By Grela Orihuela & Bill Bilowit, Founders, Wet Heat Project

During Miami’s art fair week of Art Basel Miami Beach 2011– as a companion event to our annual “HOTBED MIami” exhibition of large-scale installations by graduating MFA seniors– we launched “A Piece of Me” to feature a unique cross-generation aesthetic dialogue between New World School of the Arts students and renowned alumni.

In collaboration with the school’s Dean of Visual Arts Maggy Cuesta, the project began six weeks before opening day. “A Piece of Me” secured for exhibition a significant artwork from four acclaimed NWSA alumni: Hernan Bas, Loriel Beltran, Jen Stark and Michael Vasquez. Working in teams of two, eight of the school’s high school seniors developed and produced a video installation in response to one of the alumni works. Our video-centric rule was intended to sharpen the students’ core ideas by shifting the medium away from the original artworks– rather than a painting responding to a painting, we encouraged an idea responding to an idea.

The resulting dialogues between established career artists and teenage student artists was dramatic. At NWSA’s ArtSeen Wynwood exhibition space, “A Piece of Me” was designed as a long, wide passage of opposing pairs, so the viewer was always placed in the middle of a conversation. The exhibition teemed with every manner of local and international artgoer during the show’s four days and nights. The feedback was exceptionally positive, mostly about the remarkably high quality of concept and execution generated by high school students.

What we didn’t expect was how much the student work impressed the alumni artists– Hernan Bas wrote of the Team Bas work, “I couldn’t be happier with the interpretation and spirit of the video,” and Michael Vasquez wrote, “I was completely stunned when I saw what the students made in response to my work. Not only did they ‘get it,’ but they also expanded and further informed some of the ideas I was exploring in that particular painting… Being able to make a work that inspires the creation of new work at such a grand scale is truly a rewarding experience for an artist.”

For details and images, click here “A Piece of Me” was presented in collaboration with New World School of the Arts, and supported in part by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.