Five years ago Miami artist Xavier Cortada brought awareness to the importance of mangroves by launching the Reclamation Project at the Bass Museum of Art. Annually, the eco-art project’s volunteers collect mangrove propagules, grow them for several months inside clear cups hanging on Lincoln Road store fronts (earlier site of a mangrove forest), and then plant the seedlings nearby on Biscayne Bay.

To celebrate eight acres of coastal reforestation to date, Cortada will hang his paintings of the celebrated coastal plant in his Lincoln Road studio. Several paintings from this series hang permanently in the newly inaugurated University of Miami Alumni Center; others are on loan to the residence of the US Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea as part of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.