Last month, Bakehouse’s Cathy Leff and Krys Ortega, accompanied by artists Monica Lopez De Victoria, Woosler Delisfort, and Cornelius Tulloch participated in a study trip to Paris and Marseille, funded in part by generous donations from members of the Bakehouse Board of Directors Jose Félix Díaz, Maurice Habif, Lawrence Kline, and Jason Korman.

This trip provided the group with the opportunity to learn with and from each other, while extending our institutional networks, developing new partnerships, and strengthening existing ones. We visited cultural and community spaces that are embedded in and connect to their respective communities and play a significant role in the life of their neighborhoods.

Among our stops for conversations in Paris were: the Ministry of Culture, to learn more about how they negotiate artist housing with private developers; Centre Pompidou and its curator Anna Huddleston-Galloni; Palais de Tokyo; a meeting with Benedict Alliot, president of Cité Internationale des Arts; POUSH; and Le Wonder. Meals were planned to meet and foster conversations and exchange with international artists, curators, including matali crasset, M/M Paris, Thomasine Barnekow, and Nicholas Buffe, among others.

Following the five days in Paris, the Bakehouse group took a train to the port city of Marseille. While there, we met with Ron Reyes Sevilla from the curatorial research center, Dos Mares; Alban Corbier-Labasse, general director of La Friche la Belle de Mai, one of the largest multidisciplinary cultural campuses in Europe. At La Friche, we unexpectedly ran into an exhibit, Dust Specks on the Sea, featuring the work of three Bakehouse artists– Adler Guerrier, Najja Moon, and Michelle Lisa Polissaint, along with a piece by Board member Edouard Duval-Carrié. We participated in studio visits with Triangle - Astérides residents, and visited the much acclaimed Museum of Civilization. A final treat was the opportunity to have a private tour of Le Corbusier’s masterwork, La Cite Radieuse.

The timing of the trip coincided with the fellowship awarded to artist Cornelius Tulloch, who is spending two months in Paris as a Bakehouse x Cité internationale des arts laureate.

As Bakehouse thinks about its future campus and its renovated facility, which will serve artists and community members alike, the opportunity to see, discuss, and share our ideas with each other was fruitful. Our itinerary was intentionally organized to inform our future space as we become more physically and digitally connected.

For one Bakehouse artist, this experience captured “what a healthy and sustainable art practice can look like through different organizational models. It makes me dream of so much more for Miami and its creative communities…”

We are so grateful to the Consulate General of France in Miami for assisting us with a rich and robust agenda, especially its cultural attaché Anthoni Dominguez.