The Prequal: Spike the Punch and More
Awarded the Florida Humanities Greater Good: Humanities in Academia award Defiance was a series of community conversations—including films—to set the stage for the exhibition curated by award-winning photojournalist, Carl-Philippe Juste, which opened at IPC ArtSpace for Art Basel 2023: Defiance: Open Resistance; Bold Disobedience.
Taken as a whole, Defiance inspired a conversation about the meanings of democracy, protest and civic action in the post George Floyd, post-Summer 2020 United States, beginning in Florida and continuing around the nation. The community Conversations included the topics: Protest & Its Antecedents: Civic Engagement Over Time; Summer in the Streets: Miami and Beyond in Summer 2020; & The Global Aesthetics of Protest: The Photographer’s Gaze. The mini-film series included films by Spike Lee followed by moderated discussions.
The talks and screenings were free and open to the public.
Defiance: Open Resistance; Bold Disobedience
Iris PhotoCollective and IPC ArtSpace presented for Miami Art Week 2023 Defiance: Open Resistance; Bold Disobedience, which ran from December 2023 through March 2024 in Little Haiti’s IPC ArtSpace.
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This exhibition, the Ellie-Oolite award-winning project envisioned and curated by Carl-Philippe Juste: Defiance: Open Resistance; Bold Disobedience, inspires a conversation about the meanings of democracy. protest and defiance in the post-George Floyd, post-Summer 2020 United States, beginning in Florida and continuing around the nation. The exhibition highlights images made in Miami, St. Louis, Ft. Lauderdale, New York City, Washington DC, Minneapolis-St. Paul and beyond.
In collaboration with Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL-FIU), Iris PhotoCollective/IPC ArtSpace presented a series of programs that brought in audiences to discuss the show’s themes, from democracy-making to equity and justice. This was the inaugural exhibition as part of iWitness ArtSpace, a collaborative project between the WPHL-FIU and IPC ArtSpace, funded by the Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at the Miami Foundation (The Pérez Family Foundation), as part of the third edition of the Pérez CreARTE Grants Program.
The exhibition itself took as its starting point the notion of defiance from a broad view. The very act of defiance has a storied history through protest and uprising starting with the Boston Tea Party’s rebellion against British rule. Advance two hundred years, the strain of institutional racism born out of the nation’s slave-owning roots is pressed against the public pressure and act of defiance upon a society that continues to ignore its collective consequences.
This exhibit and its adjunct public events re-examined the local implications of the aftermath of George Floyd's death with an in-depth discussion about democracy, civil action, race, and how we—as a community and as a nation—can collectively move forward. Defiance starts with images generated through the power of the camera captured by award-winning photojournalists and an exhibition at IPC ArtSpace as they retold their first-hand accounts of the difficulties and daunting task of bearing witness. Defiance is at the intersection of the disciplines of history, art, and journalism and bridges scholarly analysis and civic engagement.