South Florida Art Residency
Fountainhead Art Studios
Fountainhead’s mission is to elevate the voices, value, and visibility of artists in our society and make their work accessible in a welcoming and inclusive environment.
Kathryn Mikesell
Co-Founder and Executive Director
Nicole Martinez
Associate Director
Questions?
Contact us at:
3057768198
Fountainhead Residency
5600 N Bayshore Dr
Miami, FL 33137
Accessibility: ADA Compliant, most studios located on wheelchair accessible first floor. Second floor available only via stairs.
7338 NW Miami Ct
Miami, FL
Parking: Street Parking
Public Transportation: 9 and 10 Metrobus run on NE 2nd Ave which is two blocks away
Fountainhead elevates the voices, visibility and value of artists in our society and makes their work accessible in a welcoming and inclusive environment.
Offering a year-round residency program, flexible and affordable artists’ studios, Miami’s only countywide open studios event, and a series of career-focused programs, Fountainhead empowers artists to build thriving careers while cultivating and nurturing a community that supports them and their work.
Harnessing the power in our diversity, Fountainhead is building a global family of artists and appreciators, one personal connection at a time.
Miami Artists-in-Residence
Barbara Roca
Bibiana Martinez
David Rohn
Dani Maya
Elaine Defibaugh
Erni Vales
Hermes Berrio
Joyce Billet
Jozie Furchgott Sourdiffe
Juana Valdes
Julie Davidow
Karen Starosta
Marc Anthony
Olan Quattro
Pangea Kali Virga
Peter Hosfeld
PJ Mills
Polen Cerci
Robert Posner
Samara Ash
Stephen Arboite
Our Story
Fountainhead was founded in 2008 by collectors and passionate art appreciators Kathryn and Dan Mikesell, who believe connecting people intimately with artists impacts how we move through this world, treat one another and confront today’s most critical issues. They created Fountainhead to positively impact the lives and careers of artists and nurture and grow their local arts ecosystem. Establishing a residency program for visiting national and international artists alongside an artists’ studios complex to serve the local artist community, Fountainhead has served over 500 artists from 48 countries and engages thousands of art lovers each year. In 2019, Fountainhead launched Artists Open, a countywide open studios event that welcomes the public into over 300 artists studios all over Miami.
Fountainhead’s approach empowers artists by making connections that lead to growth in their work and careers, providing time and space to experiment and challenge their practice, and mentorship and business skills to help them lead thriving careers. In its 14-year history, Fountainhead has become a pioneering force in the arts and culture landscape developing innovative artist and community engagement programs, and cultivating key relationships with leading art institutions in South Florida and beyond.
About Art Residency
Fountainhead Residency provides artists with connections to thrive in their careers and a nurturing environment to create, converse, inspire and be inspired.
During each month-long residency, artists are personally introduced to nationally recognized curators, collectors, and gallerists for one-on-one studio visits, offering a one-of-kind opportunity for mentorship, insight, and perspective on their work. They are invited to experiment, investigate, and reflect, while being immersed in the local cultural landscape. Artists-in-residence receive roundtrip airfare, living and working accommodations and a stipend. They meet local artists and explore Miami’s major museums, collections and galleries. Attorneys, financial professionals and business consultants are available for critical entrepreneurial guidance.
At the end of each month, Fountainhead welcomes the public into the residency to meet the artists, view their work, and learn what inspires them. In pursuit of supporting artists financially, works are made available for sale, and the organization works directly with the artist and honors any gallery representation agreements to facilitate these sales. Fountainhead’s proceeds directly support the program and its artist community, funding artist stipends, honorariums, and artist programs.
Artists live and work communally in a 1950s home, iconic of Miami’s Modern architectural style, in the historic and centrally-located Morningside neighborhood. The residency is surrounded by lush tropical foliage and open space, and is just steps from Biscayne Bay. Artists have access to paddleboards, kayaks, and bikes to explore the beautiful nature surrounding them.
Selection Process
Fountainhead entrusts much of the artist selection process to its alumni network to reach new voices and perspectives. Alumni nominate artists to apply for the majority of our residencies. Select residencies are filled through a collaborative process with cultural partners and their independent curators. Our Curatorial Committee makes final selections from these applications. The nomination process for 2024 will begin in late Spring; open call applications will be accepted beginning July 17, 2023.
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Artistic Excellence: Work that is compelling with a distinct voice and vision.
Evidence of Commitment: A history of active engagement in creating artwork and presenting it to the public, with a record of professional accomplishments appropriate to career stage.
Impact: High potential for residency to play a role in helping the artist further their practice and/or career.
Engagement: Desire to engage with artists, art professionals and the general public through studio visits and community programming.
Personal Qualities: Open-minded, kind and respectful, self-directed, able to articulate their vision and inspiration in a way that can be understood by many.
Meet the 2023 Curatorial Committee
Allison Glenn
Curator at Public Art Fund
Melissa Wallen
Director at de la Cruz Collection
Rodrigo Valenzuela
Professor at UCLA and Fountainhead Residency alum
Susanna Temkin
Curator at El Museo del Barrio
Meet the 2022 Curatorial Committee
Danny Baez
Co-Founder and Director of MECA International Art Fair in San Juan, Puerto Rico; co-founder of ARTNOIR, and owner, REGULARNORMAL.
Diana Nawi
Independent curator and Artist Director of Prospect.5 New Orleans
Mark Thomas Gibson
Fountainhead Residency alum, Tyler School of Art professor, and Pew Fellowship awardee
Monica Uszerowicz
Writer, photographer and 2020 Creative Capital Arts Writers grantee
Nanette Carter
Artist and retired professor, Pratt Institute
René Morales
Chief curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami
Special Projects Curators
Larry Ossei Mensah
Continuing Curatorial Advisor
Curator, cultural critic and co-founder of ARTNOIR
Ombretta Agro’ Andruff
Special Jury, Climate and Environmental Sustainability Residency
Curator, climate activist and founder of ArtSail residency
Omar Lopez Chahoud
Continuing Curatorial Advisor
Curator and Artistic Director, UNTITLED
Tami Katz Freiman
Continuing Curatorial Advisor
Art historian, curator and critic
Steve Miller
Special Jury, Climate and Environmental Sustainability Residency
Artist, designer and technologist
Terrie Sultan
Special Jury, Climate and Environmental Sustainability Residency
Independent curator, cultural consultant and principal museum strategist at Art Museum Strategies, Hudson Ferris.
2023 Artists -in-Residence
Baris Gokturk
Born in Turkey | Based in New York
January 2023
Sponsored by Shepard Broad Foundation
Baris Gokturk is interested in the potential for change in the political realm, the shape-shifting possibilities within the aesthetic language, and the way these two realms relate to each other. He reconstructs documents about current and historical events or individuals existing within or against the dominant paradigms of power in three-dimensional layers, hybrid fragments and installations that oscillate between drawing, painting and sculpture. He rebuilds the photographic image as a physical surface first, and then peels it off as a displaced piece of skin that is then reapplied to other found or sculpted objects. This layered process leads to an archeological network of contemporary culture while exposing, dismantling and restructuring existing relations between the larger scale of history and the intimate sphere of the individual.
Baris is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches at John Hopkins University, Parsons School of Design and Columbia University. Gokturk has shown his work internationally in US, Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University!s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. His solo exhibition Public Secret could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.
Juan Jose Cielo
Born in Colombia | Based in New York
January 2023
Sponsored by Shepard Broad Foundation; In partnership with YoungArts
Juan Jose Cielo creates simulations in painting where futuristic technology is a force to experience the sublime. He creates space where Latino myth/folklore are part of the visions of a futuristic world, and combines American dreams with his Colombian heritage. In these scenes, people use technology and futuristic ships as vehicles for cultural expression. The paintings reenact timeless moments that recur in the life of immigrants, like family reunions and funerals. The work considers how diaspora communities maintain identity in a new place, and how this changes over generations. The futuristic vehicles, their decorations and their placement in rural landscapes are all symbols of transformations in family, language and how we relate to our heritages over time.
Cielo has exhibited at The Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Consulate of Colombia in New York City, XVII Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales and The Alliance Française in Bogota. In 2017 Cielo was an artist in residence with scientists at a full-scale Mars simulation program: the Mars Desert Research station in Utah. His work has been featured on Univision 41 evening news, National Geographic Traveler magazine, El Heraldo Newspaper and ARTnews. Cielo is the winner of YoungArts’s $25,000 Jorge M. Pérez Award 2022.
Miguel Braceli
Born in Venezuela | Based in New York
January 2023
Sponsored by Shepard Broad Foundation
Miguel Braceli is an artist, architect, educator. He works with large-scale participatory projects based on collective learning and making. They are site-specific works that bring together communities, schools, and organizations in the development of Proyectos Formativos (Formative Projects): community-based projects whose main medium is education. Addressing social-political issues, these projects happen in public space to create communal responses from, with and for specific communities. He works at the intersection of art, architecture, and social practices; exploring geopolitical and local conflicts.
Most of these projects have been large-scale works developed in Latin America, Europe, and the United States; exhibited in galleries and institutions through photography, sculpture and film. He has led educational projects with institutions such as Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, Washington Projects for the Arts, Matadero Madrid, among others. His most recent participations and recognitions include Skowhegan (2022), Art Omi (2021), AIM Bronx Museum Fellow (2022), Future Architecture Fellow (2019), and Young Artist Award of the Principality of Asturias (2018). In 2021, he founded LA ESCUELA___ together with Siemens Stiftung International. In 2022, he received a commission by the Percent for Art program for a permanent public artwork in New York City. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar working and living in New York.
Christian Ruiz Berman
Born in Mexico I Based in New York
February 2023
Sponsored in part by Hesty Leibtag and Terry Verk
Christian Ruiz Berman’s work draws from histories of adaptation and migration. His painting practice dissects and understands the components of his experience and of his cultural and aesthetic legacy as a Mexican immigrant. His works address the surreal nature of being stuck between two worlds. Guided by his interests in architecture, memory, and storytelling, Christian creates layered and detailed works that explore illusion and depth on flat surfaces. Some works reference Mexican mythology, and some are based on malaphors, or mixed-up idioms, that nod to the confusion and inherent syncretism of the immigrant experience, but also a way to speak about the ways that abstraction and realism can be recombined to talk about a paradoxical universe.
His work emphasizes the idea that magic and surprise always happen as a result of shared experience, cross-cultural inspiration, and the subversion of established tropes and identities. Animals often take center stage in Christian’s work, acting as mischief makers, seers, and stewards of human culture. Christian’s work has been exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri, the Green Family Art Foundation in Texas, the Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami and at various galleries throughout New York, including Nicodim and Calderon Ruiz. Christian lives and works in New York.
Miles Greenberg
Born in Canada I Based in New York
February 2023
Sponsored in part by Hesty Leibtag and Terry Verk
Miles Greenberg was born in Montreal in 1997 and is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with often extremely demanding durational performances that treat the body as sculptural material. These performances are then captured in real-time before the audience to generate later video works and sculptures.
At age seventeen, Greenberg abandoned formal education, throwing himself into four years of independent research on movement and architecture, which spanned a number of residencies in Paris, Beijing and New York. He has worked under the mentorship of Édouard Lock, Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović. The result of a rigorous, ritualistic methodology, Greenberg’s work follows self-contained, non-linear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another. Miles’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, during Art Basel in Switzerland and at various galleries across the world. Miles lives and works in New York.
Tamara Santibañez
Born in Oregon I Based in New York
February 2023
Sponsored in part by Hesty Leibtag and Terry Verk
Tamara Santibañez’s work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics, narrative terrains, and the meanings we make from visual signifiers. As a trans artist, their practice memorializes the tactics and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build alternative worlds. Employing oil painting, ceramic and leatherworking craft techniques, Tamara animates symbols and accessories of queerness and rebellion with the visual lexicon of Mexican artisanal traditions, creating punk tees from tooled leather, belts from Talavera pottery, and paintings that equally honor lotería cards and gay bar latrinalia.
In their practices as a tattoo artist and oral historian, they are fascinated by the body as a venue for archiving and accessing personal and collective narratives. Enlisting inanimate objects and architectures as stand-ins for human figures and relationships, they complicate the undulating exchange between power and vulnerability, otherness and assimilation, generational expectations and individual capability. Tamara’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Riverside Art Museum, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, and at numerous galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Tamara lives and works in New York.
Chloe Chiasson
Born in Texas I Based in New York
March 2023
Sponsored in part by Leslie and Michael Weissman
Born in a conservative small town in Texas, Chloe Chiasson’s sculptural paintings explore sexuality and identity in environments like that of her childhood. Her depictions of queer love, friendship, and self-expression are contextualized into a world where mutability wouldn’t be necessary for survival, where freedom stretches to take on more meaning and that exchanges rigid social norms for hopeful, fluid possibility. Provided by intimate views into history as well as a personal lifetime, Chiasson’s large-scale worlds shine a light on radical love and acceptance, the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning that constitute queerness itself.
Chloe received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. While at NYAA, she concentrated in painting and was awarded the Belle Artes Residency and the Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship. Chiasson has exhibited internationally in London, Germany, and Hong Kong. She has been featured in Artsy, New American Paintings, Artnet News, Juxtapoz, and Hyperallergic.
Devin B. Johnson
Born in California | Based in New York
March 2023
Sponsored in part by Leslie and Michael Weissman
Devin B. Johnson approaches the canvas like a musician; you hear his work as much as you see it. His rhythm is architectural and expressive with a heavy textural backbeat. He’ll spray plaster on the substrate to pump up the bass through the subsequent layers. The paintings lie in a temporal space of bewilderment and undulation. Paint drips, pools, skips and gets pulled, almost like a time stretch or paused VCR stills. The paintings are between both a becoming and an undoing. Johnson paints from improvised, freestyle digital collages sourced from personal and historical imagery arranged into fictional, sentimental situations. Each portrait and tableau is a love song to these intimate, yet universally relatable experiences.
Born in Los Angeles, Johnson obtained his BA in Fine Arts from the California State University of Channel Islands and received a Masters of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute. In 2022, he was honored by the Artsy Vanguard. His work has been shown at Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim Gallery, and at the ICA Los Angeles. Johnson lives and works in New York.
Jenny Feal
Born in Cuba | Based in France
March 2023
Sponsored in part by Leslie and Michael Weissman
In Cuba, water is omnipresent, especially as a territorial frontier. But in Cuban artist Jenny Feal’s work, the island is more specifically incarnated by land. Water and clay, so present in her pieces, represent the relationship all these elements maintain, generating the tension that impregnates her work. Feal compares the material to a flexible, malleable materialization of thought, as work in clay can be interrupted, continued step by step, dried, or broken down. The combination of clay and water is more than just a material happening, it is a metaphor for life, with the intrinsic ambivalence that resides in the absence of life, being death. Philosophically, clay is a timeless material; it can be endlessly modeled and shaped; Feal considers it a noble material, thanks to which everything is possible.
Feal’s works have been exhibited at the Havana Biennial, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Villa Médicis in Rome, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the MAC Lyon during the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennial and at the Fondation Martell in Cognac. She was a finalist for the SAM Prize for Contemporary Art in France in 2021. Feal currently lives and works in Lyon, France.
Alexander Russi
Born in Colorado | Based in New York
April 2023 | Climate and Environmental Sustainability
Sponsored by Jane Wesman
Randi Renate
Born in Texas | Based in New York
April 2023 | Climate and Environmental Sustainability
Sponsored by Jane Wesman
Sarah Ann Weber
Born in Illinois | Based in California
April 2023 | Climate and Environmental Sustainability
Sponsored by Jane Wesman
Andrés Aizikovich
Born and based in Argentina
May 2023
Sponsored in part by Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess
Furong Zhang
Born in China | Based in Pennsylvania
May 2023
Sponsored in part by Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess
Kadar Brock
Born and based in New York
May 2023
Sponsored in part by Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Born and based in New York
June 2023
Sponsored in part by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and Sustainable Arts Foundation
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
Born in Rhode Island | Based in New York
June 2023
Sponsored in part by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and Sustainable Arts Foundation
Victoria Udondian
Born in Nigeria | Based in New York
June 2023
Sponsored in part by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and Sustainable Arts Foundation
Alanna Fields
Born and based in Maryland
July 2023
Sponsored by Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation
Jenelle Esparza
Born and based in Texas
July 2023
Sponsored by Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation
Olivia Jia
Born in Illinois | Based in Pennsylvania
July 2023
Sponsored by Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation
Julia Gutman
Born and based in Australia
August 2023
Sponsored in part by Adriana and Ricardo Malfitano
Manoela Medeiros
Born and based in Brazil
August 2023
Sponsored in part by Adriana and Ricardo Malfitano
Nekisha Durrett
Born and based in Washington, D.C.
August 2023
Sponsored in part by Adriana and Ricardo Malfitano
Nekisha Durrett (b. 1976 | Washington, DC) is a mixed-media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to bring forward histories that objects, places, and words embody, but are not often celebrated. Her expansive practice includes public art, social practice, installation, painting, sculpture and design. Through deep research and material investigation, she finds historical traces in the present that are filled with stories easily overlooked. Her work contemplates biases and the unreliability of memory, as information is filtered over time. Durrett illuminates individual and collective histories of Black life and imagination, addressing her own younger self and the stories she wished she had learned.
Durrett holds a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City and MFA from The University of Michigan School of Art and Design as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. She is the Howard University Social Justice Consortium Fellow, and a finalist for the 2023 Janet and Walter Sondheim Art Prize. Durrett has recently been awarded the commission for the ARCH Project at Bryn Mawr College in partnership with Monument Lab and is in production on Queen City, 35’ tall “vessel” in Arlington, VA that pays homage to 903 individuals displaced for the construction of the Pentagon in 1941.
Joaquin Segura
Born and based in Mexico
Sponsored by Britta Jacobson and Philip Berlinski
September 2023
Rashawn Griffin
Born in California | Based in Missouri
Sponsored by Britta Jacobson and Philip Berlinski
September 2023
Ruth Patir
Born and based in Israel
Sponsored by Britta Jacobson and Philip Berlinski
September 2023
Curtis Santiago
Born in Canada | Based in Germany
October 2023
In partnership with Atlantic Art Fair
Jeffrey Meris
Born in Haiti | Based in New York
October 2023
Xavier Scott Marshall
Born and based in New York
October 2023
