South Florida Cultural Consortium:
2017 Visual & Media Artists Exhibition
Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
Curated by María Elena Ortiz
As the lead designer for the 2017 South Florida Cultural Consortium (SFCC) exhibition, I was charged with building a flexible visual identity that honored the region’s top artistic voices—while embracing the avant-garde spirit of the work itself. This was curator María Elena Ortiz’s first exhibition at MOCA, and together we approached the project as a creative collaboration between curatorial vision and design innovation.
The SFCC is the largest government-sponsored grant program for artists across five counties—Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe, and Palm Beach—and the works selected for the 2017 show spanned conceptual art, sculpture, digital media, painting, and performance. To reflect the diversity and dynamism of these practices, I developed a geometric identity system grounded in linework, tension, and movement. I drew inspiration from the typography of “SFCC” itself—specifically the right-angled forms of the F and C—and constructed a modular graphic system around intersecting diagonals and directional rhythm.
The visual language extended across title wall graphics, vinyl, gallery collateral, and the digital and printed gallery guide. I also shot the installation photography with intentional abstraction and mystery—capturing the works at unexpected angles that emphasized process, presence, and potential. These images became central to the exhibition’s visual storytelling and were featured in both the gallery guide and a full-page Miami New Times ad.
As Ortiz writes in the exhibition guide:
“Their works present creative voices conscious of the complex dynamics of today’s culture, as well as the desire to keep pushing the possibilities of human perception.”
This ethos guided my approach as well. The identity system not only framed the artworks—it participated in their momentum, mirroring the SFCC’s mission to support artists at pivotal moments in their careers, and to celebrate the region’s capacity for boundary-pushing creative expression.
