MIAMI — On a July afternoon, in an deserted boutique sandwiched unassumingly between a dentist’s workplace, a Latin grocery retailer, and a barbershop, Little Havana residents and artists gathered for his or her afternoon cafecito ritual. However as an alternative of espresso, the plastic fluted espresso cups held swamp mud from the Everglades and checkpoint soil from the doorway to Alligator Alcatraz, the infamous immigrant detention heart on the heart of a lawsuit alleging violations of the Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act and Miccosukee land protections. On Thursday, August 21, a choose ordered the halting of operations on the jail, however the state shortly filed a movement to enchantment the choice.
The efficiency by Miami artist Agua Dulce, titled “Untitled (todo lo que toques se transforma)” (2025), passed off on the opening of The Artist As Activist, curated by Isabella Marie Garcia with works by members of Artists 4 Artists (A4A). In current historical past, the advocacy group has mobilized in response to native challenges just like the censorship of political artwork for Palestine, inequitable pay, and funding cuts. However since Alligator Alcatraz’s building, A4A has shifted into excessive gear, convening artists to make use of a variety of defensive methods towards detention — accompanying migrants to their courtroom hearings, collaborating in direct motion, accumulating tales of these detained, main workshops to assist affected households, and creating graphics to construct consciousness in regards to the historical past and up to date politics of the camp.
Misael Soto, a lead organizer of A4A, instructed Hyperallergic that they need the group to “commit itself to taking a stance,” encouraging artists to attract on their particular experience to “affect real change in this city.”
“I was thinking of artists who are doing creative work, but also doing work for others,” stated Garcia. “Artists who work in organizing spaces don’t often get the chance to show their work publicly.”
A cafecito cup from Agua Dulce’s efficiency “Untitled (todo lo que toques se transforma)” (2025) (picture courtesy A4A); proper: Motyko, “yes to heat protections” (2024)
The Artist As Activist, on view by means of September 7, contains works by members Motyko, Fola Akinde, and Agua. The present occupies a storefront in a strip mall in Little Havana, a traditionally Cuban neighborhood that holds layered histories of migration and is residence to residents of assorted and infrequently precarious authorized standing.
“This show speaks to people who inhabit the space naturally,” stated Agua. “It’s been interesting to disrupt the mundanity of people going about their days. That’s what makes this space powerful — you’re not expecting to engage with it.”
Behind the glass, the set up unfolds as a triptych: Motyko’s mixed-media collages on the foreground, Akinde’s cartographic screenprints on the facet, and Agua’s altarpiece on the bottom. Within the background reads the exhibition’s resonant message: “The Gestapo is here, has been here and its name is ICE. No to Alligator Alcatraz!” Translations in Spanish and Kreyòl ripple down.
Motyko, “Untitled” (2023)
Motyko’s father got here from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift, her mom from Honduras on Short-term Protected Standing. The collage “Untitled” (2023) splices a line of migrants diagonally throughout a Social Safety card, white area in between marking an absence of household milestones: a mom’s funeral, a marriage, a birthday.
One other overlays agricultural staff protesting the governor’s veto of the Warmth Protections Invoice onto a plastic Publix procuring bag. The proposed measure would have mandated relaxation, water, and shade for outside laborers, however in the end failed, even after 29-year-old Mexican farmworker Efraín López García died of heatstroke on the job in Miami.
As a member of A4A deeply invested in county interventions towards the detention heart, Motyko sees the exhibit as having an activating energy. “One of the reasons I accepted Isa’s [Garcia] invitation was because we’re not just going to have the work sit here,” the artist stated. “There’s the opportunity to mobilize people to do something.”
Fola Akinde, “Untitled (Coffee)” (2023)
A4A’s exhibition additionally endeavors to touch upon Miami’s storied historical past of immigration, resistance, and diaspora. Akinde’s screenprints map Yoruba cosmology, tracing the connection between Cuba and Nigeria by means of pathways of migration, to its up to date relevance in Miami’s Black and Caribbean communities. Utilizing photographs from the Miami-Dade Public Library, she depicts the “imagined islands,” or fictional geographies of Caribbean lore, and layers over actual photographs of Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. These invented landscapes weave collectively photographs of the Caribbean diaspora by means of labor, cultivation, and land remembrance prior to now and current.
Set up view, The Artist As Activist
On the base of the vitrine, Agua Dulce constructed an altarpiece of gathered earth and representations of the detention heart — mud from the Everglades the place these protesting Alligator Alcatraz stood, soil and water from the checkpoint the place detainees are pushed in to the ability, soil from a neighborhood farm, and sand from the 79th Avenue Seaside, a spot of cleaning and gathering. A bit of chain-link fence evokes borders that outline and confine immigrant life. The altar’s materials archive transforms the bottom right into a web site of mourning and indictment, insisting that viewers reckon with the cruelty unfolding in actual time.
As the last word destiny of the detention heart stays unknown, Miami’s artists stay steadfast of their resistance.
“What is our responsibility at this moment, as artists, activists, as revolutionaries?” Agua stated in a dialog with Hyperallergic. “Is it to create things that are pretty and can sell? Or is it to delve deep into our value system and create work that challenges people to believe that a different world is possible?”
Motyko, “no me quiero olvidar” (2024)
