Suddenly Last Summer
Suddenly Last Summer brings together the work of local artists Donna Haynes, Michelle Weinberg and Leah Brown who have been asked to listen to the song Suddenly Last Summer by The Motels and create site specific installations inspired by the song in the museum.
The song itself evokes a deeper longing or melancholy for the loss of the things associated with summer and perhaps the realization that we can never go back and/or do not want to go back but cannot help but to recall.
Donna Haynes is a contemporary artist living and working in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Born in St. Petersburg in 1975, she received her MFA in sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She was also the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. She currently holds a professional art studio in Ft. Lauderdale, focusing her work in the areas of drawing, installation, and sculpture.
She tells stories because she thinks it is the soul of our existence. Meeting others and hearing their stories is why she believes we are here. We are here to form relationships, to meet, interact, make friends, love, and record a lineage. Haynes’ artwork is an extension of this idea.
Michelle Weinberg is a painter who creates art for surfaces, interiors, architecture and public spaces. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC and her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies including a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and a 2016 Wavemaker Grant from CannonballMiami, a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship in Visual & Media Art, an Individual Artist Fellowship and an Artist Enhancement Grant from the State of Florida, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic.
Leah Brown (b. Washington DC, 1982) is a Fort Lauderdale-based sculptor and installation artist. She was raised in Asheville, NC, where the woods she wandered in her youth continue to inspire her aesthetic and her dreams. She received her BFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004), and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Miami (2014).
Brown’s studio practice is the physical manifestation of an ongoing investigation of her experiences during dreaming. She utilizes a variety of repetitive and meditative sculptural actions to coax out the continuation of their subject matter in her nightly dreaming. The dreamt version of these actions is key to triggering her dream lucidity, essentially invoking repeated dream characters and places back into her nightly dreaming. This resolution of waking and dreaming states results in a third narrative, a continuing, cross-dream storyline that is both outcome and inspiration. Part personal mythology and part oneirology, the resulting artworks begin as illustrations, but become artifacts of invocation.
