Fringe Projects

With funding and professional resources provided by the Elevate Prize, Fringe Projects will be able to amplify our work combatting the racial and cultural inequities in public art by increasing our organizational capacity and professionalizing our institution. The funds and professional development resources will enable our organization to hire more full-time staff to support the presentation and production of temporary public art by artists of color in year-round rather than on a seasonal basis. The prize will provide the ability to build out our new brand identity and differentiate our work on multiple media platforms. By stimulating awareness and building capacity, we are advancing towards our goal to receive national recognition by 2023.

The prize will allow us to workshop our nascent business idea to support our sustainable, long-term growth and will provide seed funding for our national expansion. As we have nearly a decade of experience operating within Miami-Dade County, we hope to develop a sister city program to produce site-responsive, contextually aware public art projects by artists of color. This expansion will enable us to expand the reach of our organization and elevate the practices of emerging cultural practitioners who have historically been underrepresented in public art. 

Founded in 2012, Fringe was developed as a way to introduce public art into everyday life.  We collaborate with artists to produce new, temporary public art commissions that investigate the world around us with a commitment to supporting artistic innovation and site-specificity. Since our founding, we have supported the production and presentation of nearly fifty projects with local, national, and international artists, the majority of whom had never previously produced a public art project. 

We traditionally produce public art projects that are under $25,000 making them smaller in scope than traditional public commissions, which is ideal for non-art audiences and emerging artists who are learning to create works in the public realm for the first time. These projects are often embedded in Miami’s urban contexts, placing works in front of audiences that are not served by our city’s cultural anchors. Beginning in 2019, we implemented an organizational commitment to producing work exclusively by artists of color. As we look to  expand our reach, we are hoping to develop site-specific projects outside of Miami for the first time with a sister city program that we hope to launch in the medium-term future with Richmond, Virginia as the potential first city. 

Fringe commissions improve public spaces thus promoting environments of social connectedness which has been correlated with higher levels of collective well-being.  Fringe's mission to access audiences that are not served by traditional cultural institutions deploys art as a means to create moments for community connectedness.  Our projects are embedded into Miami’s urban fabric and intended to meet the public where they art and inspire creative thinking, an important driver in high well-being. As a new alternative to investing resources into lavish projects in existing art hubs, we have invested our resources to bringing the extraordinary into the ordinary by presenting projects at bodegas, transit stations, plazas, malls, and other areas populated by the general public.

In addition, we are leveraging our resources to dismantle white supremacy in the realm of public art shifting our organizational resources to exclusively producing works by artists of color. Since this strategic shift in 2019, we have developed projects with 9 artists of color and invested $200,000 into the production of their work. In our most recent exhibition titled Public Color, we commissioned eight public art projects by seven artists of Caribbean descent, many of whom have never before completed a public art project.

At Fringe Projects, our organization actively partners with artists who lack public art experience and guides them through the process of realizing their projects. We work with them to develop their proposals, secure sites, provide funding, and assist in the production of their artworks. The scale of Fringe commissions allows them to be integrated into the community while being artistically innovative and consumable but never superficial. Fringe commissions entice spectators and beautify spaces while offering new perspectives and narratives. Our projects are conceptually rich because they are site specific and highlight places with social or historical significance.

Since the creation of numerous local and state Percent for Art programs in1960s, public art has largely operated in a highly bureaucratic model that is exclusionary to diverse voices. Artists are often required to submit requests for proposals by government agencies, which is an extraordinarily time-consuming and labor-intensive process. For many emerging artists of color, not only do they often lack the discretionary time or resources necessary to put together a winning proposal, they are often not considered for projects altogether as organizations often reward projects to those with prior experience. Alternatively, Fringe promotes artists and equity undertaking projects from conception to installation. 

Our organization is seeking to rewrite the canon of art history as it pertains to public art, moving it away from one that has privileged the voices towards a more inclusive future. We shifted our resources towards exclusively supporting new narratives in public art in our collaboration with Maria Elena Ortiz, a prominent Miami-based curator of color who has worked regularly with Fringe Projects. She helped advise our organization to champion these underrepresented artists in the public sphere. 

Many of these artists have noted that the investments we have made in their work have transformed their art practices by changing the trajectory of their careers for the better and heavily influencing the work they produced going forward. We see our commissions as launching pads for the artists we work with and a way to write their names into the art historical canon. Moreover, the manageable scale of the projects perform as interventions allowing the community to absorb the work and define it. The projects thoughtful gifts to the community thus creating positive rippling effects in well being.  In this, we create site-specific, public art that the public can see themselves in, feel included in, and have ownership of.