MIAMI — On a July afternoon, in an abandoned boutique sandwiched unassumingly between a dentist’s office, a Latin grocery store, and a barbershop, Little Havana residents and artists gathered for their afternoon cafecito ritual. But instead of coffee, the plastic fluted espresso cups held swamp mud from the Everglades and checkpoint soil from the entrance to Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigrant detention center at the center of a lawsuit alleging violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and Miccosukee land protections. On Thursday, August 21, a judge ordered the halting of operations at the prison, but the state quickly filed a motion to appeal the decision.
The performance by Miami artist Agua Dulce, titled “Untitled (todo lo que toques se transforma)” (2025), took place at the opening of The Artist As Activist, curated by Isabella Marie Garcia with works by members of Artists 4 Artists (A4A). In recent history, the advocacy group has mobilized in response to local challenges like the censorship of political art for Palestine, inequitable pay, and funding cuts. But since Alligator Alcatraz’s construction, A4A has shifted into high gear, convening artists to employ a range of defensive strategies against detention — accompanying migrants to their court hearings, participating in direct action, collecting stories of those detained, leading workshops to help affected families, and creating graphics to build awareness about the history and contemporary politics of the camp.
Misael Soto, a lead organizer of A4A, told Hyperallergic that they want the organization to “commit itself to taking a stance,” encouraging artists to draw on their special expertise to “affect real change in this city.”
“I was thinking of artists who are doing creative work, but also doing work for others,” said Garcia. “Artists who work in organizing spaces don’t often get the chance to show their work publicly.”
The Artist As Activist, on view through September 7, includes works by members Motyko, Fola Akinde, and Agua. The show occupies a storefront in a strip mall in Little Havana, a historically Cuban neighborhood that holds layered histories of migration and is home to residents of varied and often precarious legal status.
“This show speaks to people who inhabit the space naturally,” said Agua. “It’s been interesting to disrupt the mundanity of people going about their days. That’s what makes this space powerful — you’re not expecting to engage with it.”
Behind the glass, the installation unfolds as a triptych: Motyko’s mixed-media collages at the foreground, Akinde’s cartographic screenprints on the side, and Agua’s altarpiece on the ground. In the background reads the exhibition’s resonant message: “The Gestapo is here, has been here and its name is ICE. No to Alligator Alcatraz!” Translations in Spanish and Kreyòl ripple down.
“We’re in a more removed part of the city from where a lot of the Alligator Alcatraz situation is in effect,” Garcia explained. She hopes that the installation serves as a public reminder that, despite diminishing news coverage and hopeful developments in the courts, people are still being kidnapped and unlawfully detained.
Familiar motifs of immigrant life flank the explicit imagery about the detention center. Motyko’s collages include cutouts from magazines, personal photos, newspapers, websites, and archives, combining roosters with cans of condensed milk, whispers of lace with elders’ ringed hands. Two collages draw on the grief and instability that loom over mixed-status and undocumented families.
Motyko’s father came from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift, her mother from Honduras on Temporary Protected Status. The collage “Untitled” (2023) splices a line of migrants diagonally across a Social Security card, white space in between marking an absence of family milestones: a mother’s funeral, a wedding, a birthday.
Another overlays agricultural workers protesting the governor’s veto of the Heat Protections Bill onto a plastic Publix shopping bag. The proposed measure would have mandated rest, water, and shade for outdoor laborers, but ultimately failed, even after 29-year-old Mexican farmworker Efraín López García died of heatstroke on the job in Miami.
As a member of A4A deeply invested in county interventions against the detention center, Motyko sees the exhibit as having an activating power. “One of the reasons I accepted Isa’s [Garcia] invitation was because we’re not just going to have the work sit here,” the artist said. “There’s the opportunity to mobilize people to do something.”
A4A’s exhibition also endeavors to comment on Miami’s storied history of immigration, resistance, and diaspora. Akinde’s screenprints map Yoruba cosmology, tracing the relationship between Cuba and Nigeria through pathways of migration, to its contemporary relevance in Miami’s Black and Caribbean communities. Using images from the Miami-Dade Public Library, she depicts the “imagined islands,” or fictional geographies of Caribbean lore, and layers over real images of Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. These invented landscapes weave together images of the Caribbean diaspora through labor, cultivation, and land remembrance in the past and present.
At the base of the vitrine, Agua Dulce built an altarpiece of gathered earth and representations of the detention center — mud from the Everglades where those protesting Alligator Alcatraz stood, soil and water from the checkpoint where detainees are driven in to the facility, soil from a community farm, and sand from the 79th Street Beach, a place of cleansing and gathering. A section of chain-link fence evokes borders that define and confine immigrant life. The altar’s material archive transforms the ground into a site of mourning and indictment, insisting that viewers reckon with the cruelty unfolding in real time.
As the ultimate fate of the detention center remains unknown, Miami’s artists remain steadfast in their resistance.
“What is our responsibility at this moment, as artists, activists, as revolutionaries?” Agua said in a conversation with Hyperallergic. “Is it to create things that are pretty and can sell? Or is it to delve deep into our value system and create work that challenges people to believe that a different world is possible?”
