michelle weinberg is here.

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Talking Building: Michelle Weinberg’s Hand Painted Warehouse
by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez

From a vantage point far out on Google Earth: The perspiring pastel city of Miami.
Zoom in: A neighborhood transitioning from a gritty, low-rent industrial zone in urban disarray to an iconoclastic showcase of art chic.
Zoom in closer: A quasi-Caribbean stretch of warehouses, small homes, barbed wire and empty lots. Some yards have chickens running through them, while others are filled with experimental, avant-garde art installations.
Closer still and here you are: A warehouse that houses the edgy alternative art space known as Locust Projects. On its surface, artist Michelle Weinberg has instigated a conversation with it surroundings called Hand Painted Warehouse. The mural spans the entire façade, the South facing side, and heads to the back of the building.
At first glance, this building looks like any other in Wynwood, a colorful two-tone container with casually hand-painted text announcing the business within. In fact, the work blends in so well with its neighbors that one might initially pass it by. A double-take will bring the signage into clearer focus:  “Social Club”, “Party Salon”, “Supermarket,”  “Ideas” and “Temporary Projects Selected by Committee”.  To further confuse (or clarify?) Weinberg has inserted cartoon bubbles directing the passerby to “Make up Your Own Mind”, claiming that it’s “E-Z In‘N Out”, playfully critiquing the presenting and viewing of art.
Hand Painted Warehouse, already a Wynwood landmark, is a tribute to the folksiness of the neighborhood itself. Its visual archetypes are informal, naive and playful, suggesting that local propaganda, like everything else in the neighborhood, is undergoing a volatile social and cultural transition.
Weinberg is known for other public projects and works on paper inspired by the latent, untapped aesthetic potential of warehouses and industrial spaces. She pulls out of their seemingly unremarkable architecture a place where we live, think and dream. Hand Painted Warehouse provides a backdrop for any of us to become a player in this explosive and rapidly transforming scenario of art and urban life.

(Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez is a writer and film/video artist in Miami. Visit www.solislandmediaworks.com for more on her work.)

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Read the full text MAG Polychrome.

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Alfredo Triff review in El Nuevo Herald

Translation: “Miami Art: Graphic, Etymologic Theatre Set”

Sunday May 25, 2008

At the other side of town, Art@Work in Westchester exhibits “Elevations for a New City”, by the artist Michelle Weinberg. The paintings in the exhibition explore desolate urban spaces, in a Miami of the continuous present, a city of “buy and sell”, a compelling multicultural collage, frivolous and post-capitalist. Mixing the visual style of a Lorser Feitelson with the dense, formal design of Charles Eames, Alvin Lustig and Herbert Matter, these works move to the intoxicating beat of Haitian calypso and reggaeton.

Village scene, with its hurdle and gazebo, is pure theater. The tiles on the floor are stamped in blue with Mozarabic motifs, the arrow-shaped hurdle points to the pavilion labeled SUPER VIP. Nearby, neon red, green and blue hues direct us to another advertisement higher up (like the billboards that populate the Wynwood neighborhood), with its oblique-armed lamps a la Nouveau illuminating the word PAWN. Who’s advertising to whom in this scenario?

Elevation: Salon de Belleza is more ambiguous: we are neither inside nor outside. The interior view recalls the structural porousness of the architectural photographer Julius Schulman, with houses characterized by grand windows framing the interior of the 50s era California mansion. It depicts a bluish/greenish environment typical of the conversion of a massive warehouse to a Miami strip mall, painted with the over-ripe, heated-up colors that we are notorious for. In front of this same structure, once again we see a floor of geometric tiles. Suddenly three blue clouds with pink-stared centers erupt onto the scene, their oval shapes transmitting some inexpressible message. As paradoxical as it is complex, the new city invented by Michelle Weinberg  a surreal theatre set.

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Read full text Miami Art Guide review.

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Rugs by Michelle Weinberg are on view at Avant Gallery, Miami’s newest source for cutting edge design for the home. The New York Times already stopped by. Call Dmitry at 305.573.8873 and stop in at 3850 North Miami Avenue, in the Design District.

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Miami Herald Home & Design Magazine features Elope, a limited edition rug designed by Michelle Weinberg*surface design is on its cover. Kudos to senior editor Saxon Henry and her team!

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The Miami Herald Home & Design magazine  -

Read Provincetown Arts magazine article by Michael Carroll