For the last 10 years, Marie Vickles has thought about how she can expose more people in South Florida to the arts.
It’s her passion — and her job. She’s the director of education at the Perez Art Museum Miami. She brings groups into the museum to teach them about the arts. They have actual classrooms there. They fill them with everyone from Miami elementary school students to NASA scientists.
Marie realizes that there is more than one way to bring the arts to people — and people to the arts.
She starts by thinking locally. She’s also the curator-in-residence at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. There she co-curated the "Give Them Their Flowers" exhibit that was about Miami's Black queer community.
She makes the connection between those hyper-local exhibits and a large cultural institution like the PAMM, where she can help people learn about international contemporary artists like Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei and Kehinde Wiley, who painted the portrait of President Barack Obama that appears in the Smithsonian.
Marie thinks about how best to serve the neighborhoods that make up a very diverse South Florida.
On the Aug. 22 episode of Sundial, she joins us to talk about minting new generations of art lovers.
On Sundial's previous episode, Yaddyra Peralta, a Honduran-American poet and essayist in Miami, joined us. She talked about her poetry that doesn't just take us places, it also bravely stands up for the places that are important to South Floridians.
Listen to Sundial Monday through Thursday on WLRN, 91.3 FM, live at 1 p.m., rebroadcast at 8 p.m. Missed a show? Find every episode of Sundial on your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
