HOTBED Miami 2012, an Annual Exhibition by Wet Heat Project

From December 6 through 9, 2012.

HOTBED Miami, an annual exhibition by Wet Heat Project that has brought the works of a dozen NWSA visual artists to the foreground of the art world during Art Basel Miami Beach, has broadened its scope through the support of this year’s HOTBED venue hosts, NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance). The digital media creation of four New World School of the Arts visual artists will be a centerpiece of the Deauville Beach Resort during this year’s largest international art fair.

HOTBED Miami 2012 will be on view from December 6 through 9 at NADA Miami Beach’s Lobby & Bar in video monitors, and Channel 8 on every guest room television.

“The NADA Miami Beach art fair is a destination event, its location outside the clustered fairs of South Beach and Wynwood. Its attendees are especially intent on engaging and exploring, and the Deauville Beach Resort venue provides a stylish, historic, and comfortable place for art-savvy people to converge and network,” noted Grela Orihuela of Wet Heat Project.

“This unique opportunity allows our students to grow exponentially by offering them an avenue to showcase their work beyond the confines of an educational setting,” commented Maggy Cuesta, dean of visual arts at NWSA. “By coming together with respected partners in the arts field, who actively engage in fostering and promoting the arts in our community, our students have the potential to expand their reach and highlight their skills, knowledge and creativity to a larger, art-savvy, and demanding audience, giving them a taste of real-life execution.”

Selected by Grela Orihuela and Bill Bilowit of Wet Heat Project and based on the candidates’ conceptual and creative voice, this year’s HOTBED Miami 2012 student artists are challenged to create a site-specific video work to be exhibited 24/7 at NADA Miami Beach 2012 in the fair venue’s public atrium at the Deauville Beach Resort, as well as on every TV in the Deauville’s 484 guest rooms.

Orihuela explains that “this is the kind of high-awareness art fair that perfectly meets the goals of HOTBED, to showcase the talent, ideas and relevance of burgeoning local artists to discriminating viewers. Our HOTBEDproject demonstrates during the four days of Miami’s art fair week the exceptional level of talent, skill and ideas emerging from the “hotbed” of young visual artists this city fosters 365 days a year. There is no better place to find such artists than New World School of the Arts, which is why for the third consecutive year Wet Heat Project is collaborating with the school and dean Maggy Cuesta to showcase four BFA seniors and their specially developed HOTBED art installations.”

None of the students’ primary majors is digital media, therefore the challenge is for them to conceive and produce work using unfamiliar methods, each of them completing a single piece strong enough to engage art-savvy viewers in a busy public space and a most intimate private space. The NWSA visual artists that will be participating in this initiative are Azizi DeSouza, Steven Marquez, Jeffrey Noble, and Sebastian Duncan Portuondo.

A workshop was conducted in the first week of November, hosted by the Rubell Family Collection, where each student presented their work-in-progress to a mentor panel comprised of artist Dara Friedman, RFC Director Juan Roselione-Valadez, and other notable members of the art community. Miami art collector Jorge A. Garcia has generously provided production funds for the students.

As it develops, the work will be featured online including images and accounts of the student artists’ process on the HOTBEDMiami 2012 web site at www.hotbedmiami.com/2012.

HOTBED Miami 2012
Deauville Beach Resort Hotel
6701 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33141
www.hotbedmiami.com/2012