Creative Placemaking in Miami

Beth Boone: I'm Beth Boone, I'm the Artistic and Executive Director or Miami Light Project.   We were established in 1989. We present contemporary dance, music, theatre, multimedia artists from around the world, on stages throughout Miami-Dade County, and we develop new work by Miami based artists and help them to tour that work around the country, around the world, through a program called, Here and Now.

Lolo Reskin: My name is Lolo Reskin. I am the owner of Sweat Records. We've been open for six years in Miami, and we are a record store, event space, and a coffee shop. In the store, and at places around Miami, we throw over 120 events a year, everything from comedy to music, to, you name it.

Scott Cunningham  I'm Scott Cunningham, I'm the founder and Director of University of Wynwood, which is an entirely fake university dedicated to advancing contemporary literature in Miami, Florida. So we produce events and projects, we have a visiting poets series that's been going on since 2009, and we just launched this April, a county-wide poetry festival called, O, Miami.

Jo Reed: Those are three people who are making a difference in their city of Miami, Florida. Welcome to Artworks the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation’s great artists to explore how art works, I’m your host, Josephine Reed.

There has been a lot of talk around the NEA in the past two years about creative placemaking: the belief that art and culture make a neighborhood a great place to live, work and play, brings together diverse communities, and revitalize neighborhoods.  This is a philosophy shared by many including the Knight Foundation which believes that “ the arts are a catalyst for public dialogue, and that shared cultural experiences contribute to a sense of place and communal identity.”  It’s in that spirit that the foun

dation provides grants to the arts, which includes placemaking projects like Beth Boone’s Miami Light Project’s collaborative performance/work space, Lolo Reskin’s Sweat Records’ community building events and Scott Cunningham’s O, Miami’s month-long poetry festival.  I jumped at the opportunity to speak with Lolo, Beth and Scott. I was curious how they began their organizations, grew them, and in the process helped  make Miami a vibrant cultural center. I began our conversation by asking Scott why he began the University of Wynwood, a fake university devoted to  contemporary literature.

Scott Cunningham: I was leaving a real university, which was my graduate program at FIU, and I was sort of just nervous about leaving that type of community, and I always kind of wanted to have my own university where I could do what I wanted, so I just founded it. Miami, geographically, is very fractured, so it's difficult to have-- you know, it's not like a city, you know, like San Francisco, which I used to live in, where you could walk to a lot of places, and the public transportation took you to neighborhoods, and if you were a writer, you kind of-- it was very easy to figure out where you should go to meet other writers, and Miami doesn't really have that. I mean, we have an amazing bookstore in Books & Books, but it's in Coral Gables, which, for me, might as well be in another city from where I live, so I found that it was tough to find ways to create that community, or be a part of that community, so that's basically what University of Wynwood was trying to do, was create opportunities for these people who I knew instinctually were out there, but I just wasn't meeting them.

Jo Reed: Scott, when you began that, did you find that, in fact this was something that the Miami community wanted? Was it a hard go, how did it come together?

Scott Cunningham: No, I mean, it was very small and grassroots. I mean, it still is. It still, pretty much, is me. But yeah, so we're expanding rapidly. No, but it was basically me, kind of doing events with friends, one of whom was Lolo, and just sort of trying to get the word out, basically through online social media channels and then through word of mouth, and so it was something that I figured would happen slowly over time, and that's kind of what's happened. So--

Jo Reed: But this year I would imagine this year is an exponential jump with, O, Miami.

Scott Cunningham: Yeah, yeah it was. Yeah, it was definitely exponential. O, Miami was easily the largest thing we'd ever done. I think the largest event we'd done before that was 45 people. So we went from that to doing-- we produced ourselves, about 25 events during April, and then we partnered with other organizations to do another 25. So it was maybe just shy of 50 in April, and then we did 23 projects, too, as well, and then so the largest event that we produced ourselves, was just over 500 people so that was, it was a different kind of thing for us, definitely.

Jo Reed: And Lolo, what prompted the beginning of Sweat Records?

Lolo Reskin: Well similar to what Scott said, you know, Miami's geography is very spread out. I was a DJ and indie dance party promoter in the scene, and knew that there were people who liked good music, and pretty much by the time I'd graduated from high school, there were no real classic style independent record stores around in the city. And I'm from here, and I wanted my hometown to have one, and I knew that there were enough people in Miami's spread out area to sustain one, and that was pretty much the impetus for starting the store.

Jo Reed:  You're now in Little Haiti. You’ve been there for a while. Why that neighborhood?

Lolo Reskin: Well really, the reason why we moved there-- our first location was destroyed by Hurricane Wilma eight months after we opened, which was a bummer, and Churchill's is a sort of punk rock pub in the middle of Little Haiti. it's been there for over 30 years, it's a-- you know, they call it the CBGB's of Miami, and they offered us a little temporary space in the back, and then, when the space next door to them became available, we decided to take it because they're a landmark, and it made sense. They're a music venue, we sell music. It was a nice match.

Jo Reed: Beth, the Miami Light Project’s been around for 23 years and recently you’ve relocated the Wynwood section of Miami, which had been abandoned warehouse area, but it’s now the new arts district.

Beth Boone: Yes, that's right. We've had three very distinct moments in our life as an organization. The first ten years, we were just in donated back office space in various places on Miami Beach, and we presented mostly at the Colony Theater. And the next ten years, which is when I came into the picture, was with our first space, called The Light Box, which was on Biscayne Boulevard, at a time when Biscayne Boulevard had nothing really happening on the 30th Street section of it. By the time we left that location, there was a Starbuck's across the street, so we knew it was time for us to go. And so about three years ago, we started working on imagining the next ten years of our lives, and as fate would have it, we were able to identify a great spot, which was a 12,000 square foot warehouse in Wynwood. We were able to identify an interesting and innovative thinking landlord, we got a grant from the Knight Foundation, we identified partners to share in the space with us, which was too big for us alone. And we developed our new life, which I would like to think will be our permanent home, the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse in Wynwood.

Jo Reed: Well let's talk about the development of Wynwood, as an artists' area, since you were a part of that, with Scott even naming his fake university, The University of Wynwood. Can you talk a little bit about the trajectory of how Wynwood became the artists' place?

Scott Cunningham: This is Scott again from University of Wynwood. Well I'll say that one of the reasons I named it that, is because when I moved to Miami-- I grew up in South Florida, but not from Miami and I didn't move to Miami till '05. Even before I got down there, I started reading articles about Wynwood in various places, and I thought, oh man, this is great, there's an arts district. So right after I moved to Miami, I drove over there, you know, probably on a Saturday at two p.m. And there was absolutely nothing opened. There was nothing that even looked like it could be open. And I was just taken aback, like, this isn't an arts district. There's nothing here. And there was stuff there, but there wasn't a lot of stuff. And it was pretty much open by appointment. And now when you go there now, it's completely different. I mean, and probably Beth, since she's there every day, could probably speak better to that.

Beth Boone: Yeah, well it's-- you know, I think that the neighborhood itself was just ripe for becoming an arts district, but I'm not from Miami. I've lived here for 16 years, and I love the city like I was born here, but I will say that in Miami, I think that, often, I don't know what you call this, but you know, like we'll sort of just own a name, before we might have earned it. There was this aspiring to be an arts district, and now, we've caught up with that aspiration, I think.

Lolo Reskin: I think it's called culture speculating.

Beth Boone: Okay, that works. Wynwood is just ripe for what's happening in it for so many reasons. One is that it's filled with warehouses, it's a light industrial-- zoned light industrial, although I now believe that there's residential allowed.

Lolo Reskin: And café.

Beth Boone: And café, yeah. And so it's-- one thing that's attractive to me about the part of Wynwood that we are in, is that we were not displacing residents by moving in, and just philosophically, as an organization, I didn't really want to participate in gentrification. And although the neighborhood has changed a lot in the last two, three, four years, and it will continue to change a lot in the next five, ten, fifteen years, I think that it's special that we're not displacing residents, and in particular, low income residents, by moving in there. So that's cool. And then there's all of these warehouses. Sprinkled in there are these cafes that are popping up, some restaurants, some bars, lots of galleries. Really, just very organic and cool things happening. And it's taken some totally independent entrepreneurial people to move in, and it's also-- The neighborhood has also benefited from some highfalutin visionary developer people, so it's uniquely Miami, and it has changed enormously, just in, I would say, 24 months.

Jo Reed: Lolo, I would imagine a lot of people are coming to Sweat Records who might not have gone to Little Haiti otherwise.

Lolo Reskin: Absolutely. Especially since we are one of the only vinyl specialty shops in the area, we're also a specialty vegan coffee shop. We get people coming in for both aspects. We're in a lot of travel guides, and you know, tourist sites and things like that, so we definitely bring a ton of traffic into the neighborhood. And it's very nice to see these people who come in, you know, see our neat little shop, and then they walk up the street and go and check out some of the local Haitian culture and the botanicas and all that kind of fun stuff, so we definitely are doing our part to bring people into the neighborhood.

Jo Reed: Sweat Records is kind of unique, because, as you say, it's also a gathering place, and so many of your events are free, aren't they?

Lolo Reskin: Yeah. Almost all of them are free. We have a five dollar show coming up, because it's a band on Sonic Youth’s record label, and they're-- we're bringing them in from another city, and we'd like to be able to pay them for their trouble, so-- but most of the events are free. They're all, all ages, which is really important to me, because I did grow up in Miami, and I snuck into as much as possible before I was of age, and once I was of age, I never lost the feeling I had when I was younger, when I was denied from a show because of how old I was. So it's really important to keep the young kids engaged, and get them involved in music and the arts and stuff, and I really love that Sweat is a space where not only can all ages people come see shows, but we let younger kids' bands play. Some of-- a lot of local bands have had their first shows at Sweat, and we also give kids the experience of putting on a show. We kind of work with them as the event space, and say, okay, you're putting together the show, tell us which bands you want to put on the lineup, send us your flier and we'll approve it or edit it, and you know, we just kind of try to lead kids down interesting paths in the music and arts industries.

Jo Reed: And Scott, you have a wider community in-- and I'm thinking about, O, Miami You really just took on the entire city. Talk about some of-- first, before we even talk about the events that you orchestrated for that, which are really quite impressive, how did you get buy-in from so many different organizations and even city agencies?

Scott Cunningham: It was a lot of knocking on doors, first and foremost, but also when Knight Foundation is behind you that helps a lot, too, I think. Because-- partially just because people know them and they know it's a brand that people trust and recognize, but also because it means it's going to happen. You know, and in Miami, you never know, when people are talking about something, if it is going to happen or not. So it-- I think people got excited about it, and you know, I think it was different, too. I think I'm the first person to probably go around town and haranguing people to try to put poetry into their programming, so I think it was something maybe a little bit different, and I don't know, I mean, I think most of the credit is to the organizations, because they're the ones who said yes, and a lot of them didn't know me from Adam, and I had no track record with them, and-- but they came on board 100 percent anyway, and were super supportive and did amazing things.  We had this goal of reaching every single person in Miami-Dade County, during the course of April, to get them to at least see or experience or hear one poem, that's it, just one poem. So to do that, we really tried to be as inclusive and as extensive in our programming as possible, in every sense of the word. So I mean, one person in there, and also my colleague Pete Borrebach, it was primarily the two of us doing everything on our end, but two people can't reach 2.5 million without a whole lot of help.

Jo Reed: Some of the programs were really quite extraordinary. Please share-- like poem drop.

Lolo Reskin: Yes.

Scott Cunningham: Yeah. Yeah, well Lolo knows about that.

Lolo Reskin: It was fun.

Scott Cunningham: Yeah. Poem Drop is an amazing concept. We worked with two young artists who grew up in Miami, and they came up with this idea of making a bunch of almost like, little aerial paper bombs of poetry that we would then drop on one specific spot. And for the artists, it was very much a statement about peace, I think, and about the kind of safety that we enjoy in America, and also the sort of false safety implied by poetry. So we did it once in Coral Gables, and then we tried it again at Lolo's annual Sweatstock event, and there were some complications, one of which being the wind, which blew all the poems into the street. So it didn't quite work as planned, but you know, it was fun to try it.

Lolo Reskin: No, it was cool and we had some of his poets reading live onstage in between the local bands that we had on our free block party street stage. So we had the poetry in there anyway.

Jo Reed: That's wonderful, because I was going to ask you about the kind of synergy and working together that must happen down there. Tell us about Sweatstock.

Lolo Reskin: Sweatstock is our annual festival. Basically there's a new holiday called Record Store Day, and it's an international event, and it's in its fifth year now, and it's gained a ton of steam and it basically it's a day to celebrate the role of the independent record store in society, which is really great. So this Record Store Day thing has been great, and for the last two years, we've thrown a free block party to celebrate the store's anniversary and Record Store Day simultaneously. So it's the third Saturday in April and we did the second Sweatstock this past April, and it was a great day. We had between us and Churchill's, three stages, over 30 local acts, we incorporated elements from, O’ Miami, we incorporated some music, local music videos from our Borscht Film Festival, which is our homegrown independent film festival, entering its eighth year. We had local artists giving out their work, we had local food trucks serving up the food, and it was just a great celebration, free all day, all ages, had over 1,500 people come out.

Jo Reed: All of you focus a lot of local artists. Beth, that you are-- that Miami Light Project is really devoted to working and developing local talent.

Beth Boone: That's right, we have a program called Here and Now, which is now in its-- wow, I think 12th year. We commission and present the work of Miami based dance, music, theatre, artists, and then actually, with the support of the Knight Foundation, we've deepened the program and we've helped those artists to tour their work, to other cities and countries. And really it's the most rewarding program that we do at the organization.

Jo Reed:  Scott, I know O’ Miami has had many national poets here, but there was also a focus on local poets, and the University of Wynwood, really does focus on local writers?

Scott Cunningham: Yeah, we do. To me, it's focused on the local, but just like Beth is saying with the Here and Now, it's about an exchange, too, between Miami scene and the rest of the country as well, because I think that's an important component that that we are in conversation, especially since we are kind of off, almost floating into the ocean down here. So it's very easy for us to get left out of the conversation if we're not working hard to stay inside of it, so that's also a big focus for us. So we bring people down here as well from other places that we think are doing exciting things. And then they become ambassadors for Miami when they leave, and the same thing-- you know, one of the things I'd like to do in the future is kind of along the lines of what Beth's doing, getting Miami writers opportunities to go outside of Miami and present their work.

Beth Boone: This is Beth. I was talking to somebody-- I was talking to somebody about this a little earlier today, that it's remarkable how little investment it actually takes to entirely change the life of an artist, to launch their career, to put them on a trajectory that is just powerful. An airline ticket to the festival, the Theatre Festival in Prague, and suddenly their work is exposed to people over the world, all over the world. It's so little money and it completely and utterly changes their lives, and the-- in terms of their professional opportunities and in turn, starts to really, kind of, shine a light on Miami as a really interesting international cultural center. they're community based artists, and they are international artists. They represent cultures from all over the world. They represent Miami, and it's really important to us that we place them, literally and figuratively on the same stage as artists from around the world, who are, perhaps world renowned, that we also bring to the city, and that we give them opportunities to interact with one another.

Scott Cunningham: This is Scott. No, I think that's actually, in some ways, that's the way to actually improve the local, is when you get artists who are getting talked about elsewhere, like in national news outlets and other ways, and then you're in Miami, and all of a sudden you're reading about people that-- artists you know and that you've seen perform, and then other people are getting excited about, in other places, and it makes you proud to be from Miami, and say, oh, that's my artist, I know that person. So it seems like, oh, that wouldn't do anything for Miami, but actually it does a lot.

Lolo Reskin: This is Lolo. That's one of the main goals we had when we launched our web store this year. It was an idea that had been a couple of years in the making, and basically we took-- we sell local music, we sell vinyl, CDs, we sell local t-shirts, jewelry, wallets, anything someone makes handmade, locally, we're down to sell it for them, either on a consignment basis or, you know, thankfully now there's a lot of local artists that are so popular we'll outright buy whatever they bring us. So in March, we launched SweatShopMiami.com, which is all the local stuff that we sell in the store. And we launched with 400 items and since then we've already added another 100, so people have really seen the site, said, wow, I need to make something, I need to get my stuff on there, I need to get in gear, and that's exactly what we wanted to inspire amongst the local community. And you know, we've filled tons and tons of orders, and we've shipped stuff everywhere from right around the corner to other parts of Miami, to 15 countries internationally, so it's really cool that it's Miami stuff, and it's getting sent all around the world.

Jo Reed:  More and more Miami has this reputation of being an international city, more and more, a cosmopolitan city. How much do you think the growing arts community had to do with

Miami's switch to more of a cosmopolitan place to be.

Lolo Reskin: I think it had everything to do with it.

Beth Boone: Everything, yeah. Everything.

Lolo Reskin: Everything, I mean, even the-- you know, the GMCVB, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, who is in charge of promoting Miami's image to the world, a couple of years ago, switched from doing bikini girls on South Beach rooftops, to the arts, it was really great that they got that clue and decided to promote Miami's art scene, and Art Basel, from what I hear, is the biggest art fair gathering in the hemisphere, which makes sense, and it's an amazing week to be in Miami whether you're from here or visiting, and all of that stuff put together, Winter Music Conference, O, Miami, these layers, you know, it just-- living here year round, there's never a dull moment. Even the summer, which they say is slow, it's not slow for me, I'm busy as hell right now.

Jo Reed: Now what does it mean for all of you to be working simultaneously, often together, as opposed to being the lonely artist. What happens when you do sort of create a critical cultural mass?

Lolo Reskin: I love it. It feels like working with family, really. There's so many people out there who are just great people, and I'm so happy to work with them all the time, and at this point, I think all of us can pick and choose who we do and don't want to work with, and, you know, it's great to always be able to opt to work with friends, not just because they're friends, but because they're doing amazing projects. And Miami, even though it's such a huge city, it's very welcoming, and I feel like, if you have a good attitude, and you're doing something interesting, it's very easy to be welcomed into the scene, and figure out what's going on, and you know, things you'd like to do, and who you'd like to work with. You know, most people I've talked to down here are really receptive to new ideas, and you know, I don't find a lot of stubbornness …

Beth Boone: That's so true. You know, when I-- this is Beth talking. When I moved here, I moved here from New York City. I worked in the theatre my whole life, as an actor, and a director, and you know, I moved to New York because it's the center of the theater universe, I thought, and after seven years living there, I was freezing, and it was dark, and I was depressed, and I was like, why this isn't the way I want to live, and so then I just had this ah-ha moment, when I thought, you know what, why don't I move to the place where I want to be, and then make the work I want to do in that place. And I decided, because I was freezing, that it was Miami, and that was at a really interesting time, 16 years ago, and I found the same thing, that people are totally welcoming and that you can come here and, unlike other, perhaps older more established cities, you can have a bright idea and you can get in line, maybe at number ten, instead of number 450,000, and you can move your idea forward, and if you're willing to work hard and work with others and collaborate and just like everything Lolo just said, you can make really exciting things happen. It's really rewarding to be a part of that.

Jo Reed: Scott?

Scott Cunningham: Yeah, to me, Miami is a place to get stuff done. It's a great place to get stuff done. I can't imagine another city that has the sort of climate and the sense of camaraderie that Miami has in terms of the arts. We're really lucky that we have an amazing leader in the county's Department of Cultural Affairs, in Michael Spring, who's just like, I don't know, just to have a city official who's as supportive as he is of everyone, is amazing. And so I think it comes kind of from the top down, that everyone kind of has the sense of, we're all in this together, we all have the same goal, which is to make this place great and to make great work happen, and everyone really feels that way, and it just makes things so easy. You know, I talk to people in other cities, and they dread collaboration, they dread having to bring in other people to the mix, because it turns into a fight, and it's just not like that here.

Jo Reed: How do you reach out? What are some of the things you do to reach out to new audiences and to make people aware of what it is that you're doing?

Lolo Reskin: That's part of our job. We have to get creative, you know.

Jo Reed: Lolo Reskin.

Lolo Reskin: And what Scott said about the action and getting things done around here, it's so right on. I mean, a lot of people I told years ago that I was going to open a store, didn't believe me until I gave them a flier with an address on it, and said, if you go here, there will be a store, it's happening. So once it happened, I know, just as a small business owner, we definitely get creative. We do a thing now once a month at the store, where we make waffles, and while that wouldn't be something that you would really expect to happen at a record store, the last one we did, we had about 100 people out. We got written up in "City Link," we got written up in a whole bunch of different local press. "New Times" came to take pictures, and put up a gallery…

Jo Reed: Scott, during “O, Miami,” you had people reading poems when they were online at the Motor Vehicle Bureau.

Scott Cunningham: Yeah, kind of the structure of, O, Miami, I think is addressing what I'd really do think is a serious challenge for arts organizations going forwards, which is the fracturing of the media, in terms of how do you get the word out to new audiences. And yeah, and so I think it's something that we explored in a pretty in depth fashion in the course of the month. And one of the things that I thought, that I realized at the end of it was going to be a real challenge going forward, is breaking out of that, sort of core art audience, and then even breaking out of what would be maybe like a fringe audience that's around that, that you could maybe convince to do something. But once you get outside of those circles, I think it's very hard to reach those people, because as much as social media is democratic, it tends to be cliquey and you're usually speaking to a lot of the same people over and over again, and finding ways to break out of that, and break across sort of class lines and other socioeconomic barriers, I think is going to be a real challenge for all of us moving forward.

Beth Boone: This is Beth talking. One of the ways that we-- one of the ways that I believe that we have been successful in creating a really diverse audience base, and not just giving lip service to that word, because I think it's easy to do that. We want people from all walks of life, we want people who are young and old and rich and poor, and educated and not, and from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds to come to our performances. We made a very specific series of decisions many years ago about how it is that we would make diverse programming on our stages, and that will attract a diverse audience. I mean, I think that's -- for me, that's key to how it is that we run our organization. How do you-- you can't expect to diversify your audience, if you're always presenting the same kinds of artists on stage, and so we have this wildly eclectic programming, and it's not by accident, it's very purposeful that it's eclectic. We represent many different countries, many different genres, many different, sort of, generations of artists, and as much collaboration goes onstage as it does backstage, or offstage, I guess you could say, and I think that all of those things, not just one of those things, make for an audience that is reflective of your community.

Jo Reed: In summing up, are there any final thoughts about art in community, the way art builds neighborhoods?

Scott Cunningham: This is Scott. When you go to a city, I think, most people, that's-- those are the things that they're looking for. They want to know, is there a great show in town, is there a festival going on right now. You know, they want to feel instantly like locals, even if they're not. And the way they do that is, they get integrated into the arts community, because it's typically the most welcoming. And it's also, I think, the easiest way to create value in a community, and create pride amongst its residents for the things that you do, and then, selfishly for me, I mean, I just-- to me it's what makes life livable, so the better the art is in a city, the happier I am.

Jo Reed: Lolo?

Lolo Reskin: I, too, have read the studies that say that one of the true things that makes people really enjoy living where they live, is the amount of social, cultural things they can go explore and enjoy. And I definitely hear all the time, that all three of our organizations are filling niches of things that weren't happening here before. And it's really cool that I'm able to put on an indie standup comedy night once a month that people don't have to buy two drinks to get into, and that allows new comics a chance to get their feet wet. And there's so much room for culture in the city, and it's really great that, beyond us, there's just a ridiculous amount of organizations working all toward the same goal.So just the fact that we're able to help, not only put on our own programming, but disseminate the information and spread it out as far as we can, that's really enriching for us, and just the sheer amount of things we're able to accomplish on such a shoestring budget still impresses me how we're still able to pull it off, but it's been great having the Knight Foundation in town has been great, and all the cumulative work of everyone has just made the city such an amazing place that I'm so proud to live in and be a part of.

Jo Reed: And Beth.

Beth Boone: Well, I think for me, picking the place that I want to raise my six-year-old son, is obviously the most important decision I could make in my life, at least I see it that way. I grew up in Washington, D.C. I was exposed to great art from the beginning. It was a very important part of my upbringing. I think that all of that exposure created in me, a love of art and a love of community. Experiencing live performance, for example, in the same room with other beating hearts, is something that is impossible to describe. You have to experience it to know what that's like. I think that people, I think that human beings desire communal experiences, and that, when they have the opportunity, when individuals have the opportunity to come together to experience some work of art, that they can leave transformed and they, therefore transform their community, and build a community. You start to feel like, from a geographical perspective, if your neighborhood has interesting things going on in it, you start to feel a part of, and you start to care about, and become more engaged with everything that's happening in that neighborhood, and then I think that kind of grows, and makes you think more about your community at large. I always speak about the experience of live performance because that's what I do. I think that it's one of the most important things that builds community,

Jo Reed: Well my hat's off to all of you, seriously. You really help make Miami a truly great American city, so thank you.

Lolo Reskin: Thank you.

Beth Boone: Thank you.

Scott Cunningham: Thank you.

Jo Reed: I was speaking with Beth Boone from the Miami Light Project, Lolo Reskin from Sweat Record, and Scott Cunningham who heads O, Miami.

You’ve been listening to Art works produced at the national endowment for the arts. Adam Kampe is the musical supervisor

Excerpt from "Appetite" from Proviant Audio from the album Mushrooms, licensed through Creative Commons.

The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. And now you subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U—just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page. Next week, a visit to Wormfarm where artists work the land. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter.  For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.