Sweets & Smiles at Locust Projects

Miami, FL – July 22, 2024 – There were smiles for miles at Locust Projects this past weekend with a double-header of programs on Saturday July 20 featuring a Candy-Making Workshop by Kerry Phillips followed by the Opening Night Celebrations for Locust Art Builders: Summer Art Intensive for Teens exhibition.

Weaving a deeply personal story about caring for aging parents, Phillips’ exhibition in the Main Gallery was turned into a veritable candy-making factory in homage to her parents’ annual holiday gift-making tradition. Everyone who came was recruited – some helped make her family’s candy recipes like peanut brittle, millionaires, and “noodlies,” while others worked on cutting colorful paper shapes decorating jars to fill with candy to give as a gift. Smells of warm sugar and laughter filled the air as the sticky sweet treats were being made, tasted, and shared.

As the sugar high started to wind down, the energy at Locust Projects revved back up again later that evening as friends and family members of the twenty-one teen artists gathered to celebrate the opening of their collaborative Locust Art Builders Summer Art Intensive for Teens exhibition.

Led by Co-Directors/Lead Teaching Artists Loni Johnson (@lonijae305) and Chire Regans (@vantablack305) twenty-one students from high schools across Miami worked for five weeks to collaboratively build an exhibition in our Project Room. Founded in 2014, each year’s summer teen exhibition at Locust Projects evolves as a unique and timely reflection of the current issues and ideas impacting youth today. Titling their show “LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE LOST” , the students see their exhibition as an opportunity to represent, deconstruct, and criticize conceptions of the American Dream. Parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends watched and cheered as each student artist was individually recognized and received a certificate for their participation in LAB supporting the Next Generation of Artists.

Their exhibition is on view alongside Kerry Phillips’ Main Gallery exhibition “The patience of ordinary things” through August 3.