SaveArtSpace is proud to present SaveArtSpace x Fountainhead: Miami Art Week 2025 public art exhibition on bus shelter ad space in Miami & Miami Beach, FL, opening November 28, 2025. Curated by Carol Damian, Dainy Tapia, Marco Caridad, Marie Vickles, Neil Ramsay, and Ross Karlan.

The Miami Art Week 2025 selected artists are Peggy Levison Nolan, David Gary Lloyd, Katelyn Kopenhaver, Soraya Abu Naba'a, Juan Henriquez, Jayme Kaye Gershen, and Bex McCharen.

Opening November 28, 2025 SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for the selected artwork on bus shelter ad spaces in Miami & Miami Beach, FL. The public art will be on view for at least four weeks.

Selected Artists

Location: NW 2nd Ave & NW 64th St, Miami, FL

Peggy Levison Nolan is photographer, mother of seven and grandmother of eight, living in South Florida. Her work is collected and exhibited by major institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, Crystal Bridges Museum, The Harn Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Wedge Collection in Toronto, The Light Work Permanent Collection and the Martin Z. Margulies Collection. She is retired after serving 30 years on staff of the Art Department at Florida International University. A monograph of her work entitled “Real Pictures, Tales of a Badass Grandma was released by Daylight Books in 2018 and another monograph, “Juggling Is Easy” is in it’s second addition from TBW Books.

Artist Statement: Although I sport a nose ring and wear converse kicks, I am not a hipster. I am an 81 year-old mother of 7 and grandmother of 8 who photographs the world rushing by starring the many folks in my gene pool. No tricked out painted upon collaged photographs about photography. No wordy explanations necessary. If you have eyes and a heart, you will see my point of view in a 250th of a second.

Connect with Peggy at @peggylevisonnolan.

Location: NW 20th St & NW 2nd Ave, Miami, FL

David Gary Lloyd, an award-winning photographer and gay artist, draws inspiration from the interplay between individuals, their environments, and elements that shape them. His work, spanning photography, digital painting, and mixed media, offers a perspective on the diverse narratives and identities embraced in the LGBTQIA+ community, seamlessly weaving together human experiences with the profound beauty of the natural world.

Lloyd’s art embraces narratives, intertwining symbolism and photography to capture the essence of individuals and the gay journey. Through his lens, he weaves concepts of identity, acceptance, and resilience, creating a vibrant tapestry of Queer lives.

Connect with David at @davidgarylloyd.

Location: Washington Ave & 14th St, Miami Beach, FL

Katelyn Kopenhaver (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Originally from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, she received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2016. Kopenhaver currently resides in Miami, FL and is a studio resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. She uses print-based media and her body to stage confrontations with unavoidable truths that mount calls to action.

Kopenhaver was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work (2021) and the Miami Individual Artists Grant (2024). Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, The New York Times, Netflix documentaries, and The Brooklyn Rail, and will appear in Issue 18 of Der Greif, curated by Hank Willis Thomas, to be released in November at Paris Photo Fair. Select exhibitions include A Yellow Rose Project (Texas Woman’s University, 2025), Unoriginal Genius (Laundromat, 2025), and a selection of her work is currently being shown at Piero Atchugarry Gallery (Miami, FL, 2025). Forthcoming, she is exhibiting in F*ck Art at the Museum of Sex (Miami, FL, 2025). She has been a recurring guest lecturer at SVA since 2019.

Her practice investigates suppressed realities lurking beneath everyday consciousness, examining the dissonance between what we are told and what we feel, what is visible and what remains hidden. Through printmaking, video, performance and guerrilla installations, she exposes the manipulation of information and the varying levels of predation that shape our perceptions of reality and self.

She uses her own body as both medium and message, situating herself within the critique rather than observing from a distance. Her performances function as studies or situations, inviting viewers to participate or respond in unexpected ways – transforming them from passive observers into active participants. Kopenhaver's interventions seek to lodge themselves beneath conscious thought, surfacing later as persistent, unavoidable truths we must confront, question and respond to.

Recent Interview: https://portraymag.com/katelyn-kopenhaver/

Recent Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0QWqd4gzbg&t=1s

Studio Location: Bakehouse Art Complex, 561 NW 32nd St, Miami, FL 33127, Studio 45

Connect with Katelyn at @katelynkopenhaver.

Location: Washington Ave & 13th St, Miami Beach, FL

My practice is rooted in manifesting a multicultural identity through layered processes and themes that trace lived experience. I draw from my Arab-Caribbean heritage, particularly the histories of migration, trade, and women’s craft, to create work that navigates memory, resilience, and transformation.

Raised in the Dominican Republic by a family of Arab descent who arrived on the island of Hispaniola in the early 20th century, I grew up surrounded by textiles and art. My ancestors began as fabric merchants and later became dealers of Haitian and Dominican art. This environment, rich in color, texture, and cultural synthesis, deeply shaped my artistic sensibility. I was immersed in visual languages that reflected both tradition and reinvention—threads I continue to explore through my work.

Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, and textile installation, my practice bridges the historical value of women’s labor with contemporary narratives. I collaborate with Dominican artisans to create works using pelliza, a traditional technique involving knotted fabric on a plastic burlap base once used for agricultural transport. These materials—imprinted with histories of utility and survival—become symbols of identity, femininity, and the handmade archive.

Artmaking, to me, is an act of philosophical inquiry—an embodied way of thinking about survival, interconnectedness, and the transmission of memory. My visual language often draws from digital aesthetics—gradients, pixelation, grids—applied through tactile means. I’m interested in how craft can respond to our hyper-connected, fragmented present while maintaining a sense of care, slowness, and intimacy.

A central theme in my recent work is the landscape—not simply as environment, but as evidence and witness. Living in Florida, I confront the realities of climate change daily. Flowers, particularly endemic species, have become metaphors for adaptation and vulnerability. Their symbolic histories, morphologies, and regional specificity allow me to explore issues of loss, resilience, and ecological entanglement. I approach nature not as backdrop, but as collaborator and guide—a living archive of stories and survival strategies.

Influenced by deep ecology, I see all beings as interconnected. Every pattern, color, and form in my work carries meaning—a message encoded in material. Through this lens, I aim to elevate what is often overlooked: the wisdom of plants, the labor of women, the resilience of hybrid cultures.

Ultimately, my work is a meditation on what it means to belong—to a place, a lineage, a world in flux. I seek to preserve and reimagine cultural narratives through form and material, weaving together memory, identity, and environment into tactile reflections. It is an ongoing call to listen—closely, quietly—to the stories embedded in flowers, textiles, and land.

Connect with Soraya at @sorayabunabaa or soryabu@gmail.com.

Location: Biscayne Blvd & NE 77th St, Miami, FL

Juan Henriquez (b. 1980, Maracaibo, Venezuela) is a visual artist whose practice explores painting, drawing, mixed media, and collage, working primarily in large-scale formats to navigate expressionist abstraction. He began his art studies in 1995 at the Julio Árraga Art School and later at the Neptalí Rincón Superior Art Academy in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Henriquez further expanded his knowledge through workshops in experimental graphic arts, lithography, photography, literature, and dance.

As a co-founding member of La Tintota Art Collective, he developed public art projects, art labs, and group exhibitions under the mentorship of surrealist artist José Ramón Sánchez and art critic and writer Víctor Fuenmayor. His work has been showcased in national and international exhibitions across Belgium, Romania, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, the Dutch Caribbean, and the United States. In 2002, he was awarded the Young Artist Award at the 27th National Art Salon of Aragua in Maracay, Venezuela.

Artist Statement: My painting practice unfolds as a mapping of the self, a process where intuition, structure, and material encounter one another to generate tension and discovery. I approach painting as a visceral and reflective act rather than a representational one, where each gesture becomes both inquiry and resolution.

The canvas functions as a site of experimentation, where layers of color, line, and texture construct abstract, shifting landscapes. I seek to provoke visual friction, dissonances and ruptures that challenge balance and expectation, transforming perception into experience.

Materiality is central to my process. Working across solid, liquid, and aerosol states, I embrace accidents and resistances as part of the work’s evolution. These interactions produce dense surfaces and micro-conflicts that deepen the pictorial field.

In this dialogue between gesture, matter, and chance, painting becomes an open territory of exploration, an active, ever transforming space of sensory and conceptual engagement.

Connect with Juan at @juanjhenriquez.

Location: N Miami Ave & NW 19th St, Miami, FL

Jayme Kaye Gershen is a Miami-based artist, filmmaker, and photographer who explores the emotional nuance of our shared human experience through creative nonfiction spanning film, photography, sound, and immersive installation.

She is best known for her award-winning documentaries Six Degrees of Immigration (NYT Op-Docs, 2019) and Birthright (PBS, 2023). Her immersive exhibit When Mangos Last in My Backyard Bloom’d—an expansion of her film Mango Movie (NOFF, DOC NYC)—premiered in 2025 with support from the Knight Foundation.

Gershen is currently developing new documentary and immersive works that continue her exploration of connection, memory, and place.

Artist Statement: Like many Miamians, my love for mangos runs deep. About ten mango seasons ago, I found myself house-sitting beside a sprawling mango tree, collecting and sharing thirty mangos a day at the height of the season—until an allergy to mango sap transformed me from participant to observer. That shift inspired Mango Movie, a film exploring how people eat mangos and how the fruit connects us to each other, our city, and the changing climate.

The image shown here, from When Mangos Last in My Backyard Bloom’d–an immersive exhibit inspired by the film–embodies the raw pleasure, sensorial intimacy, and nostalgia that lives at the heart of this project. The exhibition combined multi-channel video, sound, organic materials, and performance to explore Miami’s connection to mango season and our human desire for connection itself.

Connect with Jayme at @jaymekayegershen.

Location: Washington Ave & 21st St, Miami Beach, FL

Bex McCharen (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, fashion designer and founder of the inclusive fashion label Chromat. Their work, filtered through mediums including quilting, cyanotype printing, photography, fashion, and social practice, is anchored in a process of mutual dreaming, collective reimagining and ancestral connection. Their latest series of quilts are visual archives of their queer and trans community in Miami finding solace, comfort, acceptance and refuge in local bodies of water. These textiles function as counter narratives of queer and trans life in Florida.

McCharen was awarded the Smithsonian National Design Award in 2021, was recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 “People Who Are Reinventing the World” and was honored in the OUT 100 as one of the LGBTQ’s communities’ brightest voices. Their work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and Elle. Collaborations include Beyoncé, Intel, Disney and Reebok.

They gave a TED Talk on inclusive design, and have spoken at SXSW, Harvard, Parsons, MIT, CFDA, Pratt, Fashion Institute of Technology and Tulane. They have been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, the Studios of Key West and Santa Fe Art Institute. McCharen curated ‘Queer Joy’ at the MoMA PS1 and their work was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

They studied at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and are based in Miami, FL. Locally, McCharen facilitates workshops at PAMM, Lotus House, the Miami Workers Center, the Alliance for LGBTQ Youth and are currently an artist in residence at the Miami Cancer Institute and Oolite Arts.

McCharen will also be showing at the Untitled Art Fair, December 2-7, 2025 with Dot 51 Gallery. 

Connect with Bex at @waterbbex.

Curators

Dr. Carol Damian is Professor Emerita at Florida International University. She is the former Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Art History and the former Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University (2008-2014) (retired). She is a graduate of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and received her MA in Pre-Columbian Art and her Ph. D. in Latin American History from the University of Miami. A specialist in Latin American and Caribbean Art, her most recent work has been with Latin American Women and Cuban exile artists, for whom she has written numerous catalogs and articles. She is the Curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Freedom Tower and the Curator of the Chapel of LaMerced at Corpus Christi Church. She is the author of The Virgin of the Andes: Art and Ritual in Colonial Cuzco (Grassfield Press, 1995), lectures frequently on Latin American and Caribbean art and has curated numerous exhibitions.

Dainy Tapia is a cultural practitioner based in Miami, FL. She is the founder and curator of ArtSeen365. Tapia holds a master's in Arts in Communications and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. She has an independent curatorial practice and has organized multiple art exhibitions in Miami, New York, and São Paulo, Brazil, focusing on women artists and their roles in the art world, the environment, and human communication. Tapia also partners with select artists to support specific projects and their overall professional growth.

Connect with Dainy at @art.seen.365.

Marco Caridad (1985) is a Venezuelan-American interdisciplinary artist, curator, and artistic director based between Miami and Vieques, Puerto Rico. His work explores identity, queerness, censorship, and belonging through a hybrid practice that includes painting, video performance, assemblage, and printmaking. With a background in theater and design, Caridad creates poetic and ironic projects that often invite public participation and community reflection. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions that center social issues and experimental practices, including at Miami International Fine Arts (MIFA), where he serves as Artistic Director. He is also the founder of Biolumina, an artist residency program in Vieques. Caridad has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Wolfsonian Museum, the Adrienne Arsht Center, and the Allentown Art Museum.

Connect with Marco at @marcocaridad.

Neil Ramsay is a strategic business consultant, economist, and nonlinear systems thinker specializing in creative capital, economic development, and innovative business strategy. He is the founder of The Creative Economist LLC and ArtsUP! Concepts, through which he advises institutions and entrepreneurs on leveraging interdisciplinary approaches for sustainable growth.

Ramsay was a 2022 Fellow at the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom and currently serves as a Creative Capital Consultant. He is also a Research Associate at Florida International University (FIU) and a Co-Founding Faculty Member of the Ratcliffe Art + Design Incubator, where he mentors emerging creative entrepreneurs.

In addition, Ramsay serves as an Economic Advisor At-Large to the Town of Lauderdale Lakes and holds a board position on FIU’s College of Business Master of Finance Advisory Board. As a dedicated mentor at NEW INC—the New Museum’s incubator for art, design, and technology—he applies nonlinear systems thinking to drive strategic innovation.

His expertise in business relations, financial modeling, and lateral problem-solving positions him at the forefront of bridging economic strategy with the creative industries.

Connect with Neil at @artmouth.

Ross Karlan, Ph.D. is a curator, scholar, and educator based in Miami, FL. Dr. Karlan is currently Curator in Residence at Laundromat Art Space and serves as Director of Art Muse LA & Miami and Executive Director of Art Muse Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to arts education and public arts access in Los Angeles, Miami, and beyond. Dr. Karlan holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University, a BA from The University of Pennsylvania, and completed postdoctoral research at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. He has recently curated exhibitions at Laundromat Art Space, Mahara+Co. Gallery, Pan American Art Projects, and has forthcoming exhibitions at the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation and Boca Raton Museum of Art.

Connect with Ross at @_rossinante.

Participating Organizations

Founded in 2008, Fountainhead Arts is Miami's oldest-running artist residency, inviting 24 artists annually to live and work in Miami in one-month-long residency sessions. With a mission to elevate the voices, visibility, and value of artists in our society and make their work accessible in a welcoming and inclusive environment, Fountainhead has welcomed over 580 artists from 50 countries and myriad national and international cities. It is considered one of the most prestigious American residencies for its robust career development objectives, which directly connects artists with professionals who can impact their careers, enhances their visibility through visual and critical documentation, and develops a community that supports and nurtures their work. In its nearly 18-year history, Fountainhead has supported some of the most recognizable artists working across the world today.

Connect with Fountainhead at @fountainheadarts.

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a message of social change that benefits the working class. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.