[From left: Jason – gapingvoid CEO, Commissioner Ed Tobin, Commissioner Michael Grieco, Laura – Gapingvoid Director, Mayor Philip Levine, City Manager Jimmy Morales].
[Miami Beach City Hall].
[Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine]
“Miami Beach: Where the future actually lives.”
Yesterday was a very cool day. The work we’ve started doing for the Mayor’s Office in Miami Beach was finally unveiled, in the entrance of new City Hall Employee Lounge.
Above are three photos Mayor Philip Levine tweeted.
gapingvoid has been based in Miami Beach for the last four or five years, so naturally, we want our art to be front and center.
No, we don’t want to be the next Romero Britto (As much as I admire what he’s done here). We want to be something completely different, something to do with business and entrepreneurship on the beach.
My favorite piece in the series was the one that says, “Where the future actually lives”.
Y’see, for all its beach-bum reputation, a lot of interesting people live in Miami Beach. Their empires may be elsewhere, but they come here to hang out and laze around in relative anonymity. This is where they like to be. And that creates demand for interesting stuff, a viruous circle.
Add to that, Mayor Levine has a reputation for being business-friendly and corruption-unfriendly, very much in the get-it-done mould of New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. This is something Miami Beach went decades without, to its utter detriment, something that it desperately needed (And got, thank goodness).
Thirdly, Greater Miami (of which The Beach is only a small part of) is finally beginning to mature as a proper cosmopolitcan culture hub, spurred on by outside investment from South America (among other things).
Not to mention, hey, February on the Beach beats February in Chicago. Just saying.
My message to all the people living here Miami Beach, who aspire to make difference: Carpe Diem. Our time has arrived.
And yeah, gapingvoid is totally part of that.
