The Bakehouse Art Complex invited Quinn Harrelson, a very young, emerging curatorial voice, to curate “Collectivity,'” which features new site-specific works selected from an open call to the organization’s resident artists. At Quinn’s request, Ade Omotosho, curatorial fellow at Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Stephanie Seidel, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, participated in the jurying process.
 
Michelle Lisa Polissaint’s photographic epic “The Ballad of Me and You” examines the point at which the individual dissolves into a relationship, while Robert Chamber’s “Gretzel: The Empress’s Castle” decodes the societal implications of collective mythologies, like the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel and a secret 14th-century Japanese castle. The artist collective Midnight Thrift’s group exhibition, within the larger exhibit, attempts to undo the collective by questioning the entanglement of individual identities and the extent to which the collective has become an individual itself. Troy Simmons’ “Berchemia” takes residence in and on the building’s support structure, standing in for the real collective of artists-in-residence at the Bakehouse over the past three decades. Simmons is interested in the ways in which the collective, always shifting, has acted both as a stabilizing and destabilizing foundation for the institution. A.G. will release the sixth edition of LSD in a mid-century modern reading room, constructed for the publication’s consumption in the Bakehouse’s entry.
 
Christina Pettersson’s durational installation investigates the history of industrial bread-making in South Florida. She writes, “Because wheat does not grow in the tropics, traditionally bread was made from arrowroot, a starch derived from the Coontie plant, which was cultivated by indigenous people here for thousands of years.  Commercial production (using roots gathered from wild plants) occurred in South Florida from the 1830s until 1925, when the FDA banned the practice. The last commercial “Coontie starch” factory in Florida was destroyed by the 1926 hurricane. That same year, American Bakeries Company (now Bakehouse Art Complex) opened its doors, distributing bread made from imported wheat that was no longer connected to the land upon which it sat.” Over the course of the show, Petterson will cultivate Coontie root on the Bakehouse campus, which will culminate in an historic breaking of bread.
 
Domingo Castillo’s sculpture co-opts the means and economies of musical production, sound, and stage. This new work contains the just-completed soundtrack of Castillo’s forthcoming feature-length film Tropical Malaise, which centers around a speculative post-human future.
 
Sterling Rook and Nicole Salcedo, collaborating for the first time, produced a line drawing from fiber installed throughout the Bakehouse’s snaking hallways, “weaving new stories using objects tethered to over-lapping and sometimes conflicting imaginaries” to examine our accidental hostility to collective natural life.
 
Performance artist Cara Dodge presented a haunted house that seeks to pervert systems of dehumanization, drawing in equal parts from the Victorian macabre and the horrors of industrialization to examine the power of the shared collective experience as it relates to death, fear, and illusion.
 
About the Curator
Quinn Harrelson is a 17-year old curator and writer living and working in Miami, Florida. Founder of Current Projects, an experimental exhibition space in Little Haiti, Harrelson has organized exhibitions at BBQLA, Los Angeles, and curated public programs at the Bass Museum of Art. Current Projects exhibitions have been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, AQNB, The Miami Rail, Artfcity, and Hyperallergic.
 
About the Jurors
Ade Omotosho is an art historian based in Miami. He is the inaugural Ford Foundation
Curatorial Fellow at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Prior to PAMM, he was the Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow in the department of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He holds a BA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.
 
Since joining ICA Miami in 2016, associate curator Stephanie Seidel has been responsible for a number of exhibitions, including the co-curation of German artist Thomas Bayrle’s major retrospective “One Day on Success Street,” Tomm El-Saieh’s and Diamond Stingily's first solo museum presentations, and “The Everywhere Studio.” Forthcoming exhibitions include “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning.” Before joining ICA, Seidel was a curator at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Germany.