Frost Museum launches its first online exhibition

Photo credit: virtual.frostartmuseum.org screenshot

Daniel Uria/Staff Writer

The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum opened its first ever online exhibit entitled, “The Drawing Project”. The exhibit explores the concept of drawing through a series of online residencies as well as a project space that is open to submissions. The site also displays a number of works included in the museum’s collection.

“The Drawing Project” began as the brainchild of curator and FIU graduate, Emmy Mathis.

“Emmy had an idea. The museum had never done an online exhibition and she had never done one either,” said Sherry Zambrano, the Frost’s Assistant Curator who worked as a coordinator for “The Drawing Project”. “She researched our database and based on her idea, picked out the artwork.”

Mathis said that rather than being an art exhibit that happens to be online, “The Drawing Project” was specifically catered to the Internet. “The medium itself is the Internet, so to try to work with the medium as opposed to against it,” she said. “It was curated around the idea of alternative spaces and considering the Internet an alternative space.”

The most recent residency featured a collaborative project between artists Greg Burgoyne and Yumino Seki that explores drawing as a noun in the form of an idea as well as a verb.

“It’s a more academic approach to understanding the term drawing as a noun,” Mathis said.

The next residency will begin in mid-August and will feature Miami artist, Claudia Scalice, whose focus is largely centered on drawings and small paintings.

“We’re trying to kind of flip-flop it, have someone who makes more object based work and then port it to people who are a little more performance oriented or have a little more conceptual approach to the idea of drawing,” Mathis said.

The exhibit’s project space is home to a collection of works that follow the concept of lines.

“I like for the project space to be really conceptual, this idea of implied lines,” Mathis said. “A couple of the artists were invited and a couple applied.”

One such project is “Then Again” by Crystal Pearl Molinary, in which she recreates various photographs of her mother who was a Vedette, model, singer, actress and dancer in Cuba.

This particular project explores various types of lines, Mathis said. “For me it’s this idea of when you’re travelling you’re making lines; there’s family lines and family ties and a timeline and a history.”

The museum’s first venture into online exhibits has been fairly successful and the format provides certain advantages.

“With the online exhibit, anyone from around the world can see it,” said Zambrano.  “Even the artists that are participating from different countries can showcase it to their audience.”

“You gain access,” Mathis said. “The fact that someone, namely project space artist, Gagan Singh, in New Dehli, India can be looking at the same thing that I’m looking at, at the same time.”

Zambrano hopes that The Drawing Project can inspire similar exhibitions in the future. “It’s something we’ve never done before,” she said. “And I’m hoping other graduate students come to the museum with these ideas so we can continue with online exhibitions.”

daniel.uria@fiusm.com