art

Street art is by nature ephemeral. But a coloring book, of all things, is preserving some of the murals in Wynwood by asking the rest of us to add our own interpretations of the work with crayon, pencil or marker.

The pages are black and white versions of murals - both abstract and figurative. Some of the pages feature an entire mural,  others just a detailed section of a wall.

The coloring book’s creator, Diego Orlandini, said the first mention of a coloring book came from an ex-girlfriend.

A new public art project in downtown Miami is piping music into the Metromover. It’s not coming over the loud speaker, but through a new app that’s designed to let people uncover hidden art in the world.

Get on the Metromover at Government Center Station, open an app called “Lapse,” put on some headphones and as you slowly make your way around the circuit, a symphony slowly builds to a rich and textured audio composition. “The Sounds” is one part of Ivan Depeña’s goal to mix art, virtual reality and a twinge of  science fiction.

  On Michael Gieda's first day at work with the Key West Art & Historical Society, he checked out one of the society's three museums, Fort East Martello.

There he found a couple of local artists working on some pieces that had been in the society's collection for almost 30 years.

  "I remember walking up to the second floor of the citadel where all these pieces were being treated and just being utterly and completely blown away by this collection of sculpture," Gieda said.

In a studio above a pizza place in Miami’s Design District, a film projects onto a screen. Scenes of life flicker past. The graininess and clothing style give away the time - late 1960s. But, the activities are familiar today: eating burgers, playing music with friends, taking a walk in the woods. For a brief moment a page with typewriter script flashes the name “Walden” on the screen.

This is Jonas Mekas’ seminal avant-garde film from 1969.

Lineth Mardomingo, a third-grader at Coral Terrace Elementary School, calls her latest piece of art, "Spinny Scroll." The piece is inspired by a memory: the time she dropped a crayon on the floor and saw it spinning, then kept spinning it and spinning it and then started spinning herself, and then bumped into a wooden bed.

"That was a long time ago and I was, like, 5," Lineth says. Now older and wiser, she says the colors she chose for her piece -- dark blue and light purple -- are the same colors as the crayons in that memory.

  Key West has a lot of signs denoting historic sites. Most point to events and places of significance since Europeans settled the island in the early 19th century.

For the month of March, four new signs point further back into the island's history. They are works of public art by Edgar Heap Of Birds and are part of his Native Host series.

Jennifer Rubell celebrated love with bread and butter at her 13th annual Art Basel breakfast in Wynwood on Thursday. Each year, the artist and daughter of prominent art collectors  Don and Mera Rubell,  feeds guests with a new food-related performance art piece.

Among the elaborate parties and gallery exhibits that come to South Florida every year for Miami Art Week, last year an usual heist became it’s own cause célèbre.

Art crimes make up a $6 billion industry worldwide and, in general, if stolen art doesn’t turn up within the first few months, it could be be a long time before it does. 

THE THEFT

Art Miami 2014 was David Smith’s fifth time at the art fair with his Amsterdam-based Gallery, Leslie Smith. 

The city of Miami is rich with artistic, architectural and historic detail, but what can be learned from the streets themselves? Local artist Nick Gilmore explores the heavily used, but often forgotten, city streets in his new print series, “Paper Pavement.”

Gilmore, an adjunct professor of printmaking at Florida International University, takes a close look at the details of aging city streets, transforming crumbling street tops into textured prints that capture a unique piece of Miami’s history.