Superblue’s Miami Experiential Art Center, a venue for showcasing large-scale, immersive, experiential art projects, will open for the first time in Miami this spring in a 50,000-square-foot industrial building.
The Miami opening will be the first installation space by Superblue, which was co-founded last year by
Marc Glimcher,
president and CEO of Pace Gallery, and Superblue’s board chair, and
Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst,
the president of Pace London for five years.
“It’s about creating these very incredible and mind-blowing immersive installations,” says Dent-Brocklehurst, Superblue’s CEO.
It’s also about making large-scale experiential art available to as many people as possible, and supporting artists and studios that don’t make conventional objects that can be purchased and hung on a wall.
The Miami show, titled “Every Wall Is a Door,” was originally scheduled to open on Dec. 22, but was postponed until “early spring.” It will feature works by
James Turrell,
“the father of experiential art, in our minds,” Dent-Brocklehurst says, as well as teamLab, a group out of Tokyo that is probably the most well-known in the field of experiential art. Also featured will be Es
Devlin,
who is breaking into the field, “but who is brilliant and incredibly thoughtful,” she says.
Superblue’s Experiential Art Center in Miami, facade rendering
Courtesy of Superblue. Photo: Moris Moreno
Each will have a space between 8,000 and 12,000 square feet to create their art. Superblue has a multi-year lease on the space in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood—allowing it to bring in future installations. The show going up in the spring will be in the space at least through 2022.
The idea for Superblue grew out of Dent-Brocklehurst’s many years in the art business, including a recent two-year project with Future City in the U.K. called Future/Pace, which focused on creating site-specific public art.
“I’ve seen the emergence of these groups of artists, whether single artists or collectives, making these amazing [works], often fueled by technology, but also fueled by a desire to reach a much wider audience than perhaps the traditional art world would afford them,” Dent-Brocklehurst says.
“The gallery model doesn’t really support them in a way—there’s no object to sell,” she says. While experiential art has been sold to museums, this offers “a direct relationship between the consumer and the artist, rather than via a patron.”
At the moment, Superblue is working with 23 artists and is interested in engaging with more. “We are not bound by the rules of this gallery or that gallery,” Dent-Brocklehurst says. “We are looking for people [who] we feel could make a meaningful engagement in the kinds of productions we want to create.”
The group intends to support their artists in various ways, including the establishment of additional venues each of which will allow the experiential exhibitions to be available to the public for up to a year—longer than the typical gallery or museum show. But Superblue will also commission works, and will support their artists’ projects in other locations, Dent-Brocklehurst says.
“Their work is about social impact, sustainability, community engagement—forces for good in the world,” she adds. There’s a “feeling we could do something significant by opening these spaces, by driving traffic to them, by supporting the artists, by supporting their values, and our own values as well.”
At Superblue’s Miami Experiential Art Center this spring, Turrell’s Ganzfeld—work that “examines the effects of light and space on the mechanics of vision as well as conscious and unconscious modes of seeing,” according to a press statement—will fill a room with monochrome lighting.
teamLab, meanwhile, will bring a suite of interconnected works that explore the “ambiguity between living and non-living states of being and the relationship between humanity and the natural world,” according to the statement. Many of the works will shift with how the audience interacts with them and the surrounding works, creating “one-time-only visual effects that can never be replicated,” Superblue said.
Devlin also explores the connections between humans and the natural world in Forest of Us, a project created from a “massive mirrored maze that resembles bronchial structures,” Superblue said.“Es’s project is all about connecting the way we breathe—our lungs—with trees, and if you look at a black-and-white image of a lung and a black-and-white image of a tree, they are almost an identical image, except upside down,” Dent-Brocklehurst says. “Her project is about making you understand and realize these two things are interconnected.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
