Miami Artists Are Making Waves Thanks to Locust Projects Grant

Art isn't just a painting on the wall anymore, and Locust Projects has made it its mission to help artists who create outside the box to move forward.

With the Wavemaker Grant, 13 artists are creating works that range from an immersive interactive extended reality art experience to an artist-led garden.

"This is not a grant for a museum show; it's a more public community forward-facing grant," says Lorie Mertes, executive director of Locust Projects. "These are projects that happen in neighborhoods across Miami, in unusual places."

Artist-founded nonprofit Locust Projects has been running the Wavemaker program since 2015 and has awarded $570,000 in grant money to Miami artists. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts subsidizes the program as one of 32 regional regranting programs across the country and the only one in Florida.

"These are modest grants; $60,000 is not going to go for years. It is not going to pay someone's rent for a year or cover all costs for a big project in a museum. That is not the intention of this grant," Mertes says. "It is meant to be a putting-ideas-in-motion grant."

Christina Pettersson is one of 129 applicants who won a grant this year. A self-proclaimed messenger of plants, Pettersson says her Abortifacient Garden is based on research and development, allowing her to explore concepts to see how this garden pans out into an art project.

"I love doing gardening more than art half the time, and I reached a point where I can't keep these things separate. I want to figure out a way to incorporate all my love of gardens and plant history into my work," Pettersson says. "Art can be so many things, so I am not too worried about it."

Early in the research stage, Pettersson says the project became very important given what is happening with Roe v. Wade.

"It has been really eye-opening to see how common and widespread the practice of using plants to control pregnancy has been for thousands of years... even when it was technically illegal," Petterson adds. "People like Benjamin Franklin wrote recipes for it."

Two-time grantee Monica Lopez De Victoria has been making art for more than 25 years and has been able to explore different genres. She went from her 2015 Wavemaker grant project, based on underwater video and photography, to this year, where she tackles climate change through an immersive extended-reality experience.

Oculus goggles will take players through Swamp Deco, which shows what Miami's historical art deco architecture would look like in the year 2500 if underwater.

"It is a new medium for me, but I am learning a lot as far as programming and building in a 3D space," De Victoria says. "A grant like this really helps push things forward with ideas and technique or mediums."

Since her 2015 grant, De Victoria's work has been featured at the BauHouse in Germany and is in the Pérez Art Museum Miami collection.

Like De Victoria, Trish Gutierrez and Nicole Pedraza are New Work project artists, meaning they have a specific idea that just needs a push to be brought to life.

Gutierrez and Pedraza's Quiero Bailar Contigo weaves dance with visuals and audio, making it a digital story.

"What I was really interested in was turning one form of art into another, so motion-controlled visuals or sound or sound-controlled visuals, like the visuals dictate the movement," Gutierrez says.

Pedraza, a New World School of the Arts graduate and professional dancer, says connecting Miami's various communities and people of different ages and backgrounds was a main motivator for this project.

"Dance is an art form that many different types of culture connect to, and it is like a bridge to bring people together," Pedraza explains. "Every culture has their own practices and dance, and it connects people back to their own roots and engages them to share their culture out to others as well."

Each artwork will be displayed somewhere in Miami once the artist has decided when and where.

To learn more about Locust Projects' Wavemaker Grants, go to wavemakergrants.org.

– Vanessa Reyes, ArtburstMiami.com