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Over the past three decades, Cortada has created art across six continents including more than one hundred and fifty (150) public artworks and dozens of collaborative murals and socially engaged projects. Cortada's work aims to address our relationship to place, to each other, and the natural world. He has developed innovative art solutions to public art-making that explore our ability to coexist with nature.
Cortada's site-specific public art range from free-standing and suspended sculpture, fountains, plazas, ceramic tile murals, mosaics, paintings, and large-scale digital works. His Florida public art commissions include works at Port Everglades, the Frost Art Museum, the Florida Turnpike, Florida Botanical Gardens, Curtis Park, and at ten Miami-Dade Housing Authority sites.
His first public art commission of the decade was El Manglar and the Miami Mangrove Forest (redux) ceramic flat tile murals in Palmetto Bay. Learn more about Cortada's ceramic mangrove murals here.
Cortada's work is in the permanent collections of museums across the nation, such as Peréz Art Museum Miami, the Whatcom Museum, and the Frost Art Museum. In Florida, his works permanently hang at the entrances of the Museum of Florida History, the State of Florida Department of State, the commission chambers of the City of Miami, the Upper Keys Government Center, the Village of Pinecrest and Miami-Dade County Hall.
He has also been selected for juried artist pools for public art programs in Seattle, El Paso, Iowa, Los Angeles, Broward County, and Ocala, FL.
The most recent project by the prolific American artist Xavier Cortada is the adornment of Liberty Square Apartments (Miami, Florida). Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places commissioned Xavier Cortada to paint 36 ceramic flat tile murals for the entrances of buildings at Liberty Square, a new 753-unit residential complex in Liberty City in Miami, Florida. Cortada's public art pieces depict the very native plants that he engages the public to reforest through his long-standing participatory eco-art projects: mangroves and wildflowers.
"Painting mangrove roots on new buildings keeps us grounded; it reminds us of Liberty City's deep history," said Cortada. "Flowers celebrate the lives of residents who through the decades helped grow and build community on-site here, at one of the nation's oldest public housing complexes."
Below you can see a video showing the realization of Xavier Cortada's project:
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