Open Session #12: Hosted by Sydney Rose Maubert
Tuesday, July 30, 2024, 6:30–8 pm
97 Kenmare Street
New York, NY
Artist, architect, and professor, Sydney Rose Maubert expands upon her ongoing project Queen of the Swamp, which analyzes aesthetic legacies of Florida’s Saltwater Railroad. Acknowledging Miami’s vital ties to Caribbean communities, it draws upon the history of Bahamian laborers’ construction of Miami’s infrastructure on porous rock and their descendants’ influence on Miami Bass culture, a subgenre of hip hop. Maubert will showcase a video work-in-progress that visually and sonically emulates a drive through Florida’s Everglades and seeing patterns of creolization. Through these collaged archival images, found footage, music, and sampling, Maubert traces Black material contributions in Miami’s built environment, creating an atmosphere that represents Black life in the swamp. The screening will be followed by a presentation of her research and a conversation with fellow Miami-based interdisciplinary artist Cornelius Tulloch, where they will discuss shared explorations of Afro-Indigeneity within their respective practices.
About the Host
Sydney Rose Maubertis an artist, architect, and professor. She uses painting as a tool for architectural storytelling. She holds degrees in architecture from Yale University and the University of Miami, with double minors in writing and art. Her research interests are architecture, geography, and cultural production in the Caribbean and American South. Informed by her Haitian-Cuban heritage, her practice explores racial-sexual perception in the built environment. Maubert is the inaugural Strauch Early Career Fellow through The College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University. She has received several awards, including the Miami-Dade County Department for Cultural Affairs, Cornell Council for the Arts Award, Yale Moulton Andros Award, and University of Miami Alpha Rho Chi Award. She has assisted in teaching courses at Yale University, Morgan State University, City College of New York, and the University of Miami. She is the June 2023 Artist in Residence at the Everglades (AIRIE).
About the Participant
Cornelius Tulloch is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist and architect. His work transcends boundaries of photography, fine art, and architecture. Tulloch combines and subverts creative mediums to tell powerful stories. Cinematic moments, spatial complexity, light, and color are important characters in his practice. His work explores the importance of cultural identity within built environments and how space shapes culture, which in turn cultivates landscapes. Many of Tulloch’s projects have been grounded in his upbringing and communities in Miami, as well as inspired by his Jamaican and African-American heritage. His work expresses the ways in which bodies exist between cultures and borders.
