Every year the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum features works by students graduating from the Master of Fine Arts program in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University. This year, the museum is featuring the work of Dianna Grace and Elizaveta Kolesnikova. Grace is informed by immersive spaces and engages in innovative experimentation with materials. Kolesnikova's current work presents Peruvian cultures and traditions.

Cultural identity in the United States has been long intertwined with its magnificent landscapes, from the dense forests of New England to the open terrain of the West. These landscapes extol the unique beauty of this country and relate to the first significant art movement in the United States, known as the Hudson River School. The artists who painted these American landscapes worked during a time of increasing industrialization and growth of technology—not a coincidence of history but a lens on ecocritical thinking of the time. 

Influenced by photographers such as Garry Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Monroe traversed South Beach capturing candid moments, daily activities, religious services, and community gatherings. Many of the Jewish residents during this time had retired from factory jobs in the Northeast. Some had survived the Holocaust and had immigrated to the U.S. from Europe decades earlier. They came to South Beach where, even on a modest retirement income, one could enjoy an active Jewish cultural and religious life as well as Miami’s warm sunshine, therapeutic ocean, and welcoming beaches.

Citing Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison’s 1948 collaboration Harlem is Nowhere as an influence, Frazier utilized mass media as an outlet to reach a broad audience, publishing her images of Flint in conjunction with a special feature on the water crisis in Elle magazine in September 2016. Like Parks, Frazier uses the cameras as a weapon and agent of social change. The exhibition is part of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Exhibition Series, which addresses issues of race, diversity, social justice, and civil rights.

"A Reordering of Life, Politics and Art" comes from the prophetic messages in the 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. More than 50 years ago, this book foreshadowed our reliance on isolating handheld technology and the 24-hour news cycle that dominates our times. The author Guy Debord warned about "a future world where social interactions become too influenced by images that would prevent us from direct personal contact."