In Donald Trump’s United States, funding for both national parks and the arts are on the chopping block, making the work done by Artists in Residence in Everglades (Airie) all the more essential. Through the programme, around 14 artists per year live and work in the Everglades National Park for one month each. Founded in 2001 by the artist Donna Marxer in partnership with the Everglades National Park ranger Alan Scott, Airie began with a simple but radical idea: that artists, given time and solitude in the wild, could help the public see the environment anew.
Each year, Airie invites artists, writers, musicians, choreographers and thinkers to the residency. Fellows live and work in the park’s historic cabin—originally a 1950s staff apartment—immersing themselves in the sights, sounds and solitude of this unique subtropical wilderness.
Getting back to nature: under the Artists in Residence in Everglades (Airie) programme, artists get to live in the national park for a month and produce work that responds to their experiences there
Photo by Dharma Creativ, Courtesy of Airie
Over more than 20 years, Airie has hosted around 200 artists, and the resulting work has travelled far beyond South Florida. While Airie has a small exhibition space (the Airie Nest Gallery) at the Coe Visitors Center located at the entrance of the park, Airie exhibitions have made their way to the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and the Venice Biennale, among other distant venues. A recent work by the Miami-based artist Germane Barnes, whose practice is rooted in architecture and how it shapes marginalised communities, is just one example of how access to such a unique environment can alter an artist’s practice. During his Airie residency, Barnes inverted his usual framework to collect sounds from the Everglades and build listening stations, contrasting nature and the built environment.
At its core, Airie operates on the belief that artists are problem-solvers capable of revealing new ways to engage with climate, culture and community. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the residency is expanding its mission from “Everglades everywhere” to “environments everywhere”—a recognition that the ecological questions rooted in South Florida extend globally.
As a Miami native and the founder of Prizm, the only art fair exclusively exhibiting works by artists of the African diaspora art during Miami Art Week, Mikhaile Solomon recently shared her perspective on what makes Airie one of South Florida’s cultural treasures.
The Art Newspaper: What makes Airie such a special institution to you?
Mikhaile Solomon: I’ve loved this organisation for a long time. It’s the only institution in South Florida that truly connects artists to nature and to one of the most important natural elements we have in Florida. It’s such an interesting way to engage artists around the environment and to have them reflect that back through their work.
What drew you to its mission?
Airie is doing something that no one else in Miami is doing. It places artists directly in the Everglades and asks them to respond to that experience. The work that comes out of the residency is beautiful—it’s thoughtful and sensory. It shows how artists are interpreting Florida’s natural environment in their own voices.
Can you share an example of a project that stood out to you?
There was a musician from South Africa, Thandeka Mfinyongo, who built her own instrument out of a calabash gourd and recorded the sounds of the Everglades—birds, water, even the sound of walking through the swamp. She turned those sounds into music. It’s a perfect example of how the environment becomes part of the artwork.
What do you think people should know about Airie right now?
This is its 25th year, which is incredible, but it’s also a critical time for Airie. It partners with the National Park Service, and recent federal cuts have made that partnership harder to sustain. One of the key parts of the residency—the cabin in the Everglades—is in danger. I really want people to support Airie because it’s an organisation that’s done so much with so little.
- Airie Nest Gallery, Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center, Everglades National Park, Homestead
