MIAMI - Marine Stadium Second Life

"Graffiti art gives abandoned Miami stadium a second life" PBS NewsHour 7/21/2014

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  It sits abandoned on a thin stretch of land called Virginia Key, overlooking a manmade basin between Miami’s South Channel and Biscayne Bay, a magnificent setting, downtown Miami in the near distance.

Today, the 6,500-seat Marine Stadium is littered with garbage, every reachable inch of it covered in graffiti, forgotten by many, but not those who remember its role as a cultural centerpiece for a rising city.  One of those is Miami’s own music star Gloria Estefan.

GLORIA ESTEFAN:  This is one of those things in the city that has history.  It’s almost 50 years old.

JEFFREY BROWN:  That’s — 50 years old is not that long, right?

GLORIA ESTEFAN:  In Miami, it is.

JEFFREY BROWN:  In fact, the stadium turned 50 years old just last December.  And Estefan has joined a grassroots effort not only to save it, but to give it renewed life.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Miami was still finding its identity as something more than a seasonal tourist destination.  When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, waves of Cubans began leaving for South Florida, seeking new lives and redefining the city’s culture.

"From painting overpasses to stadiums, a graffiti artist on his evolving art form" PBS NewsHour 7/18/2014

Excerpt

For more than 30 years, Los Angeles-based artist RISK has been creating colorful murals on everything from highway overpasses — known as “heavens” — to dilapidated buildings, walls, trains and buses.

“I like to evoke emotion with colors and not letters or imagery,” he said, “so I have to really look at the environment and see where I’m at and kind of work that into it.”

Recently that environment was South Florida, where he joined eight other graffiti artists to paint on the abandoned Miami Marine Stadium, part of an effort to raise attention and money for the stadium’s restoration.  Curated by New York-based stencil artist Logan Hicks, the project is called ART History and runs through 2014.

While reporting on the broader story of the Miami Marine Stadium, which was built in the 1960s and abandoned in the 1990s, Jeffrey Brown spoke with RISK about his project there, his body of work and the very temporary nature of his art form.