Even though the local visual arts museum has weathered a turbulent past few years, the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art has never experienced a drop in quality or vibrancy. This year features a carefully curated lineup of thought-provoking and adventurous young artists from all around Florida — from Tallahassee to Miami and, yes, Orlando.
This year’s featured artists working across media and presenting works large and diminutive alike are Nathalie Alfonso, Eddie Arroyo, Leo Castañeda, Kelly Joy Ladd, Amanda Linares, Kandy G. Lopez, Jiha Moon, Troy Simmons, Cornelius Tulloch and Lisu Vega.
The period between each Florida Prize show, 11 years running now with 110 artists in tow, provides a valuable opportunity to consider the creative shifts and evolutions that have occurred since the previous years. Where are we now creatively? What aspects have changed? And perhaps most importantly, which artists are demonstrating these changes in their work, not only in terms of style and execution but also in their chosen subject matter?
Considering the current climate in Florida, where the arts are a significant topic of discussion, debate and even conflict; and with patronage of the arts in a state of crisis both in Florida and across the nation, we are prompted to think about the experience of participating in a contemporary art showcase. How significant are exhibitions like this one for the wider public, for those who actively engage with art, and for the artists themselves? Orlando Weekly posed these questions to a few of the participating artists.
The only Orlando-based artist in this year’s showcase, paper artist Kelly Joy Ladd, created a healing space within the gallery walls of OMA, combining paper works and mixed-media pieces — all heavy with personal connections and memories.“There is no other exhibition like it in Florida,” Ladd says. “Each year, the Orlando Museum of Art gives the selected 10 Florida artists the rare creative freedom and space to fully express themselves and explore new ideas.”
Artist Kandy G. Lopez, an associate professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, showed off stunning, large-scale yarn and fiber portraits of BIPOC folks that caught her eye, seemingly ripped from some dreamlike, ethereal fashion lookbook or liner notes from an album we need to own.“These exhibitions should be an opportunity for education, identification and growth,” Lopez says.“Exhibitions can be intimidating, especially if it’s a rare occurrence, but being open to receiving information and acknowledging the differences in perspective is key.”
One of the connective tissues that runs through this year’s Florida Prize group is a sense of family, heritage, belonging and longing to be visible. “The beauty of memory,” as OMA curator Coralie Claesen-Gleyzon aptly puts it.
Cornelius Tulloch, an interdisciplinary artist and architect, seconds her remarks, referring to a “host of memory” present both in his own site-specific work (paintings and collages housed within and without an immersive environment inspired by the “shotgun house”), and the exhibit overall. “It is an exercise in not just connection but folk, craft and culture,”says Tulloch.
Miami-based artist Eddie Arroyo expresses strong themes on the consequences of gentrification on community and gentrification as a form of censorship — especially in his nod to the broken historical marker that commemorates the 1980 McDuffie Race Riots. “Art institutions had historically pre- sented platforms for artists to share curiosities and concerns. For me, censorship is a topic that consistently gets revised,” Arroyo says. “My interest in engagement is when it is considered justified.”
“My contribution/focal point in this year’s Florida Prize is akin to igniting the Thermidorian Reaction. To create perspective regarding the Reign of Terror within a history of a nation,” Arroyo adds. “One which has been referenced over and over as we continue to move into the future. The circumstance in which this regicide has been placed, through its own actions, and its well-documented consequences. I invite the public to meditate over this, a simulacrum of the now.”
Miami-based artist Troy Simmons reflects this sentiment in his own sculptural work: dayglo industrial graphic stripes that meet brutalist concrete leftovers with slick sci-fi renderings of found objects. “Salvaging part of these places, places that were businesses, places that were homes with love and family that are now abandoned, maybe a crack house now, but the story then and what the story is now is something worth telling,” says Simmons.
The winner of this year’s $20,000 Florida Prize is South Florida artist Nathalie Alfonso for her large-scale and site-specific 87-by-17-foot work LineScape — Onset. With dreamlike green and blue hues that evoke the Florida swamps, with disembodied gridlines that seemed almost vaporwave-esque, the mammoth piece took nearly three weeks to complete and install in the space. But rather than an ethereal reverie, the piece is meant as a personal exploration of the repetitive motions of so-called manual labor, and a reflection on Alfonso’s own time spent cleaning houses after emigrating to the United States.
Alfonso “became deeply conscious of the often-overlooked nature of labor, and of the invisibility of the ‘little hands’ that work tirelessly behind the scenes,” wrote OMA Chief Curator Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon in an accompanying essay. “Rather than separating art from labor, Alfonso brings them together. Her drawings become per- formative, due to their repetitive physical action. They are also real endurance feats.”
All very timely ideas in our present moment. The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art will be on view through Aug. 24.
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This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2025.
