Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum-FIU features three Miami-based women artists in new exhibition

“Of what surrounds me: Amanda Bradley, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Mette Tommerup” draws inspiration from nature as a means for exploring the self and others.

Arts & Culture FIU in the news

By Daniel Zayas

June 19, 2024 at 4:01pm

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum-FIU announces a new exhibition, Of what surrounds me: Amanda Bradley, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Mette Tommerup, an immersive meditation on nature which nods to Mary Oliver’s poem about finding peace and solace in the natural world. On view through Sept. 15, 2024, the exhibition features multi-media installations by three established Miami-based artists who explore ideas around belonging and self.

“The Frost gives way to a vibrant art scene that defines Miami year-round,” said Miriam Machado, Interim Director of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU. “Tommerup, Rodriguez, and Bradley have each created deeply personal work that pays homage to Oliver’s reflective poem about the interconnectedness of nature and beauty. These artists have created warm spaces in the Frost’s galleries, welcoming visitors to sit for a while and gain a sense of calm and grounding.”

Amanda Bradley’s work considers what is invisible, ephemeral, and hard to quantify through environmental imagery. Bradley incorporates debossed text to layer the legibility of the final image and the superimposed text. While not documentary, her photography captures lushness, abundance, and density, her home country of Belize as a common subject.

Abundant flora and complex terrain inform Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s practice, including sculpture, painting, installation, and public art. Born and raised in Miami, Rodriguez is intimately familiar with the region’s vibrant vegetation, light, humidity, and ferocity of the local environment. While Rodriguez’s work is often maximalist it is not rooted in living nature so much as the passage of time— the changing of seasons, the process of decay, and the nature of resiliency. Rodriguez’s work for the exhibition includes a rarely seen, monumental installation titled Endless Autumn, from the collection of the Pérez Art Museum, as well as a new large-scale painting.

Working outdoors, Mette Tommerup creates color fields with marks produced during performative actions that allow for a freeing, intuitive process. As visitors walk into the gallery, they are transported into a sacred realm conceived by Tommerup. The four works on view, made in nature by nature, form a site-specific installation titled Like the Body of a Flower. Each work reinforces notions of spirituality and transcendence.

The Frost Art Museum FIU hosted an opening reception for this and its two other Summer 2024 exhibitions, Juan Carlos Alom: Entre los Elementos/Between the Elements and The New York Collection for Stockholm Portfolio on June 15, 2024.

For more information on Of what surrounds me, visit the Frost Art Museum’s website here. For additional press images, click here.