Laserfiche WebLink
The City views its public art program as multi -faceted. It has been laying <br />the groundwork for this Program over the last three years and the concept <br />of a wide variety of acceptable creative expression has also evolved. The <br />City envisions its Public Art Program to not just be about sculpture and <br />traditional art installations but as an artistic expression of a creative, <br />innovative community which could include public gardens, pop-up <br />performances to any number of projects that could create civic dialogue. <br />As endless as there are ways for community to express itself, this is as <br />open as the city will be to utilize public (and to the extent of their <br />willingness to participate, private) spaces- from parks, local streets and <br />pedestrian walkways, to other public infrastructure with opportunities for <br />lighting, sound, architecture and engineering as well as community art <br />festivals and performances, story -telling and other experiential and <br />interactive art forms. The City's program will always give a respectful nod <br />to its history while looking forward to new developing concepts in art. <br />Since before Sunny Isles Beach actually became a city, the <br />area has been the home to some of the most unique and <br />architecture in South Florida. Harvey Baker Graves (1855- <br />1936) made his first visit to South Florida in 1905 and came <br />back in 1920 to purchase 2,841 acres of land of which 1,912 <br />acres that were known as Sunny Isles- in the northern end of <br />what would become Miami Beach. While he would not live <br />through the boom bust cycle of the 20's and 30's, the area <br />started its first real development as a tourist destination in the <br />1950s and 60's. This saw the advent of such hotels as the <br />Dunes, the Golden Strand Thunder Bird, the Tahiti, the <br />Castaways, the Ocean Palm and the Sahara, with their <br />assorted life size sculptures of Bedouins and camels, horse and <br />biggies and other notable MiMo style "kitsch", housing <br />oversized signs that when lit, turned night into day in these <br />areas. These were designed by such architects of renown as <br />Carlos Schoeppl, Melvin Grossman and Norman Giller, <br />z <br />