Bakehouse Art Complex marks 35 years with big plans for future
When Chire Regans was creating a mural to cover 245 feet of the outside wall of Miami’s Bakehouse Art Complex in July 2020, something interesting happened.
Her public art memorial project, “Say Their Names,” on the westfacing wall along Northwest Sixth Avenue attracted the attention of passersby who watched as she painted the names of people lost to hate crimes and gun, police, gender and domestic violence.
Then they would comment, said Laura Novoa, curatorial and public programs associate.
“They’d say, ‘Where’s the name of my uncle, my brother, my cousin?’ ” Novoa remembers.
It became a community effort, she said, with people helping Regans (also known as VantaBlack) add names. “Say Their Names” took six months to complete and was unveiled on Dec. 5, 2020.
The story is illustrative of the direction in which the nonprofit artist studio and residency complex is headed as it marks 35 years in what’s become known as Wynwood Norte, a 35-block area that runs from Northwest 29th to 36th streets and Interstate-95 to North Miami Avenue.
Cathy Leff, director of the Bakehouse Art Complex, said Regans’ mural and a second one, titled “Ode to Bakehouse” by poet Arsimmer McCoy and visual artist Chris Friday, use art in outdoor spaces as a way to invite the neighborhood in, so to speak.
“Ode,” situated on the building’s north-facing wall along Northwest 33rd Street, has been unveiled as part of the complex’s 35th anniversary festivities.
“This is an effort that we’ve been very dedicated to that, both literally and metaphorically, breaks down barriers between us and the neighborhood,” Novoa said.
The Bakehouse campus encompasses 2.3 acres that wrap around Northwest 32nd Street. The primary building, which houses artists’ studios, galleries, a print shop, ceramics, woodworking and welding facilities was once home to an industrial Art Deco-era bakery built in 1926.
Leff said its founders, who got together a contingent of other artists, had the foresight to realize that the only way to have permanence was to own their own site.
“Thirty-five years ago, a group of artists recognized when they were evicted from a rental space that they had gotten kicked out once, and it wasn’t going to happen again,” Leff said.
A warranty deed shows a $10 transaction in 1985 between The Bakehouse Art Complex Inc., and the Miami Baking Co. According to a 1998 New York Times story, the appraisal of the land was
$900,000.
The Bakehouse group then reportedly received grant money of $225,000 from the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County to ensure the building could be retrofitted and renovated to create a working space for artists.
Now, Leff said, the time has come for Bakehouse to move into its next chapter, which includes growth not only for the organization itself, but for the neighborhood that surrounds it.
A sold-out Nov. 12 fundraiser, with tickets at $500 per person, kicked into gear a full-steam-ahead approach to a strategic plan adopted by the board on Jan. 28, 2019. And a recent green light for rezoning has Leff and the board chomping at the bit to get moving.
“We realized that we to use studying in Hong Kong, is his story on a plate.
“It’s authentic to me,” he said. “I grab a lot from my background, from my childhood, from the things I love.”
He’s used to being the chef with no name — he got his first head chef job at South Miami’s gonebut-not-forgotten No Name Chinese, a restaurant with no sign out front. There he was asked to create classic Chinese dishes with his particular fine-dining touch.
The restaurant closed , but it caught the attention of James Beard awardnominated chef Niven Patel, who came in for dinner on its last day and hired Zitzmann to help open his first restaurant at the Thesis Hotel, Mamey.
Then the pandemic hit. Zitzmann was furloughed in April of 2020 as restaurants braced for the unknown. But Zitzmann, who was a married father of a pre-schooler and a toddler, couldn’t just live off unemployment.
He still had the No Name Chinese Instagram had an underutilized piece of real estate and, if we could change its use, that potentially we could add housing for artists,” Leff said. “I started talking to the city to see if there was an appetite and if this was something that was viable.”
In March 2021, Miami commissioners approved the Wynwood Norte Neighborhood Revitalization District. As part of the overarching plan for the area, Bakehouse’s application for rezoning and land-use conversion was also approved.
Most importantly, Leff said, this will further the vision of Bakehouse administrators and its board to build “a significant amount of attainable housing” on the complex for its artists as part of a five-year plan.
“The rezoning of the property and the change in land-use gave us a lifeline,” Leff said.
The plan includes renovating the nearly 100-yearold building as a 21st century art-making facility,” Leff said.
On Nov. 2, Bakehouse received $200,000 from account, which had thousands of followers but had been dormant for two years, when he posted three words, “We’re coming back.”
“I had no plan. It was the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done.”
Zitzmann decided to start making simple dumplings at home, with the help of his wife, Natalia Restrepo, the former pastry chef at No Name who also sold cakes and cookies from home.
They turned their threebedroom Downtown Dadeland apartment into a production kitchen. Folding tables covered in rice flour stretched across their living room. Three coolers filled with handmade pork and vegetable dumplings were stacked in the closet. And in between, their son, then in kindergarten, attended Zoom classes in one bedroom while their daughter ran between tables in the living room.
“It was a restaurant, a pastry shop, a school and a home,” Restrepo said. “I had to be a teacher, mom, chef — all in the same space.” the Jorge Perez Family Foundation’s CreArte program. The money is, in part, to bolster master planning efforts for the historic building renovation, expand the complex facilities and ensure its long-term sustainability.
“We were recipients in their first round of funding — two years ago — receiving $100,000 over the two years. Now, we just were awarded another two- year grant for $200,000 ($100,000 per year) to continue to provide affordable spaces for artists to work, as well as advance the plans for our future campus,” Leff said. “This is a very significant gift for us . . . We are overjoyed by the support and affirmation that we are on the right path and filling an important gap in the ecosystem.”
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation also assisted with the development of the five-year “Vision of the Future” strategic plan, according to Leff, providing a $150,000 grant that brought in curators to work with artists in creating
The couple set up the production every morning at 6 a.m., broke it down in the afternoon, and did it all over again the next day, five days a week — for most of a year — so the kids could have a sense of a normal home for at least a few hours a day, Restrepo said. Their parents tumbled into bed exhausted at midnight.
“The pandemic could have been something that tore us apart,” Restrepo said. “Instead, it made us stronger. We had to be.
For each other and for our children.”
At 6 p.m. sharp, Instagram customers, who paid two days in advance so Zitzmann could buy ingredients, lined up to pick up their orders in the parking garage. (Yes, security guards had questions.)
One of those customers, a former No Name fan and real estate agent, lured Zitzmann to a hidden spot in an office building with two banks that had been empty for months. With “$2,000 and a couple of trips to Home Depot,” Zitzmann said he transformed the space: spraypainting chairs sage green in the adjoining patio, reupholstering seats with IKEA fabric, hanging wallpaper bought on Etsy, learning how to epoxy the bar top, framing a poster of Hong Kong he salvaged from No Name.
Guido Parodi, a former No Name colleague hired away from his job as sous chef at Joel Robuchon’s Le Jardinier, showed up with four boxes of plates he had been saving for his own restaurant.
“I was crying,” Zitzmann said. “This is not the story of a multimilliondollar company opening a restaurant.”
A year to the month after he was laid off, Zitzmann opened the doors to Zitz Sum, with a staff made up almost entirely of former No Name employees. Diana Fernandez mixes cocktails like the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Guava (vermouth rosso with hibiscus and sake) that pair delicately with dishes like Zitzmann’s perfectly pinched pork dumplings in Calabrian chili vinaigrette with toasted shallots. Elsa Lopez, 62,