June 2020 Fountainhead Story

June was certainly such an unprecedented moment, where humanity was forced to turn inward and ask questions centered around what’s truly necessary in such an urgent circumstance. As a global pandemic clashed with a civic uprising over the continuous and systematic oppression of black bodies, Fountainhead stood in solidarity with those protesting for justice and reform. Our resident artists for the month - Jacqueline Falcone, GeoVanna Gonzalez, Najja Moon, and misael soto pointedly requested that their experience at the residency remain secondary, so that the voices of activists could take center stage in this moment of reckoning. With their permission, we’re sharing their story now because we have always believed that artists’ voices play a major role in shifting mindsets and perspectives around social issues.

Placing artists at the center of our world - turning to them for guidance, and recognizing the power in their ability to think critically and creatively about solutions to our most pressing issues, is an approach we will always advocate. June’s residency took shape with this sentiment in mind. Inviting four artists whose friendship and creative interests cause their work to frequently intersect, the residency became an incubator for projects addressing the immediate needs of their respective communities.

In a moment where a critical mass of artists had exhibition, residency, and work opportunities suspended, GeoVanna and misael launched a collaborative project with Fountainhead designed to critically assess local artists’ needs and make strides towards achieving them meaningfully. GeoVanna’s alternative art space and open-source platform Supplement Projects and misael’s Department of Reflection, which aims to build more actionable connections between government and its citizens through community place-making arts activities, coupled with Fountainhead’s commitment to its local artist community, combined made the perfect vehicle from which to examine artists’ needs. GeoVanna and misael together curated a set of dinners between artists, writers, and curators, designed to at once provide nourishment while discussing the pointed issues facing local artists amidst a global pandemic, and solutions that might address those issues in the future.

While the issues they discussed certainly existed long before the current crisis took hold - unfortunately, artists remain particularly susceptible to dubious contracts, fee arrangements, and lack access to stable employment and healthcare - both artists agreed that such a dire situation created the optimal conditions for addressing and demanding change. “Having these discussions paired with a dinner made a lot of sense for the current situation we were in,” says GeoVanna. “Between the political climate and quarantine, being able to have something that is nourishing and giving made a lot of sense in terms of how we hosted these discussions, and they were motivating in a positive way, as opposed to feeling angry.”

For misael, the project proved illuminating in terms of just how much work needs to be done in order to level the playing field for local artists. “For me, it was just one of those things where, as with any form of research, once you crack into it it’s an onion of layers,” they say. “So I was always just kind of impressed and dumbfounded by how each dinner was so different and realizing how something as simple as wanting artists to get paid well and have health insurance has a domino effect and ripples out into the need to address other structural issues.”

As the project remains in development, GeoVanna and misael are eager to bring a larger pool of artists into the conversation and create a living, open-sourced manifesto that both states artists’ needs and outlines a path toward their achievement. We’re hoping this story drives awareness and attracts artists who want to be part of this movement. GeoVanna and misael have requested that artists interested in participating contact them directly.

June artists Najja and Jacqueline also played a role in the month’s dinners, while staying focused on ongoing projects they were each tackling. Jacqueline had been set to open her latest show at Bed & Breakfast with the artist Okey Stevens Ofomata when the pandemic hit, and she quickly shifted her focus to helping the artist sell prints, the proceeds of which would benefit the artist and be donated to Black Girls Code. But spending a few weeks at Fountainhead also gave her the mental space she craved to consider how she might continue evolving on Bed & Breakfast, a project she initiated from her Miami home nearly 10 years ago.

“Because this is a home as well as a residency, it really gives you space to think about things. You have the opportunity to nurture one another in a communal home, and that provides a comfort level you wouldn’t get at a more institutionalized residency,” she says. “Feeding my studio mates and being in this domestic space has me thinking alot about the structure of Bed & Breakfast, what the immediate needs of my community are, how I can fundraise and make sure we continue to have a platform.”

While Najja was busy working on a new conceptual piece that would fuse photography, performance, and sound, she was also contributing significantly to misael and GeoVanna’s project given her work as a community organizer and activist. She reflected on the need for rest in a moment of intense struggle, turning to her practice as therapy but also recognizing that she needed to honor her sheer exhaustion and take things slowly.

“I’m going to paraphrase my friend Aja Monet - she said to us once, ‘It’s important to be good to yourself so you can be good for the movement,’ she says. “Particularly now, where we have a heightened awareness for social justice and we’re bombarded with opportunities to take action, I sometimes feel guilty for not being present or staying silent. That kind of note is a nice reminder that if I’m not worth shit for myself I won’t be worth shit for anyone else. I’m thinking about ways I can be better so I can be more present.”

As friends, collaborators, and artists, Jacqueline, GeoVanna, Najja and misael gave us hope for the cultural renaissance that can emerge from a moment like this one.

Jacqueline Falcone

At the root of Jacqueline’s practice is the need to nurture and be in community. She views her work as sitting at the crossroads of hospitality, art, and architecture - a liminal space in which hosting is an art form, art infuses a home with opportunities for creative exploration, and the home becomes a cocoon for leisure and discourse. Her artistic pursuits, too refuse to exist categorically: Bed & Breakfast sees Jacqueline take a roving approach in her role - she is the artist driving it conceptually, the curator giving life to its walls, and the caretaker providing comfort and nourishment to its guests.

Jacqueline founded Bed & Breakfast in 2012 in Miami, to quell her urge to create an alternative art space without having to commit to a traditional space, like a gallery or exhibition hall. Working in traditional art institutions left Jacqueline yearning for a project that would focus on only the best aspects of contemporary art and art-making.

“While they support B&B artists and teh project directly, making sales isn’t at the forefront of B&B,” says Jacqueline. “I have a different motive - I approach my relationship with the artists I work with as though they were guests. I like it when artists want to come into that practice and have a say. Every project shifts depending on the artist’s needs or what they’re trying to achieve.”

Launching from within her bedroom, Jacqueline would invite artist friends to contribute works for exhibitions within that space. The exhibition would be a meeting ground from which Jacqueline could also play host, as the concept began to evolve into an actual bed and breakfast that would also offer food and accommodations to interested guests. As she moved across the country to Los Angeles, the project continued to evolve. Her latest exhibition, Crocodile Tears with Okey Stevens Ofomata, invited a very young artist that works primarily with found materials, paint and collage to exhibit his works within the space, while his sister - a burgeoning chef - would provide nourishment. Though the exhibition was unfortunately upended, her mission was undeterred - in assessing what it was that Okey needed from her, Falcone shifted to selling prints that would go directly to funding the artist and Black Girls Code.

Ultimately, Jacqueline is focused on making Bed & Breakfast a larger scale project, and the time at Fountainhead allowed her to strategize around what that might mean. “I want to live where food and art happen because I’ve recognized that it’s all connected. The intimacy that emerges from the experience is something I really want to replicate.

Painting by Jessy Nite and photographs by Monica Uszerowicz — *Painting by Jessy Nite and photographs by Monica Uszerowicz*

GeoVanna Gonzalez

GeoVanna’s practice is designed to hold space, both in the corners of our minds and within the institutions that generally tend to suffocate alternative ways of being. Her practice evaluates the spaces we do and don’t have access to, with a particular emphasis on the communities that fall outside of the mainstream. Her own experience as a queer woman of color drives this desire to be so expansive, making room for both herself and for the people she hopes come to inhabit and reflect within the work. Sculpture and installation are the vehicles through which she invites people to pause, reflect, or make; bright, playful and iridescent color and materials like PVC and metal act as subtext for the layered histories of queer and diasporic communities. The work only becomes fully realized once presented before a public audience, who activate the work simply by existing within it.

“I play a lot with the space we take up as individuals and collectively. I am interested in the line between public and private space, and how a lot of times the private realm becomes public,” she says. Apparent in the societal sanctioning of queerness and gender, or a collective preoccupation with race and socioeconomic status, GeoVanna’s practice addresses these ideas by blurring the lines between the exterior self and their interior world.

Her projects are generally born from an idea triggered by a text or work she encounters, and then expanded upon through an open source research process that invites a multitude of perspectives into the work. Once an idea has taken shape, she considers the best approach for building an environment that simulates the concept so that others can take part in the work. For example, a recent project entitled Play, Lay, Aye builds on the French tete a tete - a discreet rendezvous between lovers made possible by side-by-side seating that faces away from one another - and reimagines this space with a giant, bright pink and blue sculpture that considers how the queer and trans community often obfuscates their identity for the guise of societal comfort.

Collaboration is often at her work’s crux - a reflection of GeoVanna’s interest in community building as an agent of change, with art becoming its vehicle. Sometimes, this practice finds GeoVanna acting as curator - like in the case of her alternative art space-cum-home, Supplement Projects, where she transforms her home into an exhibition space and community meeting point.

“I started to be comfortable with understanding and realizing that my curatorial work is equally part of my practice,” she says. “Especially because I’m taking the approach of curating in a collaborative way where it’s not necessarily me dictating but coming to other artists with these ideas and figuring out ways we can make it happen.”

At Fountainhead, GeoVanna continued work on an upcoming exhibition at Locust Projects that was postponed due to the pandemic, while developing her collaborative project with fellow artist misael soto. Approaching this collaboration as a Supplement Projects initiative, GeoVanna found marked synergies. “It was a revolving space that visitors shared and molded and added and subtracted. I like the evolution of it and it had a lot of synergy with transforming what space looks like,” she says.

Najja Moon

Thanks to a studio visit with dancer and choreographer Pioneer Winter, Najja recently stumbled into a new way of seeing her work - where she once thought her drawings were about translating some preoccupation or meandering thought, she now believes they actually emerge as a record of a deep-seated memory. “Now I see that my drawings are more the result of something that has already happened, and the words ‘remnants’ and ‘residue’ triggered that for me and changed how this translating feels for me,” she says.

Whether recording an experience or emerging from a subconscious thought, Najja’s work taps into some fundamental aspects of her lived experience: Her upbringing in the church, her former career as an athlete, her parents’ careers as musicians, and the kinship she finds exists within communities of sport, faith, and music. With her drawings comprising just one facet of her work, Najja’s practice moves seamlessly from drawing and installation to photography, community organizing and performance. Just as her drawings tend to mark a path forward - while simultaneously refusing to follow a straight line - her work evolves from a cornucopia of experiences that appear markedly unrelated to most, yet powerfully meaningful to Najja.

Where she once might have thought that her work was designed to lead to somewhere, Najja now wonders whether it’s actually bringing her back to someplace else. Najja today finds herself somewhere within that full-circle trajectory with her latest project, The Huddle is a Prayer Circle, a project she says is “about clarifying the similarities I see between sport, music, and faith.”

Working at night within Fountainhead’s garage studio, Najja created long exposure light photographs, using a flashlight that traced her dancing as she listened to the sound of a gospel choir. In the long seconds that the camera’s lens opened to capture her movement, Najja recreated in photographs what she depicts in her drawings - images that resemble athletic plays or contemplative maps. She plans to use the photographs as springboards for creating experimental gospel music.

“It’s something about how all of those things come together to create this energy and refuge,” she says. “I see this work as an environment I’m building that’s comprised of sound, image, and sculpture, with collaborations with other artists and musicians.”

Wholly an extension of her entire practice, The Huddle is a Prayer Circle is a project Najja views as an exercise in joy. “I’m literally performing my memories, and finding a way to capture that,” she says.

misael soto

misael soto’s practice tests the theory that involving artists in governmental planning can lead to more engaged and effective civic involvement in major decision-making processes. With a practice that incorporates both aesthetic and ephemeral elements -- but is ultimately designed to lead to discussion toward progress on policies that impact everyday citizens -- misael questions, subverts, and topples structures that contribute to dysfunctional civic frameworks.

When choosing subject matter, misael is particularly drawn to liminal spaces, which they define as ideas that feel “immediate, but where simultaneously the immediacy has lost its edge.” Of late, that urge has drawn them toward projects that reflect on climate change, with performative and time-based works that focus viewers’ attention back on its immediate danger. Projects like Reflecting Pools, a temporary public water feature consisting of two reflecting pools with walls made of sandbags and two industrial gas-powered water pumps, like those used for emergency flooding situations; and Provisional Obstruction (Little Haiti, Miami), which highlights ongoing construction in the gentrifying neighborhood of Little Haiti - driven largely by its low property values and high elevation - shine a light on the myriad social and environmental issues related to climate change in Miami.

misael has also situated themselves within Miami Beach government to bridge the disconnect between government and its local residents on issues pertaining to sea level rise in the city.

Their seminal project, the Department of Reflection, creates this mutual exchange. Located within available governmental buildings, the Department of Reflection collaborates internally with the City of Miami Beach to interrogate the direction of their work. “On the one hand, we’re creating a space so government can understand art and art-making, but we’re also creating a conduit and space for the meeting of residents who can understand the issues and contribute to artwork that acts as a framing device for their feelings on an issue,” says misael.

In their second consecutive month at Fountainhead, misael’s collaborative project with GeoVanna Gonzalez was pointedly focused around what the Department of Reflection aims to do. “The project was an opportunity to look at ways we can address a small area of need collectively,” they say.

Images courtesy of misael soto and Alex Nuñez

Words by Nicole Martinez