Congratulations to the Winners of No Vacancy 2022
The City of Miami Beach, in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA), was pleased to announce the 2022 edition of No Vacancy, Miami Beach. No Vacancy is a juried art competition that supports and celebrates mainly local artists, provokes critical discourse, and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as temporary art destinations in their own right. This year was the largest to date, with an expanded program presenting 12 artists creating site-specific works at 12 iconic Miami Beach hotels. The installations were on view from Thursday, November 17 through December 8, 2022.
Each selected artist or collective received a stipend of $10,000 to realize their project at each hotel location. Artists were drawn from a call for submissions issued by the city and selected by representatives from the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places Committee, Cultural Arts Council (CAC) and MBVCA.
For the third edition of No Vacancy, $35,000 in prizes have been awarded to two selected participants, featuring a $10,000 Public Prize by the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau and a $25,000 Juried Prize awarded by a jury of local art professionals. This edition was the largest to-date, with 12 participating hotels and increased prize money.
Projects were displayed at the following twelve hotels in Miami Beach listed in alphabetical order.
- Avalon Hotel Miami
- The Betsy South Beach
- Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club
- The Catalina Hotel & Beach Club
- Hotel Croydon Miami Beach
- Esmé Miami Beach Hotel
- Fontainebleau Miami Beach
- Faena Miami Beach
- International Inn on the Bay
- Loews Miami Beach Hotel
- Riviera Suites South Beach
- Royal Palm South Beach
Winner of Juror’s Choice Award
Antonia Wright & Ruben Millares, Patria y Vida
Jurors Nate Freeman (Art Columnist, Vanity Fair) and Anjuli Nanda-Diamond (Artistic Director, The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation) awarded the Juror’s Choice Award to Miami-based duo Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares. Their work, Patria y Vida (“homeland and life”) is a large-scale sculpture installed on the beach outside the Faena Hotel Miami Beach that celebrates people’s right to peacefully protest by using the barricade as a symbol of global resistance. For No Vacancy, the artists recreated the activist gesture from the Pro-Democracy Protests in Hong Kong, where protestors subverted the use of barricades, set out by police, and repurposed them to create an insurgent structure for their own protection. For this new sculpture, 25 crowd-control barricades with LED lights were bound together in a disorderly composition to memorialize global acts of nonviolent resistance.
Winner of People’s Choice Award
Maritza Caneca, Submersion in Blue
The People’s Choice Award is determined by the public, who selected Submersion in Blue by the Brazilian-born, Miami based artist and director Maritza Caneca. Installed on the facade of the Riviera Suites South Beach, the video offers an underwater view of an Olympic sized swimming pool on a vertical flat panel screen that faces the street. Crashing through the calm of the empty water, a figure jumping into the pool slides down the screen, changing the topography of the water with thousands of bubbles. As the figure disappears into the depths below the screen, the bubbles continue to rise and distort the placid blue of the water.
No Vacancy is made possible with the support of The City of Miami Beach, The Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority, and The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau.
