INSPIRATION / MIAMI, ART & PARTICIPATION
Xavier
Cortada
You are part
of the picture.
A storefront. A yard sign.
A reason to look again.
A real-estate sign is designed to interrupt your drive. Usually it wants you to imagine a different kitchen, a shorter commute or a mortgage payment you will spend the next thirty years describing as manageable.
Xavier Cortada found another use for the format. In Pinecrest, his Underwater Homeowners Association placed signs outside homes showing their elevations above sea level. The familiar sales-board shape carried an unfamiliar question: what does living here mean over a much longer stretch of time?
The signs belong to a practice that moves comfortably between galleries, school grounds, mangrove nurseries and Antarctic ice. Cortada is a Miami artist whose materials include paint and sculpture, but also participation. Sometimes completing the work requires a neighbor to ask a question. Sometimes it requires someone to plant a tree.
That makes his career especially interesting in Florida, where the landscape can become so familiar that we stop looking at it. A mangrove can register as scenery. A house can seem entirely separate from the water nearby. Cortada keeps finding ways to put those relationships back in the picture. I admire his ability to make a large, difficult subject feel close enough to enter.
RECLAMATION PROJECT / 2006
A storefront
full of seedlings.
For his Reclamation Project, begun in 2006, Cortada used rows of clear cups holding mangrove seedlings. Some appeared in Miami Beach storefront windows, bringing small living trees into spaces more commonly arranged around merchandise. An Earth Day installation at the Bass Museum of Art included 252 seedlings.
The form has a lovely economy. Each cup is simple enough to examine. Repetition makes the display visible at a larger scale. The plants remain individual living things even as the grid becomes an image.
The work continued beyond the display. In his 2021 account for the Environmental Law Institute, Cortada describes participants collecting the propagules, displaying them and eventually planting them along Biscayne Bay.
There is also something distinctly Miami about giving a mangrove space in a shop window. The city markets itself through desirable views. Here, an organism involved in making the coastal landscape gets the kind of individual presentation normally reserved for an object someone might buy.
I like that reversal. It gives the plant a moment of almost ridiculous celebrity, standing in its clear cup, while asking a serious question about what deserves public attention. The eventual destination is the shoreline. The window is one stage in getting people there.
PINECREST / 2018
The homeowners
association nobody expected.
Underwater HOA began in Pinecrest in 2018. Its yard signs used property elevations against reproductions of Cortada’s Antarctic watercolors, made with glacial meltwater. A local number and a distant material occupied the same small rectangle.
The title does some of the work before you see a sign. A homeowners association usually has opinions about the immediate appearance of a neighborhood. Cortada expands the jurisdiction considerably. It is hard to concentrate on the approved shade of beige when the association’s name has introduced the ocean.
The elevation figures are a starting point for conversation, rather than property-specific flood forecasts. A yard sign cannot tell a homeowner exactly when, how or whether a particular house will flood. The artwork makes a relationship visible; assessing an individual property’s risk requires more information.
That distinction leaves plenty for the work to accomplish. It interrupts the assumption that a parcel ends, conceptually, at its boundary. Water belongs to a larger system. The choices a community makes about its future also exceed the dimensions of any single lot.
The project invited neighbors into discussion, extending the artwork beyond its printed surface. This is a recurring feature of Cortada’s practice: the physical object provides an opening through which other people can enter. The artist does not need to paint every subsequent conversation for it to matter to the work.
Something else
to say to a neighbor.
There was another way into the work. After the 2018 midterm elections, Cortada invited people to paint over their campaign signs and turn them into elevation markers.
WLRN reported the invitation: cover the candidate’s name in white, add the home’s elevation in black and draw a blue line for the sea. Cortada wanted the signs to encourage civility and attention to a shared problem.
I admire the imagination in that gesture. The materials were already in the neighborhood. People had already used them to say something publicly. He offered a way to keep speaking, with a different conversation in mind.
Painting a sign cannot make disagreement disappear. It can give neighbors a reason to begin somewhere other than the last argument.
24
shoes at the
ends of the Earth.
Cortada’s Longitudinal Installation takes a different route toward connection. At the poles, he arranged twenty-four shoes in a circle along lines of longitude and read accounts from people affected by climate change. Ordinary footwear became a way of representing people in a place far outside ordinary experience.
Shoes carry an immediate suggestion of a body. Even without knowing who wore one, we understand its scale and function. Put a shoe in a remote landscape and the absent person becomes unusually present.
The circle adds another layer. Longitudes that stretch across enormous distances elsewhere converge at the poles. The installation brings geographically separated accounts into that shared arrangement, allowing the physical location to participate in the meaning.
It is an approach to a huge subject that makes room for individual voices. Instead of asking a single spectacular image to represent everyone, the work holds a series of accounts together. The differences among those lives remain part of the piece.
That quality helps connect the polar work to the Miami projects. The distances are dramatic, but the underlying artistic problem is recognizable: how can a person experience a connection that is real and consequential, yet difficult to see from where they are standing?
An invitation
you can plant.
In Native Flags, participants plant native trees with green flags. The flag signals that the planting belongs to a shared undertaking, and gives a passerby something to ask about.
It is a small change to an ordinary action, but a useful one. A newly planted tree may look like private landscaping. A flag makes the action more legible as a public invitation. Someone can notice it, learn about the project and choose to participate elsewhere.
The work has an unusual relationship with time. A conventional exhibition often has an opening date and a closing date. A planted tree develops according to a living schedule. Care becomes part of what happens after the initial gesture.
Nor does the artist control every detail of the resulting view. Participants make decisions, the plants grow, and the places change. The artwork depends on other people’s willingness to carry something forward.
That dependence feels central to Cortada’s career. His biography and project history include work with scientists, public institutions and communities, as well as permanent public art. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and law degrees from the University of Miami. The routes through which people organize a shared life are close to the surface of his work.
There is a useful companion here in Nicole Stott’s movement between spaceflight and art. Both use an unfamiliar vantage point to reconsider a familiar planet, although their materials and methods are very different. Stott can begin with a view from orbit. Cortada can begin with the number outside your house.
Miami is more than a setting for that work. Its coast, neighborhoods, institutions and residents help give the projects their form. A piece can belong to a particular place while asking questions that travel well beyond it.
What I find inspiring is the trust he places in the people who encounter his work. A passerby can become curious. A neighbor can carry a conversation further. A participant can care for something living after the formal event has ended.
The next time you see a mangrove, a yard sign or a young tree, Cortada’s work offers a reason to look a little longer. The thing in front of you may also be an invitation to consider everything it is connected to.
About the projects
What is Xavier Cortada’s Underwater HOA?
Begun in Pinecrest in 2018, Underwater HOA used elevation-marked yard signs and community conversations to draw attention to sea-level rise.
When did the Reclamation Project begin?
Cortada launched the Reclamation Project on Earth Day in 2006, using mangrove seedlings in art installations and involving volunteers in restoration planting.
What happens in Native Flags?
Participants plant a native tree with a green flag, making the planting a visible invitation to discuss and restore native habitat.
Sources: Cortada’s project archive and biography; his 2021 essay for the Environmental Law Institute; WLRN’s November 2018 reporting. Project descriptions are grounded in those records. The reflections on their meaning are Rob Urban’s.
Written by Rob Urban. For more of his writing, perspective and consulting, meet Rob.