How an ‘ugly’ underground garage in Little Havana became Miami’s buzziest art hub

Looking unsure and a bit lost, VIPs from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami straggle into the dim underground garage of a nondescript Little Havana strip mall on a recent Saturday morning. They’re here for a tour, but can this be the right place?

It is.

The homespun welcome: cups of colada and pastelitos de guayaba arrayed in neat rows on the open tailgate of a pickup truck.

Fluorescent light glows through a glass door set in the garage wall, the only other clue that’s there more here in El Capiro shopping center than first meets the eye: Behind the glass, vividly colored calligraphic silkscreens hanging in a tiny exhibition gallery provide the one luminous spot in the otherwise dark and drab surroundings — the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the home of Tunnel Projects, Miami’s newest, most unlikely — and perhaps buzziest — center for art-making and exhibition. Rarely before has a name so perfectly captured the look and feel of an endeavor that has, almost surreptitiously, dug its way into a space where it’s not supposed to be.

“It’s underground, literally and figuratively,” said Sterling Rook, a Miami multimedia artist whose show of silkscreened images, “Shupingagua,” his Peruvian mother’s Indigenous family name, is on display through April 25 in the Tunnel’s compact parking-garage gallery. “It’s kind of the allure. It feels like you’re on the ground floor of a new thing.”

This new thing got its start three years ago when artist Luna Palazzolo-Daboul and a couple of friends, desperately seeking affordable working studios, rented vacant spaces in the basement for dirt cheap, then started spreading the word.

“A friend told me about it. She said, ‘I have a place for you that is so ugly,’” Palazzolo-Daboul recalled, laughing. At first, she declined — Little Havana was on no one’s art map then — but when she came across the listing again she figured it was meant to be, not to mention too good to pass up at $150 a month for a split of the space.

Some 15 artists — most but not all of them young and up-and-coming, all of them friends and friends of friends, every one of them scrappy and talented — now work in former shops and offices scattered throughout the three-story mall and office building.

Perhaps the best known is Reginald O’Neal, whose hyper-realistic paintings of family, neighbors and scenes from his native Overtown are in the collections at the ICA, the Perez Art Museum Miami and the Rubell Museum.

The artists share the 1970s complex with a typical grab bag of Little Havana enterprises catering to a mostly Central American immigrant community — notaries and tax preparers, a dentist, a hair salon, a barber shop, a convenience store, even a storefront Evangelical church.

The freshness of their work and the unexpected setting is getting them noticed. Curators, art lovers and fellow artists are coming by for studio visits and show openings, which have gained a reputation as real shindigs.

On the recent Saturday, it was the ICA group, led by the museum’s artistic director, Alex Gartenfeld. Once they got their bearings and their fill of colada — some, new to Miami, had never tried the to-share Cuban espresso in a thimble cup — ICA patrons, collectors and staffers enthusiastically spread out to Rook’s show and the open studios, taking in the wide variety of often-edgy art and chatting with the artists, uniformly friendly and down-to-earth.

Rene Morales, senior curatorial fellow at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Wynwood and former chief curator at PAMM, recently swung by for a studio visit with Palazzolo-Daboul, and, intrigued, ended up scouting out the rest of Tunnel. Morales, who grew up in Little Havana, used to get his hair cut as a kid at the barber shop in the mall.

“I came for the studio visit and stayed for the whole experience,” Morales said. “It’s just been transformed into this amazing hub of experimentation and artistic energy. What they’re doing is supporting a small but mighty core of artists.”

A support system for Miami artists

Tunnel wasn’t planned. While it’s legally incorporated, it’s not a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, there’s no money in it and no foundation support, not even a sign outside, and definitely no attitude.

It’s just a welcoming landlord, Martin Pinilla, partner in a Little Havana commercial real estate enterprise that includes the famed Ball and Chain lounge, and a growing group of friends and acquaintances, a mix of immigrants and native-born locals, who are part of a new generation of artists determined to live, work and succeed in Miami — a city that, despite its hard-earned cultural cachet, has long been a tough place for an artist to build a career.

It’s only getting tougher. Gentrification, redevelopment, and rising rents and costs for studios and living spaces have over the years pushed artists out of first Coconut Grove, then out of South Beach and Wynwood, and now out of a fast-changing Little River.

Which is what brought Tunnel co-founder Palazzolo-Daboul to the corner of Southwest 12th Avenue and Third Street along a busy commercial corridor. The landlord, Pinilla, has been supportive, enthusiastic and responsive, she said. He also has experience with artists. Little Havana’s historic Tower Hotel, which he owns with business partner Bill Fuller, hosts art exhibits and has four artists’ studios in a rear building.

Though there is no hierarchy at Tunnel, and decisions are made collaboratively, Palazzolo-Daboul has taken on the role of unpaid director and chief facilitator. The community has grown spontaneously, as artists tell like-minded friends and spaces become available.

In one way or another, they all share a commonality in the themes they tackle — identity, community, representation and immigration, among others — and the collaborative spirit of exploration in which they approach art, Palazzolo-Daboul said.

“It’s very organic,” she said.

The artists have sought to blend in to El Capiro and the neighborhood. Intentionally, there is no permanent Tunnel Projects sign anywhere in the complex, though a small map on a signpost is set out inconspicuously at a side entrance, and a paper guide is taped to the wall next to the ground-floor elevator, which is hidden in an alcove.

Visitors are otherwise largely left to figure out how to get to studios or the garage, down the covert elevator, a gated stairwell — often locked — or around the corner to the ramp leading to the basement garage, where graffiti murals predate Tunnel.

Some studios occupy mall shopfronts or converted offices upstairs and down a long interior hallway. On the ground floor, the miniscule shop window space that serves as exhibition space for special projects and pop-up shows still bears the hand-painted name of its former tenant, Touche Boutique.

“We didn’t want to come and change it to something it’s not,” said painter David Olivera, a Tunnel co-founder and one of the original four tenants with Palazzolo-Daboul. “This is part of the identity, being part of the neighborhood.”

Initially, Olivera had but a tiny corner in which to make his big paintings of dramatic, fantastical seascapes. Now that they’ve expanded, he shares a comfortable, larger studio in the basement with one of Tunnel’s newest arrivals, painter Marie Franco. There’s even some natural light, which comes in through a narrow window that’s level with the sidewalk outside.

She makes big pictures, too. Franco, who came to Miami with her family from Venezuela, has made a series of oil paintings of people and scenes from the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, where her mother is a vendor.

“It gives us total freedom in decision-making,” said Connor Dolan, who paints self-portraits and makes eerie installations in which photographic images are produced on treated glass by steam rising through a hollow stand. “We bootstrap everything. If someone needs help, there’s five people here to help.”

‘A real punk spirit’

Tunnel is helping fill a yawning gap in Miami’s still-developing art scene, where affordable and functional studio space is hard to come by.

At least two other longstanding local organizations, the Bakehouse and Oolite Arts on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, provide affordable studios for artists. Both institutions got their start much like Tunnel, when artists managed to nab inexpensive real estate decades ago. Oolite is now expanding to the Little River/Little Haiti neighborhood.

But competition for those studios is stiff, and the supply falls far short of the need. And given that high housing costs mean artists live scattered across South Florida, there’s no critical artistic mass in any one neighborhood.

“We needed it really badly,” said sculptor and object-fabricator Hayden Weaver, who was making his art at home until he recently snared a space at Tunnel. “The scene is really new and fresh. We need places to congregate.”

Because most of the artists who work at Tunnel also have day jobs, they come and go at odd hours. But it does function as professional and artistic fulcrum and as “a second home,” as one Tunnel artist put it.

To encourage socializing, Weaver keeps a folding ping-pong table in his studio. He came to Miami from Lakeland to study at New World School of the Arts and, like many of his Tunnel peers, decided to make a go of it here. In the past, Miami artists looking to build careers and reputations have gone to New York and Los Angeles.

But that may be changing, Tunnel artists and local art world figures say. Painter, textile artist and illustrator Shelby Slayden, a South Miami native, went away for art school but came back because much of her work is rooted in nostalgia for the people and landscapes she grew up with.

Her family had a place in Stiltsville, the cluster of weekend shanties built on stilts in Biscayne Bay, and she is working on an installation using a weathered board of pinned family photos and sketches that she rescued from the house. Another visual theme in her recent work is typical old Miami — glass-slatted jalousie windows, featured in her paintings on drapes and shades.

Slayden shares her studio, off an upstairs office hallway, with photographer and curator Lauryn Lawrence, who also went away to grad school, in London, before returning to Miami. In her work, prominently portraits of women in Miami, she explores common Caribbean, Afro-Latina roots. Lawrence, who is also building a parallel career as a curator of other Miami artists’ works, helped put together a show that’s now up at Oolite’s exhibition gallery in Miami Beach.

That doesn’t mean that all the art being made at Tunnel has a Miami theme or stylistic similarities. On the contrary. For instance, sculptural and installation works by the Argentina-born Palazzolo-Daboul, among the more established artists in the Tunnel stable with a 10-year career of exhibitions, often use rebar and cement and are in part influenced by the international minimalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

But the Tunnel artists share a decidedly Miami vibe that’s singular and distinctive, the Bakehouse’s Morales said.

“The thing with the Tunnel that a lot of us appreciate is that it’s very much homegrown, from the community for the community,” Morales said. “It speaks to something we all crave, truly homegrown ways of creativity, and one that respects Miami history and local cultures. Even just to go there, you have to have a feel for deep 305.”

The exposure has helped several Tunnel artists land exhibits in commercial and nonprofit galleries. Weaver and Dolan, for instance, have pieces in a group show now at the David Castillo Gallery in the Miami Design District. Franco has work in a two-person show in New York, and Palazzolo-Daboul will have a solo show at Little River’s Primary in September.

There’s no way yet to tell whether Tunnel, along with the Tower Hotel studios, will end up being one-offs or inspire other artists to venture to Little Havana to create a broader artistic community, Morales said.

“It feels like there are these islands of interesting art activity throughout that neighborhood, but whether those will become connected and convert into a critical mass remains to be seen,” he said.

But to veteran Miami artist George Sanchez-Calderon, who, save for a stint in Spain, opted to spend his career at home and whose work is deeply steeped in Miami social history, architecture and real estate development, the DIY spunk of the Tunnel artists has already created something special in Little Havana that’s worth emulating.

On two nights in April, Sanchez-Calderon performed a new piece, “The Sleeper Has Awakened,” in the Tunnel garage. It’s a shadow play using paper cutouts representing Johnny Cash and Carl Jung debating perception and reality in Plato’s allegorical cave that was inspired by the cavern-like underground garage space.

“There’s a real punk spirit there,” Sanchez-Calderon said. “Luna had real chutzpah to put that together. It’s a group that didn’t go to L.A. and doesn’t want to leave town. They’re addressing a very real need, but they didn’t wait for someone to organize it for them. It’s like they’re claiming territory, and they just threw some stakes down on the ground.

“It’s people coming together collectively, but everyone is incredibly individual. And that is beautiful.”

If you go

Two upcoming shows will open to the public at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 8. Painter Alejandra Moros will have a solo show in the project gallery in the basement garage, while artist and luthier Benjamin Ray Chomitz, who makes string instruments from found and rescued wood, will show his work in the Touche Boutique space on the ground floor.

Tunnel Projects is in El Capiro shopping center, 300 SW 12th Ave., Miami.