The BayParc Apartments in downtown Miami opened a space to artists through collaboration with the national nonprofit YoungArts.
The latest installation there is “A Place To Be Held” by Miami-native and 2016 YoungArts winner Nadia Wolff. She is currently studying textile art at the Rhode Island School of Design and African Studies at Brown University.
Wolff’s work is the first in a series of art projects by YoungArts alumni that will be showcased at BayParc, 1756 N Bayshore Dr.
She talked to WLRN’s Nadege Green about her work and how Haitian culture inspires it.
WLRN: What inspired this installation?
WOLFF: The installation was inspired by my first trip to Haiti. I had never been before and my family is Haitian. So the trip brought up a lot of questions about belonging about identity
I essentially reinvented a black Caribbean domestic space. I was thinking about how many of the objects that black Caribbean folks curate and collect into these spaces speak to the way that we understand home or the ways we try to create intimacy for ourselves.
And at the same time how that speaks to these similar histories of trauma particularly in terms of colonialism in the Caribbean.