Hothouse artists: North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art recently collaborated with an alternative space to present the work of 15 young artists who are part of the area's burgeoning scene - Report From Miami

The newest development in Miami is the surprising number of very young local artists who are showing their work. Fourteen members of this demographic bulge, all in their early 20s, had pieces on view in "The House at MOCA," an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. Bonnie Clearwater, the museum's director, first spotted them at a recently opened alternative space--The House. She cocurated the exhibition with three of its artist-founders, Bhakti Baxter, Martin Oppel and Tao Rey.

This bumper crop of artists seems to have appeared suddenly, but favorable conditions have been coalescing for several years. Graduates of local art schools (the New World School of the Arts, the Design and Architecture Senior High School [DASH], and the art department of the University of Miami) have opened their own cooperative exhibition spaces, among them The Box, The Green Door and Locust Projects as well as The House. Miami critics, especially Alfredo Triff of the weekly New Times, have sought out and reviewed the shows in these shoestring operations, lending support and validation. Some commercial galleries (Snitzer, Ambrosino, Dorsch) have consistently included these artists in group shows. Institutions have also played a part, especially MOCA and the Miami Art Museum with its "New Work" series. In hindsight, it appears that the interaction of this new generation of artists with local writers, dealers and museums has gradually created a critical mass.

MOCA provided the most visible proof of the phenomenon in this introductory exhibition. Clearwater commissioned the pieces and worked with each artist through the preparation process to achieve a museum standard of presentation. The sense of harmonious ensemble was one of the show's most striking characteristics: the works were so compatible in spirit that the exhibition could be seen as a single, collaborative art installation.

The spirit springs presumably from the artists' youth and Clearwater's process, but also from the ideas of co-organizers Baxter, Oppel and Rey. All three artists are in tune with the peaceful protests in Seattle against corporatization, fragmentation and the acceleration of consumerism. But confrontation is not their strategy. They believe that art in a contemplative mode can be transformative: their work infiltrates the mind through the senses, encouraging a consciousness of the wholeness of experience and the connectedness of all nature. Oppel described their art as "unaggressive," adding that "you don't change people by yelling at them." The implied desire to "change people" took various forms in the show, but many of the artists are engaged at different levels with critiques of our current physical and mental environments. Most of the work is direct, well crafted, without irony or mockery. Some of it is beautiful. Baxter contributed two wall sculptures, arresting in their effect of purity and simplicity. For From the Center Outward (all works 2001), he coaxed young poinciana twigs into tender curves like eyelashes around circles of white wall. Light Made Visible is a large, slightly convex, circular construction of finishing nails, string and geometric shadows, suggesting both a shimmering spiderweb and the structure of a geodesic dome. It hovered weightlessly on the wall, projecting the esthetic elements praised by Aristotle: "radiance, clarity, harmony and unity."

Oppel showed a dark, dense wall piece in the shape of a horizontal landscape picture, made with soil as black as the midnight sky. An occasional bit of debris or a tiny pebble reflected a starlike glint of light. A wide, gray frame surrounded Dirt Constellation and Concrete; the "concrete" in the title refers to the concrete of the museum floor in front of the piece. But why stop there? It expands into an immense space in the imagination.

The exhibition included slide projections, videos, photographs, installations and paintings as well as wall sculptures. Daniel Arsham installed a weather map with a gleaming fiber-optic pattern in a dark room. The gorgeous changing colors of the high-tech map were accompanied by sound: the babble of many meteorologists overlaid by the powerful roar of wind and waves. Weathervain [sic] is his title. Nick Delaveleye contributed an ink-jet print, Metrorail, End-to-End on a 70-foot-long paper scroll, 40 feet of which was stretched out on the museum wall. The continuous strip of photos of the entire 20 miles of the elevated train structure, unified by a digitized Miami sky, is about half an inch high. From a distance, one sees only a horizontal line; once close enough to make out the details, one sees only a tiny fraction of the whole. The result is a strange and compelling dislocation of time and space. In Party, Tom Scicluna heaped 1,000 feet of black paper ribbon on the floor. A black balloon rose from the tangle, stymied from reaching its potential by MOCA's ceiling. Frank Wick spelled out "Nobody Said Life Was Easy" in giant braille bumps of molded white plaster. Tim Curtis, their teacher at the University of Miami (and the only artist over 30 in the exhibition), showed a charred wood upright "X" of crossed canoe shapes, a strong, assertive sculpture that sets off, by contrast, the less confrontational work around it.