Miami theater icon Teo Castellanos honored with prestigious $275,000 arts prize
For three decades, actordirector-playwright Teo Castellanos has been mentor and catalyst for Miami’s theater scene. Thursday, he also became a 2021 Doris Duke Artist, one of seven to receive a $275,000 prize that is the largest national award to individuals in the performing arts.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised by a single mom in Carol City, Castellanos cleaned up his drink-anddrug habit in his 20s. Since then, he has acted in a wide array of films, TV productions, and theater productions. His work as an artistic director and writer has helped shape Miami’s vibrant theater community and serves as a thought-provoking voice on social issues. He frequently collaborates with playwright-director Tarell Alvin McRaney, whom he once mentored, and Miami Light Project. He leads the ensemble D-company and when we introduce them into these spaces.”
In the main gallery of Locust Projects, it’s a different golden experience, much darker and less obvious in its message. Segall’s “Reverse Alchemy on the Gold Coast” takes on the harm done to the ecosystem from gold mining.
Visitors enter through a black curtain that separates the front of the exhibition area and the main space. Mounds and mounds of dirt (21 square yards, to be exact) act as the foundation for plants in what resembles a grow house. There’s much to take in. The centerpiece is a gold-fed garden that uses a reverse-engineering process to irrigate Florida native plants with a diluted gold solution.
“I’m interested in transformation and process,” Segall says. “All of my work has some kind of process where there is a material change usually happening within it or an energy exchange.”
Through the goldmining process, harsh chemicals such as cyanide and mercury are used to bleach it out therefore it contaminates water supplies: “This work takes it one step further toward absurdity by saying, ‘Let’s put the gold back in the is artistic director of the Combat Hippies.
Theater director Lileana Blain-Cruz, a resident director at Lincoln Center ground,’ ” she says.
She was influenced by the notion that gold represents power and, in breaking down the gold to its original form, creates a statement on its status.
“This speaks to not just the gold itself but to the power structures that surround it. Seeing gold transformed from this incredible symbol of power to nothingness, that’s something that I wanted to portray,” Segall says.
While researching contamination caused by gold mining, she spent time in a gold mine with Peruvian environmentalist Maxima Acuña, who is known for her resistance against the mining industry that wanted to cultivate her land.
“It made a powerful impression,” Segall says.
The “Reverse Alchemy” installation features video projections filmed during her reverse-engineering process, in which U.S.
Mint gold coins were dissolved into a gold solution and then diluted into the water that irrigates the plants.
Segall says she discovered an interesting dichotomy between her work and Johnson’s “Remnants” installation just a few feet away: “Loni works with gold in a metaphorical sense of value, and it is compelling to put and recent recipient of a New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Fellowship who lives in Miami and New York, also received the the two together because we are coming from such oppositive perspectives.”
In the back of the exhibition space is the Project Room, where Colburn’s “A Fountain for a Dark Future” is a stark contrast visually to the darkness of “Alchemy” preceding it.
Open the door to the room of vivid white walls and see a bright-white, 8-foot-tall sculpture that consumes the space. The sculpture is “protected” by aluminum rods, while automated robot arms with small brushes attached continually clean it. At the bottom, a large tray is continually filled with water, a commentary on the impact of rising sea levels on Miami and its people.
The work shares a laundry list of problems, including workers being replaced by automation, and water rising around places that people live because of climate shifts. But there’s irony and humor, too.
“A Fountain for a Dark Future” resembles a blurred figure in motion while its feet rest in plastic trays through which water circulates. It is a recreation of Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s iconic sculpture, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” from 1913. Colburn says in prize. This spring, she will be directing a Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” his artist statement that he “re-creates sculptural forms of the past to interrogate the conditions of the present, examining the ways these artifacts reinforce and shape narratives that persist today.”
“This is my nod to the Futurists. They had some pretty troubling ideologies,” he says. “The fact that they, in the early 20th century, were so enamored with cars and machine guns and it translated into a wholesale embrace of violence … to me, that’s the same kind of wholesale charging forward [we see today] without any kind of critical sense in languages of tech and disruption.”
During a conversation from his home near Philadelphia, Colburn says the sculpture was entirely created onsite at Locust Projects for almost three weeks in August.
When it came time to actually physically build the piece, Colburn found that times had changed quite a bit since conception of “Fountain,” he says.
“I wrote the proposal for this work in the summer of 2019 and, at that point, I thought things were pretty bad in terms of the way the world was going, and then 2020 happened,” he says. “It was
Other awardees announced Thursday were Cynthia Oliver and Dormeshia in contemporary dance and Kris Davis, Danilo Pérez and Wayne Shorter in jazz.
“Art is the antidote to crisis. These exemplary artists demonstrate that a time of unprecedented disruption in the arts and across society cannot stifle the power of great art to persevere,” said Sam Gill, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. “We are proud to support these outstanding creators and accelerate their phenomenal contributions to society.”
Since its inception in 2012, the Doris Duke Artist Awards program has awarded more than $35.4 million in funding to 129 artists.
Jane Wooldridge: 305-376-3629, @JaneWooldridge conceived with weighty issues in mind, and it could be focused on the doom and gloom. I do hope, though, that people leave with a sense of a certain hopefulness from seeing the piece, that there is change that we can realize, but that we have to think about all of these things.”
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