Art in Public Places - South Terminal

Aqua/Botanica
Artists: Ed Carpenter - Mike McCulloch - John Rogers
Concourse H, 2nd floor

Situated high above the concourse floor adjacent to clerestory windows, Aqua/Botanica is a sculptural glass installation reflecting, transmitting, and modulating natural light. Florida’s intense sunlight filters through chemically treated “dichroic” glass to create fluid “light paintings” on the undulating ceiling and upper concourse walls. At night, lighting installed beneath the glass structures creates a different but equally dramatic effect.

Flight Patterns
Artist: Robert Calvo
Concourse H, 2nd floor

Artist Robert Calvo investigates notions of time, travel, distance, location, and discovery in his 880-foot-long floor mural titled Flight Patterns. Fascinated with the tension between the impulse to travel and the need to return home, Calvo incorporated powerful symbols referencing maps, celestial cycles, and astrology in his floor imagery. On the stairways to the third level, Calvo inlaid evocative proverbs and poems, gently prompting the traveler to upper areas of the concourse. Executed in over ten colors of terrazzo, Calvo communicates with the traveler, creating a thoughtful environment and, in the artist’s words, “balancing transience and nomadism with domesticity and sense of place.”

Ghost Palms
Artist: Nori Sato
International Baggage Claim J, 3rd. floor

Ghost Palms combines the organic structure of palm trees with the clean lines of the terminals’ architecture, producing a subtle dichotomy between the natural and man made. Sited at five locations along the 300 foot-long glass interior wall of the International Baggage Claim, Ghost Palms uses softly colored iridescent glass to create a space full of oversized "stained glass" windows that reveal magnified fronds and branches of various types of palm trees. Sato has also designed a terrazzo floor for the baggage claim area, which mirrors the reflection of the glass windows and creates the illusion of shadows cast on the floor by the palm images.

Foreverglades
Artist: Barbara Neijna
Concourse J, 2nd floor

The vast, compelling work of art celebrates one of the world’s great miracles — the slow-moving “river of grass” we call the Everglades. But the art, which fills much of Miami International Airport’s Concourse J, is in many ways a miracle on its own. Barbara Neijna’s Foreverglades is one of the largest public-art projects ever built, covering floors and walls of two floors of the concourse, filling it with words and images, color and light — and even more, perhaps, with insight and inspiration.

MIA's ‘Foreverglades’ Wins Prestigious Award

On November 5, 2010, Neijna and Foreverglades received the first-ever international Art and Work Award for a project in the built environment, an award of such magnitude that other finalists included the city of London and Royal Dutch Telecom. The award was announced at the 2010 World Architecture Conference in Barcelona. It’s an extraordinary honor for an extraordinary accomplishment. Continue