Pinecrest Gardens Welcomes Xavier Cortada

Main | < | 2017>

Miami Community Newspapers

July 7, 2017

Pinecrest Gardens, South Florida’s Cultural Arts Park proudly welcomes Artist in Residence Xavier Cortada. For the next five years and beyond, renowned Eco-Artist, Xavier Cortada will call Pinecrest Gardens his home, moving both his studio and offices to historic Whilden-Carrier Cottage. He will also be taking over curating responsibilities at the Gardens Gallery and presenting several shows of his own throughout the year.

Cortada has created art installations in the Earth’s poles to generate awareness about global climate change: In 2007, an NSF Antarctic Artist and Writer’s Program Fellow, Cortada used the moving ice sheet beneath the South Pole as an instrument to mark time; the art piece will be completed in 150,000 years. In 2008, he planted a green flag at the North Pole to reclaim it for nature and launch a reforestation eco-art effort.

Since 2011, Xavier Cortada has based his engaged art-science practice at Florida International University.

Cortada often collaborates with scientists in his art-making: At CERN, he worked with a physicist to develop a site-specific art installation capturing the five search strategies which the CMS experiment has used to discover a new Higgs-like particle.

He has also worked with a population geneticist on a project exploring our ancestral journeys out of Africa 60,000 years ago, with a molecular biologist to synthesize an actual DNA strand made from a sequence randomly generated by participants visiting his museum exhibit, and with botanists in eco-art projects to reforest mangroves and wildflowers.

Cortada is currently working with scientists at Hubbard Brook LTER on a water cycle visualization project driven by real-time data collected at a watershed in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

The Miami artist has worked with groups globally to produce numerous collaborative art projects, including peace murals in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, child welfare murals in Bolivia and Panama, AIDS murals in Switzerland and South Africa, juvenile justice murals and projects in Miami and Philadelphia, and eco-art projects in Taiwan, Hawaii, Holland and Latvia.

Cortada has also been commissioned to create art for the White House, the World Bank, the Florida Supreme Court, the Florida Governor’s Mansion, Florida Botanical Gardens, Miami City Hall, Miami-Dade County Hall, the Miami Art Museum, the Miami Science Museum, Museum of Florida History, and the Frost Art Museum.

His work is in the collections of the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the NSU Museum of Art in Ft. Lauderdale, the Whatcom Museum, the Patricia and Philip Frost Art Museum and the MDC Museum of Art + Design.

Corporations such as General Mills, Nike, Heineken and Hershey’s have commissioned his art. Publishers like McDougal and Random House have featured it in school textbooks and publications. His work has also been featured on National Geographic TV and the Discovery Channel.

Cortada, who was born in Albany, New York and grew up in Miami, holds degrees from the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Business and School of Law.

We are truly honored to have Xavier as a member of the Pinecrest Gardens Team and we look forward to sharing his extraordinary talent with our visitors and patrons on a daily basis.

Mark your calendars for his upcoming exhibits and artist meet and greets.

Read More Here: Pinecrest Gardens Welcomes Xavier Cortada