Knight Arts finalists

According to the Knight Foundation, the arts are “transforming South Florida.” (It’s either the arts or the plummeting real estate prices – take your pick.) So they created a contest offering $20 million over five years to the ideas they believe will accelerate this transformation.

This first year the foundation received 1,643 entries. One particularly brilliant idea (read: mine) was to create an online community for the South Florida art/design/craft community featuring artist interviews, exhibit/festival highlights,

Sound familiar? Yeah, basically SeaBird Chronicles with a Miami focus.

But apparently my idea was, ahem, rejected in favor of 77 others, including “SocialMiami.com: Document Miami’s emerging art scene and it’s impact on the community.” Which sounds like a boring and lame version of my idea.

Well, it’s probably best that it was rejected, since the Knight Foundation only provides half of the funding and I would’ve had to come up a matching amount…. eek!

Here are a few that I hope are chosen:

1. Broward County Film Society: Celebrate diverse cultures with “Around the World in 80 Nights,” a festival screening free films from 80 countries over 80 nights.

2. ArtSeen: create a space dedicated to student artists in the Wynwood Arts District.

3. Create a distinctive annual poster for the City of Miami through a competition.

4. Celebrate graffiti art in the Wynwood Arts District with the Street Art Awards.

5. Expand the Young at Art Children’s Museum, an art museum uniquely aimed at children.

6. Establish an annual Lincoln Road GospelFest. [Can you imagine?!]

And here are a few that – if they win – may cause me to flee South Florida forever:

1. Create a publicly accessible, state-of-the-art computer center for the arts. [Will be used as the main downtown library is – as a place for homeless people to bathe and escape the humidity. Better to just give the money directly to Camillus House.]

2. Develop a pilot project to research the impact of performance art centers on local communities using the Arscht and Broward centers as examples. [Let me save them some time and money: Positive.]

3. Reinvigorate Vizcaya, a national historic landmark, with updated cultural programming. [This is all very well and good, but if you want to encourage more community participation, try lowering your admission prices.]

Find all 77 finalists at Knight Arts.