s-s/2026-27/echoes_of_the_past/w/Yochi_Yakir-Avin
Yochi Yakir-Avin is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in South Florida whose work explores the layered relationships between memory, identity, and personal history. Born in Poland and raised in Israel, she studied fine arts in Israel before earning her BFA from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Italy. Yakir-Avin’s practice spans painting, drawing, fiber-based processes, photography, installation, and more recently performance and theater. Through the use of worn photographs, sheer fabrics, reflective surfaces, stitching, and industrial materials such as aluminum, she constructs evocative visual narratives that reflect the fragility, persistence, and transformation of memory over time.
Her work frequently incorporates archival imagery that is altered through layering, image transfer, and thread, mirroring the way memories are fragmented, preserved, and reassembled across generations. Yakir-Avin has exhibited widely across the United States, including at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, the Salmagundi Art Club and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club in New York, the Lore Degenstein Gallery in Pennsylvania, and multiple institutions throughout Florida. In 2024, she was awarded the Broward Innovation Grant for her interdisciplinary project Painting Life in Pictures, a collaborative performance integrating visual art installations and theater. The project reflects Yakir-Avin’s continued evolution as an artist committed to exploring the intersections of visual storytelling, material memory, and collective experience.
https://www.yochiyakiravin.com
s-s/2026-27/landscapes_of_refusal/w/Eddie_Arroyo
Eddie Arroyo (b. 1976, Miami, Florida) is an American painter whose work centers on cultural memory, civic space, and the lived realities of communities shaped by redevelopment. Based in Miami, Arroyo has spent more than fifteen years documenting neighborhoods undergoing rapid transformation, particularly Little Haiti and other historically Black and Caribbean/Central/South American communities. His urban landscapes—often depicting storefronts, botánicas, churches, and modest commercial buildings—function as acts of visual preservation. While his atmospheric compositions recall the spatial quietude of Edward Hopper, Arroyo’s subject matter is firmly rooted in the present: the cultural and economic pressures that reshape identity, belonging, and access to space. For Arroyo, painting is not merely representation; it is civic record-keeping and a gesture of care toward communities whose histories are frequently marginalized.
In the 2025 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Arroyo deepened this commitment through a series chronicling the removal and reinstallation of a historic marker honoring Arthur Lee McDuffie, whose 1979 killing by police sparked one of Miami’s most consequential uprisings. Exhibited at the Orlando Museum of Art, the works document the site repeatedly—before, during, and after the plaque’s disappearance—rendered in stark, architectural black lines that evoke unfinished plans. By pairing this series with a portrait of Robert-François Damiens, executed in eighteenth-century France, Arroyo draws a transhistorical connection between state violence and contemporary struggles for justice. His practice underscores art’s power to keep cultural stories alive, to insist on remembrance, and to foster conversations about how communities endure, adapt, and demand visibility. Arroyo lives and works in Miami.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/eddie-arroyo
s-s/2026-27/between_image_and_sound/w/Richard_Vergez
Richard Vergez is a Cuban-American multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and musician whose work spans sound, collage, installation, and experimental media. Born in Philadelphia and based in South Florida, Vergez creates work that explores the intersection of technology, culture, and contemporary identity through layered visual and sonic compositions. With a background in graphic design and audiovisual production, his practice merges collage, experimental sound, and installation to construct narratives that often reflect socio-political tensions and the psychological texture of modern life. His work has been exhibited internationally in cities including New York, London, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and has appeared in publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian.
In 2017, Vergez founded Noir Age, a record label and creative platform dedicated to experimental and leftfield music from artists around the world. Through limited-edition cassette, vinyl, and CD releases, the label emphasizes handcrafted presentation and artistic collaboration. Noir Age has since expanded beyond publishing into event production, intermedia performance, DJ programming, and a monthly radio show for the UK-based broadcaster NARR Radio. Alongside his label work, Vergez composes sound for performance and dance, including collaborations with choreographer Ana Mendez, with performances presented at venues such as the Adrienne Arsht Center and the De La Cruz Collection.
https://cargocollective.com/richardvergez
s-s/2026-27/interlaced_economies/w/Laura_Marsh
Laura Marsh is an installation and textile artist whose practice transforms fabric into a social architecture for participation, reflection, and care. Rooted in a working-class lineage of women who sew, Marsh approaches textiles as both material and method—objects that carry labor, memory, and political charge. Her immersive installations incorporate spheres, flags, tapestries, and plush environments that invite viewers to touch, rest, photograph themselves, and converse. Drawing on histories of craft, feminist labor, and DIY culture, her work resists disposability and champions mending, repair, and embodied presence as acts of cultural resistance.
Marsh received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dimensions Variable, Locust Projects, Printed Matter, Field Projects, and the Deering Estate. Through residencies, public programming, and curatorial work, she activates underused spaces and advocates for ethical labor practices in the arts. Marsh’s installations function as tactile safe havens—spaces that hold conversations about class, mobility, gender, and value—while weaving together community, material exchange, and collective care.
Sound-Signals 