time in Minnesota), they embarked on a three-month cross-country travel-trailer trip that led them to California.

She graduated from San Diego State University and later earned her MBA. Joy married her high school sweetheart and together they raised two children and now are involved with their twin granddaughters. She taught in elementary schools and during that time was asked to and did run an outdoor education program for K through sixth grades. When living in Washington state, she became interested in computer work and became a technical writer for a computer company. This job involved a lot of travel throughout the U.S. while teaching adults software programs.

Traveling is a part of her life, having visited England, Scotland, Germany, Greece, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia. She enjoys the local art everywhere. Native art and crafts became an interest on trips to Australia. Rock-hunting and outdoor life is a lifetime hobby for her family. Joy currently lives in Logandale, Nevada, with her husband and is Communications Chair for Virgin Valley Art Association.

Centuries before Europeans arrived with glass trading beads, Native people who lived in what is now Minnesota were making beads from stone, shells, teeth and bone. Dakota and Ojibwe women used these beads to decorate clothes and craft jewelry, establishing a rich creative tradition.

Even as the materials changed, bead art continued to reflect the natural world of the woods and plains, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Dakota designs used bilateral symmetry — mirror images — and floral patterns in pastel colors. Ojibwe designs also featured florals, but in a more flowing style and against a black background.

Always, beadwork evolved and adapted. For example, in the wake of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, when the Dakota were forced from their homes to Nebraska and the Dakota Territory, their beadwork began to incorporate the bolder colors and geometric, repeating shapes used by their Lakota kin.

By the mid-20th century, after the government encouraged Native people to relocate to cities, beadwork itself came to represent resistance to assimilation and survival of culture. Modern-day artists draw from this heritage, reviving techniques and playing with patterns, carrying meaningful traditions forward in contemporary work.

From left:

Ojibway woodswoman hat, $795; northlandvisions.com

Dakota braintan cinch bag, $1,100; shakopeetradingpost.com

Cedar necklace by Wendy Roy, $200; instagram.com/custombead

Feather barrette from the Minneapolis American Indian Center, $60; maicnet.org

Canadian Iroquois moccasins, circa 1900-1915, $1,900; shakopeetradingpost.com

1900s Canadian Ojibwe braintan bag, $1,500; shakopeetradingpost.com

Rose medallion by Anishinaabe-Michif artist Jack Theis, $680; birchbarknativearts.com

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) – Native POP: People of the Plains is a free event hosted Saturday and Sunday at the Journey Museum from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Every spring there is an open call to artists to be featured in the show.

This year, Native POP will showcase nearly 40 artists.

“This is the 11th year, and there are no indigenous art markets in the region besides Red Cloud. So, we feel it’s important to be represented in our area,” said Lafawn Janis, executive director of Native POP: People of the Plains.

On Saturday, there will be local indigenous musicians who will play at Murphys in downtown Rapid City from 6 to 9 p.m.

There will also be a brunch hosted at Aby’s on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Copyright 2023 KOTA. All rights reserved.

In Wyoming, July 3 is known to some as “Treaty Day” – a day that commemorates the signing of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868. The Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes signed this treaty with the U.S. government 155 years ago, creating what is now the Wind River Reservation.

This year, the Fort Bridger Historic Site made some changes to its annual Treaty Day celebration to emphasize the ongoing presence of tribal communities in the area.

Native artists from both the Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes participated in a new exhibit called “My Treaty Ties” that opened at the Fort Bridger site on July 3 of this year. The exhibit aims to both educate the public about Indigenous history and create a space for Native artists to show their contemporary connections to their ancestors and lands.

Located about thirty miles east of Evanston, the Fort Bridger State Historic Site served as a crossroads for all sorts of people in the mid-to-late 1800s. In 1843, former trappers Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez established a trading post at the site, and it served as a stop along the way for the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Pioneer Trail, and the Pony Express Trail.

But Bridger and Vasquez certainly weren’t the first or the only people to trade in the area – Shoshone people had lived around the Great Basin of the interior West for thousands of years. Fort Bridger Superintendent Joshua Camp said that recent archaeological digs at the site have only affirmed the Shoshone presence there.

“The archaeological record indicates that there were huge amounts of Shoshone trade items [at the post], and the more we looked into it, probably a more accurate picture of what was going on was, yes, the trading post was there, but both inside and outside the fort walls would have been Shoshone trading booths – essentially, it would have been much more like a bazaar where you had all these different people trading goods,” Camp said.

The signing of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 took place six months after the Bear River Massacre, where U.S. troops killed at least 250 Bannock and Shoshone people.

The treaty decreed that a reservation would be created in the Wind River Valley “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Shoshone Indians herein named…” and that the Shoshone-Bannock peoples would be assigned a separate reservation at a later time. This led to the establishment of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation outside of Pocatello, Idaho, and laid the groundwork for fundamental treaty rights.

For Superintendent Camp, connecting all this history to the present has been an important change for the museum.

“So many people come through here, and they kind of walk through this area and they see all the older Shoshone items and they think, ‘Oh, the Shoshone was a past people.’ And that’s really not the idea we want people to have,” Camp said.

For the Superintendent, the seed for the “My Treaty Ties” art exhibit was planted five years ago, during the 150th anniversary celebration of the signing of the 1868 treaty. That celebration included a Native prayer ceremony and a reading of the treaty in Shoshone, Bannock, and English.

“It was one of those things that, it was good, but we felt we could be doing something more, something better,” Camp said.

The site got more input and landed on having a show highlighting contemporary Native artists in the area. Camp said the exhibit emphasizes that Native connections to the treaty are ongoing, rather than a thing of the past.

“Again, the Shoshone tribes and the Bannock tribes are both very much alive and very much present and very much active in this area still,” said Camp.

Robyn Rofkar, who works for the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center, came to see the exhibit on the way back from a trip to Utah. Rofkar said the Fort Bridger Treaty isn’t something to be taken for granted.

“We’re very fortunate that we were one of the tribes that have a treaty,” said Rofkar.

The Wind River Reservation’s size is much smaller than the territory originally decided on by an earlier treaty. The Fort Bridger Treaty of 1863 allocated 44 million acres to the tribe. Then only five years later, the signing of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 reduced the reservation’s size to 3.2 million.

In the following seventy years, a series of land cessions and court cases further reduced the reservation to 2.3 million acres. Following a 1938 Supreme Court Case, the reservation was renamed from the “Shoshone Reservation” to the “Wind River Indian Reservation” and is now home to both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.

Rofkar said that the treaty is an important part of upholding the sovereign rights of Tribal nations and is still very relevant to the Eastern Shoshone community today.

“We really feel that that treaty gives us some of the rights we have today since it’s a legally binding document passed by Congress,” said Rofkar.

Rofkar said that treaty rights continue to make headlines in recent U.S. Supreme Court cases.

“[The treaty] gives us rights that we’re still fighting for too, even in court – the off-reservation hunting thing is a big issue now,” she said.

Rofkar is referring to the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court case Herrera v. Wyoming, in which the court held that Crow tribal members have a treaty right to hunt beyond the borders of their reservation on unoccupied lands.

Wyoming authorities argued that the treaty right ended when Wyoming became a state in 1890, but the Supreme Court disagreed.

Cases like these are helping some people realize that treaties like the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 are very much alive and impacting tribal communities today.

Still, Rofkar said that it’s difficult for a lot of tribal members to come down to Fort Bridger for celebrations like Treaty Day – the drive from Fort Washakie takes right around three hours one way.

“I wish we had some buses or something to charter or take to bring some of our people down, because I know they would love to come and see stuff,” said Rofkar. “But yeah, it’s a ways.”

Prior to the art exhibit at Fort Bridger, the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center hosted a blessing event for the artwork in Fort Washakie in June. All artists who contributed to “My Treaty Ties” will be reimbursed for their artwork, thanks to a grant from the Wyoming Arts Council.

In order to let the exhibit evolve over time, Superintendent Camp wants to give all artists the chance to share their reflections on the treaty, even if they didn’t submit their creations in time for the “My Treaty Ties” July 3 opening.

“I’m more than happy to take more artwork and if more artwork wants to come in still, we will readjust again to get that up, because I feel very passionate that this is something that should be on display and should be showing,” said Camp.

By mid-day on Treaty Day, one wall of the exhibit held four whimsical paintings of Indigenous flower fairies set against backgrounds of strawberries, hydrangea, roses, and sunflowers by Eastern Shoshone artist Lauren Garrett.

Part of Garrett’s artist statement said that she “hopes to carry forward the vision of hope of Chief Washakie and our ancestors by making a space where Shoshone and other Indigenous peoples can experience imagination, healing, and enjoyment through these playful and harmonious images.”

A series of black-and-white pen sketches by Shoshone-Bannock artist Sienna Wolfchild sat on another wall, depicting three faceless Native figures in traditional regalia.

Other artists listed in the exhibit were Aiyana E. Perez (Eastern Shoshone), Joanna Brings Thunder (Eastern Shoshone), Carlino Goggles (Eastern Shoshone), William Chippewa (Eastern Shoshone), Jacqueline Washakie (Eastern Shoshone) and Chasity Teton Moccasins (Shoshone-Bannock).

In addition to hosting the “My Treaty Ties” art exhibit, the staff at the Fort Bridger Museum took on the task of updating their own interpretive imagery for the site.

One of the prominent pieces of their interpretive plan is a wagon wheel, which sits as a nearly floor-to-ceiling painting right at the entrance to the museum. In between the spokes of the wheel are painted panels that help guide visitors through the different overlapping eras of the site.

Camp said that an older version of the wheel only depicted the site’s original “five interpretative M’s” – mountain men, migration, military, milk barn/motel, and, then of course, museum.

Originally, the bottom three panels of the wheel depicted the landscape of the site. However, Camp said that was “an unfinished wheel.”

The site consulted with members from the Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes, and then commissioned the wheel’s original artist, Bonnie LaFond, to update the wheel with their suggestions.

Now, three new panels depict three additional parts of the story of the site: one for the Eastern Shoshone tribe, one for the Shoshone-Bannock tribe, and one to honor the first inhabitants of the area over 13,000 years ago.

Those three panels represent the museum’s new sixth “interpretive M” – the moccasin era.

“[The wheel] gives us the full circle to the present,” said Camp. “It’s very much including everything now and that very much makes the wheel feel complete and whole at this point, whereas before, we were missing that.”

And that serves as a reminder – that we can find ways to tell a more complete history, and that history isn’t just history – it’s also now.

Through the month of July, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana will be home to artwork designed by student artists with disabilities from the Orange County area.

Created in partnership with the Orange County Department of Education’s OC Arts and Disability, this exhibit was curated as part of the nonprofit’s regional traveling art show known as Arts on the Move. The organization aims to honor creativity, diversity and the potential of the human spirit through the community display.

With close to 80 different creations, pieces by students and adult artists will be showcased from July 12 to July 27 in recognition of Disability Pride Month. The gallery, which is free to the public, will also highlight pieces featuring the American Sign Language and Braille alphabets to encourage education surrounding diverse communication methods.

The museum will host an opening reception on July 16 for the artists to celebrate their compositions with their families and teachers. One of the exhibit’s featured images will be a piece called “The Adventure Starts Here” from Edison High School student Bryan Ha, which was chosen as the themed artwork for the OC Arts and Disability Festival in April.

“We are grateful to Bowers Museum for the opportunity to showcase artists with disabilities and for bringing awareness to our community, especially during Disability Pride Month,” said Marleena Barber, director of Orange County Arts and Disability.

“It means a lot to the artists and their families to be celebrated in a nationally acclaimed museum. Bowers Museum is showing that it values diversity and recognizes that the arts are for all people to participate in, experience and enjoy.”

Here are the other stories we’ve been following this week:

• Summer might mean time away from educational activities, but for transitional kindergarten teacher Leslee Milch, it’s quite the opposite. For the past 25 years, Milch has hauled her book bag, chair and assortment of snacks to the local park to host an summer story time for her Buena Park School District students.

• North Orange County native Carla Roque has made her mark throughout the Anaheim Elementary School District after completing mural No. 23 last month at Price Elementary as part of a state-funded mural project.

• Approximately 63 school districts in California are registered to lobby state government officials, according to a report from online publication Capitol Weekly. OCDE is among the many government entities that contracts with firms to receive updates and provide input on developing legislation and budget proposals in Sacramento.

• A former Orange Unified student who was reportedly expelled for alleged harassment has taken legal action against the district, claiming discrimination and due process violations, the Orange County Register reported. The district has denied the allegations.

This is the part where we encourage you to keep up with local education news stories by bookmarking the OCDE Newsroom, subscribing for emailed updates and following us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – A celebration of Native American music, art and culture is coming to the Levitt Friday and Saturday.

The All My Relatives (Mitakuye Owas’iƞ) Festival happening July 7 and 8 will include three Levitt concerts featuring Native American artists:

• Friday at 7 p.m. — hip-hop musician Frank Waln (Sicangu Lakota/Rosebud Sioux Tribe) performing with world-renowned hoop dancers Lumhe and Samsoche Sampson (Mvskoke Creek/Seneca).

• Saturday at 10:30 a.m. — Jackie Bird (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) will present a performance for youth and families featuring traditional dance as well as singing and puppeteering on the mainstage of the Levitt.

• Saturday at 7 p.m. — blues-rock group Indigenous (Ihanktonwan/Yankton Sioux), opened by musician Kobe Jordan (Ihanktonwan/Yankton Sioux) and his band.

• Hip-hop artist Gabriel Night Shield (Rosebud Sioux Tribe) will be opening Friday’s concert and emceeing throughout the festival weekend.

Activities will be available in the parking lot behind the Levitt Shell and in the neighboring Startup Sioux Falls and Rehfeld’s Underground venues during the day on Saturday, starting at 11 a.m.

The event will also feature an art show, a children’s area, Lakota hand games, art activities, Buffalo Gals food truck (on Saturday), a Native artisan and vendor fair, a fashion show and a DJ.

More about the fashion show

A fashion show featuring Native designers will be offered on the backstage of the Levitt at 2 p.m. featuring clothing designers Kyrie Dunkley of Shinin’ Star Style (Toka Nuwan/Enemy Swim), Yolanda OldDwarf of Sweet Sage Woman (Apsaalooké Nation/Crow tribe) and Kirstie Mattos, the Mrs. South Dakota USA Ambassador (Taino). Accessories will be designed by Sheila Winge and Denise Hill of Family Affair LLC (Sisseton Wahpeton). Lead hair designer is Holly Songhawk (Ihanktonwan/Yankton Sioux) and lead makeup designer is Carla Iron Shooter (Rosebud Sioux Tribe). Over 24 models will be sharing the work of the designers at the All My Relatives Fashion Show, which will be followed by a designer and model meet and greet at 3 p.m. at Startup Sioux Falls.

“The Wokini Initiative focuses on collaboration for Native youth,” says Sarah Bad Warrior-Vrooman, director of Wokini and Tribal Relations for SDSU.  “The partnership between Wokini and the Levitt is important for supporting and inspiring our Native youth by bringing a celebration of Native culture and artistry to youth and families in the Sioux Falls region.”

“Levitt at the Falls is proud to present a festival that celebrates and shares the music and art of many accomplished Native artists from our region.  We are grateful to the Wokini Initiative for their partnership and support of the All My Relatives Festival, which is an important program to advance our mission of building community through music.  We share Wokini’s mission to engage and inspire youth and have used that goal to inspire the family-friendly activities of this inaugural All My Relatives festival,” says Nancy Halverson, executive director of Levitt at the Falls.

Copyright 2023 KSFY. All rights reserved.

WARSAW, July 7 (Reuters) – Yulia Krivich is part of a burgeoning community of artists from around the former Soviet Union that has helped turn the Polish capital into a major hub of creative talent, especially after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of her native Ukraine.

Krivich, who has lived in Poland for more than a decade, now organises exhibitions, workshops and other events at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art with the aim of confronting what she sees as the collective trauma of Russian colonialism.

“We came here (to the museum) on the third day of the invasion and stayed. We like to call it the occupation of the Museum of Modern Art and the director is happy with the occupation,” Krivich, 34, joked.

“We came here to make banners for a protest at the Russian embassy and stayed,” she said.

Even before Russian troops poured into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Poland had been hosting thousands of migrants from the east, including people who fled a Moscow-backed uprising in eastern Ukraine and turmoil in Belarus and Central Asian states.

Poland, which borders Belarus and Ukraine, and was also once part of the Russian empire under the tsars and then of the Moscow-led Soviet bloc for decades – is a perfect place, in Krivich’s view, for artists to explore the theme of “decolonising Russia”.

“Many of my friends from Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Belarus feel at home here, also mentally, culturally and ideologically… We have a common past,” Krivich told Reuters.

THEATRE

Warsaw is also proving fertile territory for drama.

In the courtyard of Warsaw’s New Theatre, Marina Dashuk awaits the performance of her mentee Palina Dabravolskaya, a 27-year old Belarusian director and actress completing a residency for Belarusian artists launched in 2021.

Dashuk, 44, has worked as a theatre producer in Poland since 2013, but it was only after the crushing of anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020 that she focused on working with fellow Belarusian artists.

“When the revolution in Belarus began, artists started fleeing… Then (Russian-born playwright and director) Ivan Vyrypaev proposed making a theatre play with Belarusian actors and that is how our huge cooperation with the New Theatre began,” Dashuk said.

The play’s title “1.8m” refers to the space available to individuals in overcrowded Belarusian prisons. Directed by Vyrypaev, the performance is based on political prisoners’ court speeches and letters.

The New Theatre not only gave the refugee actors a chance to perform but also helped them with accommodation and visas. Since then, other institutions have followed suit.

“Poland is the only country where Belarusians can easily legalise their stay… All independent art initiatives that used to be in Minsk are now in Warsaw,” said Dashuk.

Vyrypaev, 49, whose plays have been staged in more than 250 theatres worldwide, has also launched a new project in Warsaw – Teal House, staffed by Ukrainian and Belarusian refugees, offers activities ranging from drama and music performances to yoga and trauma healing.

In May, a Moscow District Court arrested Vyrypaev in absentia for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army.

“These are incredibly tragic circumstances,” Vyrypaev said, referring to the war. “But Poland has a chance to become a real leader… of eastern Europe… It is a chance that should not be missed.”

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Artists nationwide are struggling to find affordable housing and studio space as housing prices and inflation skyrocket. Artists, who are routinely used as a tool of gentrification, also contribute essential work for the community that helps provide catharsis in times of turmoil. Many artists say they simply can’t create without affordable housing or studio space. Arts organizations are attempting to find a solution to the unrealistic housing and rental markets by creating their own housing, like PushPush in Atlanta, or by offering housing-specific stipends like in South Florida, where Oolite Arts announced an annual $12,000-a-year housing stipend for their artists-in-residence who are based in Miami.

“I went to school in Baltimore at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and after I finished my studies, I decided to move back to Miami. It is where I was born and raised. It’s where my family resides, and it’s where I draw a lot of my inspiration from my art practice,” Diana Eusebio, an Oolite artist in residence said. “I think there is a growing amount of opportunities when it comes to the arts, but a lack of sustainability when it comes to our lifestyle. There’s a passionate pool of people that are born and raised here that are choosing Miami, but they can’t afford to live here.”

Applications open July 12 for the 2024 residency at Oolite Arts. To qualify for the Knight Artist Housing Stipend as part of the Studio Residency, artists must show proof that they have lived in Miami-Dade for two years at the start of the residency in January 2024. 

Organizations in other cities are also working to meet artists’ housing needs. PushPush Arts, an arts incubator that has been promoting and supporting the arts in Atlanta for 25 years, will offer affordable housing, art studios, galleries, stages, and community art spaces in an adaptive reuse arts campus. Residents can rent or own property in the arts complex, choosing between $600-900 a month in rent or $155,000 to own. There will be 60 one- and two-bedroom apartments available. The space is set to open sometime before the holiday season.

“I kept talking to people who were having a hard time finding rent … It started getting to be where a single apartment was $1,800, and artists’ support is pretty low in Atlanta,” said Tim Habeger, co-director of PushPush Arts. “So that’s what really got us thinking that if we were going to attract and retain artists here in Atlanta that we were going to have to do something about getting them living spaces.”

According to Habeger, the space was supported by Tapestry Development, a low-income housing tax credit developer dedicated to preserving low-income housing in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina.

Without housing, artists are forced to find alternatives.

“​Artists are often the vanguard, and then the victims of this gentrification tsunami,” said Colin K. Gray, who created the 2021 documentary “Unzipped: An Autopsy of American Inequality” about affordable housing in Venice, California. The film spotlights artist families who are struggling to remain in their neighborhood, which has since fallen victim to gentrification “They are part of the fabric of these communities; they helped make a place rich and culturally diverse and cool and vibrant, and then they’re often the ones who are [later displaced] because they don’t have that same kind of steady income as other people do. It brings up big questions about what is the value of art? What is the value of art and artists in our community?”

The average rent in Venice for a one-bedroom apartment is about $3,300 as of July 6, although average rent prices reached nearly $4,000 in May, precluding up-and-coming artists from being able to afford living in the community. In Los Angeles County, approximately 600,000 people live in households that spend more than 90% of income on rent. According to Gray, this is a rent crisis. 

“We’re going to need to rethink how we make it possible for artists to remain in these kinds of communities like in Venice, California, and in Miami,” Gray said. “It’s very difficult to find communities where they can afford to rent and chase their art and their dreams and career.”

That goal is at the heart of the organizing work by artist Pangea Kali Virga. The recent closure of Fountainhead Studios in Little Haiti, an affordable studio space for 30 artists in Miami, has pushed Virga to organize locals to try to find a new space. Virga, who was paying $600 a month for a studio space in Fountainhead, has been working out of her studio in limbo until they are given a 60-day notice to evacuate the facility. When she heard the news that they would have to leave, Virga decided to form an artist cooperative and try to acquire property.

“There are so many artists who need studios, or at the very least want community,” Virga said. “We really want to make it accessible for people who can’t afford studio spaces all the time.”

Virga says the project is temporarily on pause while they strategize fundraising and organizing with other artists who will be displaced by the Fountainhead shutdown. Meanwhile, in Venice, Gray spent two years tracking the housing journeys of two artist families. One family was able to find supportive housing and shelter, and the other was eventually evicted.

“It was a really tough film to make because we were not only documenting the families, but then we were talking to different stakeholders in the community, some very pro-housing, some very resistant to it,” said Gray. “It was really sad and sobering to see the amount of vitriol that was directed at them.”

As Miami officially becomes the least affordable housing market in the country, the local artists who built Miami’s vibrant and diverse artist enclave are being priced out of their studios and homes and say living and working in Miami is simply not sustainable anymore. 

Franky Cruz, a Dominican Republic-born multidisciplinary artist who was predominantly based in Miami, has been struggling to find stable housing and studio space for more than a year in the city. Cruz was part of a wave of graffiti and street artists who helped popularize the street art movement in Wynwood in the early aughts. But the once Puerto Rican neighborhood soon fell victim to a similar pattern of art-washing-based gentrification. Now, the neighborhood boasts some of the least affordable housing in the city with a median rental price of $3,950.

Cruz rented a studio in Little Haiti for years, but he decided he needed to move in 2021 after someone was shot outside the studio and his rent was increased. Neither condition was conducive to creating work for him.

“It’s kind of amazing that I was able to even make work in that environment,” said Cruz, who raises native butterflies as part of an ongoing project called the Vivarium Meconium Laboratory. “I was able to raise 3,000 butterflies during this whole process. I can’t imagine what I would have, or what I’m going to do once I find a place where I can have my own garden.”

After Cruz left his Little Haiti studio, the artist slept in his car for two weeks and camped for another two weeks in the Everglades until he could find another studio and housing space.

“It’s an interesting social experiment, going from living in your car to a tent, and even in that chaos, still making work,” said Cruz. “I’m not going to stop making artwork no matter what the situation is. It just doesn’t let me focus on my main body of work, which is the Vivarium Meconium Lab, which is still active but not where it needs to be.”

Cruz raises native butterflies inside of a geodesic dome he designed filled with other native and pollinator plants. Once the caterpillars become chrysalids, he rigs them above watercolor paper. After a week of metamorphosis, they emerge and release a liquid, meconium, which is captured in the watercolor paper as its own form of pigment. The result is an imprint of the butterfly’s journey of self-transformation before Cruz releases them back into the urban ecosystem where they will contribute to the cycle of life. But, without sufficient space, the dome is boarded up in a storage unit until Cruz can find a stable place to settle. Currently, he calls himself nomadic and is traveling outside of Miami until something stable materializes.

“I know a lot of talent that has left from the city that we would benefit from having here,” said Cruz. “I’m not the only one who is talking about leaving, who is leaving.”

misael soto, an interdisciplinary artist whose work is driven by community and the systems to which society is beholden, has been organizing artists through monthly meetings to address each others’ needs and support each other, including signing letters in solidarity with artists who have been fired from their institutions or are not being paid an equitable rate.

“Myself and a lot of other artists here have been paying attention and expressing certain needs that aren’t being filled by anyone and really just feeling like no one knows what we need better than ourselves,” said soto. “So, thinking about how can we best serve ourselves. It’s just a very classic kind of collectivizing mentality of strength in numbers.”

Their current goal is to create and conduct an artist census. Inspired by the Los Angeles Artist Census, spearheaded by Tatiana Vahan, soto hopes to collect data about the community’s needs. Vahan’s work studies artists’ experiences with affordable housing, income security, debt, education, and access to health care. LAAC also examines how intersectional identities pertaining to race, gender, age, queerness, and ability relate to disparities in quality of life and professional development among artists. The census found that in 2019, 16% of artists surveyed made $20,000-30,000 annually. Thirty percent of respondents reported they went without basic needs and necessities due to lack of funds in 2018-19. Of these respondents, 44% were transgender or nonbinary, and 42% were Black. 

“In Tatiana’s words, a census can really shine light where there’s darkness. This is information that we just don’t have, and that is by design,” said soto. “Collectors, institutions don’t want the greater public to know how bad it is for us.”

soto has been carefully working on establishing a team that will help with outreach and another that will work on marketing and design while making sure the questions are thoughtful.

“These questions are prying; they can be personal, so we really want to get them right,” said soto. “Just knowing that something like this exists in a city where I haven’t heard of anything like this existing ever, at least that isn’t attached to any kind of developer or institution or grant … I’m excited that it’s finally happening. It’s given me a bit of faith.”