Anindya Sen in Conversation with Superblue Director, Shantelle Rodriguez
Shantelle Rodriguez, Photo: Nick Garcia
Shantelle Rodriguez, Sotheby’s Institute NY Alumna (2012), is a passionate advocate for democratisation of the arts and has sought a career that allows her to push forth that agenda. Currently, she is the Director of Superblue’s Experiential Arts Centres and is responsible for development of its processes for programming, partnerships, operations and staffing, as well as its community engagement initiatives for social impact. Before joining Superblue, she was the Director of Arts at Goldman Global Arts (GGA) where she led ongoing projects at their pathbreaking public arts destination Wynwood Walls, having earlier launched their GGA gallery in 2016. As Superblue gets set for the launch of its first location in Miami this spring; Shantelle speaks to Anindya Sen about her career journey so far, lessons from her experiences and the challenges of preparing for a launch in the middle of the pandemic.
Anindya Sen: Can you tell us a bit about your early cultural influences, arts education and what made you interested in the art world as a career choice?
Shantelle Rodriguez: I am the daughter of Cuban immigrants and growing up in Miami at that time, my childhood was predominantly influenced by our Cuban immigrant culture. My family worked very hard to get here and they had no background in art - no connections to art whatsoever. It is something that I fell in love with on my own but that’s where I quickly realised there were kind of barriers to entering the art world, where most people had an uncle who was a collector or a friend who was a dealer who could get them easier passage. That’s what made me realise the need for democratising art for the masses.
Originally, I was very fascinated by the auctions and the markets. That’s why after getting a bachelor's in art history from Florida University, I went off to Sotheby’s Institute of Art where I studied Art Business.
Everyone thinks of Miami as this cultural Mecca now, but when I was growing up it was devoid of all that. It had very few museums and projects - it had no Art Basel. That influenced where I am today and why I chose to work with a company like Goldman and now with Superblue.
AS: Can you tell us about your stint with Goldman Global Arts whom you joined in 2016? How did the opportunity come about? What was your role there and what were some of your key learnings?
SR: After I graduated, I was the business manager at a local auction house here in Miami. That’s where my interest quickly pivoted to bringing art to everyone. I developed a street art department for them. We would do a whole week of events; we would auction works by major artists like the London Police. Peter Tunney, Jessica Goldman’s business partner and co-founder of Goldman Global Arts came to the auction and purchased a work from me.
One day, they [said], ‘we have been trying to open a gallery in Wynwood Walls which would represent all the artists that we have invited to paint over the last eight years, and we need to give them a bigger platform to develop and sell their art.’ So, I joined them and helped launch the GGA gallery (inside the Wynwood Walls) in 2016. Around the same time, Steve Ross came to Jessica Goldman. He was revitalising the Hard Rock Stadium and wanted us to revitalise it with public art murals and a private art collection that would include a number of street artists; that was what helped Goldman Global Arts take off. Then, we started going national, but we did not want to import the Wynwood Walls model to a different city in a way that was foreign. We made the effort to understand their culture and DNA by speaking to members of the community and understanding what would complement [their culture]. Eventually I became the Director of Arts and in that role oversaw all of Wynwood Walls - the shop, the gallery, and these national art projects as well.
AVAF, 2016. Hard Rock Stadium Project, Miami. Photograph Courtesy of Goldman Global Arts.
Dasic Fernandez, 2016. Hard Rock Stadium Project, Miami. Photograph Courtesy of Goldman Global Arts.
What I took as lessons from my GGA experience were the concept of community, how to relate to people and how to make people more connected to the arts. I also learnt that when you are working on such a public format - like street art or murals - you also have more of a social responsibility. It is not just art for art’s sake. You really have to think about what you are putting out there and how it will connect to the people coming through.
London Police, Hard Rock Stadium Miami Project, Photograph Courtesy of Goldman Global Arts.
AS: What attracted you to Superblue, or as it was called then, Pace X?
SR: When Pace X reached out, I was initially very interested because they were speaking the same language as me, but in a different form; [they were] democratising art for the masses, bringing art to everyone, creating a new patronage for the arts, but through ticket sales and ways that one could support artists without purchasing a $50,000 piece. For the first time I felt that my purpose, which was democratising art for the masses, did not have to be in the public space. It could be in these new kind of venues like Superblue. The art speaks for itself; there are many wonderful artists on the roster. We have to work to make it more accessible in different ways. We must set a ticket price that makes it possible for the masses to come and support. Also, a share of the ticket sales goes as royalties to our artists - there is direct impact there.
Superblue Miami, Façade Rendering. Photo: Moris Moreno. Courtesy of Superblue.
AS: You joined Superblue as part of the leadership team in January 2020. Preparing for such a launch would have been super challenging in the middle of the pandemic. How has the experience been?
SR: I have to say that it has been challenging but we all feel very lucky that we had not launched yet. It would have been more heart-breaking if we had launched and then had to furlough staff. The fact that we had not opened yet made pivoting a bit easier. Of course, there were challenges though. We had to hold our launch back multiple times. We wanted to be sensitive to what was happening around the world, although Miami was a different situation.
But certain things that became part of the new normal were always part of our program. For example, a single directional flow around the building was always part of our [original] plan. It is our way of managing the capacity and flow of visitors. As was timed ticketing, which all these museums are now doing to adhere to new norms. The reason for that is that our artists have an ideal number of people in mind who should be in the space to have a meaningful experience. Our space is 50,000 sq. ft so we can let in 2000 people at a time, but these artists want 50, 20 or 10 people in a room. So, we were already scaled back in terms of capacity. But then, not being open to the public has helped us set up more robust sanitation and hygiene protocols rather than having to close and renegotiate that.
TeamLab, Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life, 2020. Installation view of Every Wall is a Door, Superblue Miami, 2021. Sound: teamLab. © teamLab, Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
AS: Superblue promises to be an ‘Experiential Art Centre.’ According to you, what makes Superblue an experiential and unique proposition from a visitor’s point of view?
SR: We have had kids come through to test some of the installations, and heard them say “Oh, we thought our parents were taking us to another museum. This was so much more interesting.” … and it translates to all ages.
The beauty is that the audience has been converted from a passive viewer to an active participant. Most of the installations have an interactive component and the visitor plays an important role in the completion of the artwork. For example, take teamLab – all their works generate code in real time. Depending on how the group around you is interacting with a particular piece, you will see something different each time and you are constantly engaged with what is happening in the room. The artwork is more about the experience as a whole and sharing it with people around you; ultimately it belongs to the people. I think that is very different from usual [museum] models.
TeamLab, Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year per Hour, 2017. Sound: Hideaki Takahashi. Installation view of Every Wall is a Door, Superblue Miami, 2021. © teamLab, Courtesy Pace Gallery.
There are a lot of ‘experientials’ out there, but I think we are the first to involve the top world-renowned artists. For example, Van Gogh was one of the greatest artists of all time, but he didn’t physically create the experience that is currently on offer. For us, these artists have conceptualised and created everything that the audience will experience.
AS: One of the key success factors for Superblue will be how well it engages with the community. With you, you bring rich experience of having worked with public art projects focused on social impact. How do you plan to make Superblue more engaging and accessible?
SR: Experiential Art at its core is positioned to disrupt traditional models and make art and culture more accessible and engaging to diverse audiences. We are planning to co-create the majority of our programmes with local leaders, artists, community organisers, educators – to really work with them on how we can answer our community’s pressing questions. We don’t claim to be the experts on everything – we bring in people to build a kind of advisory team [that focuses] on how we tap into and support the community. So, we are building relationships with many grassroots organisations in Allapattah (where Superblue is located) and throughout Miami and we are using artists as the lens for a lot of these issues. The staff we hire is also mostly from our Allapattah neighbourhood.
Es Devlin, Forest of Us, 2021. Installation view of Every Wall is a Door, Superblue Miami, 2021. Photo: Andrea Mora.
One of our artists is JR, much of whose work is about immigration issues which is a vitally important issue in our community today. Es Devlin’s work – an artist who is exhibiting in our inaugural exhibition at Superblue - is about climate change and a call to action, so there is a reforestation project we are working on where people can donate towards Sebastião Salgado’s reforestation project in Brazil. We want to tie these issues back to Superblue and the community.
Our community will be interested because this is a universal language. It is not an elitist environment. It is very much for everyone. We will also expand over time to make the experience more accessible globally. Miami is just the first in a ground-breaking series of international spaces. All these works will eventually become an ecosystem that can travel within those spaces.
Es Devlin, Forest of Us, 2021. Installation view of Every Wall is a Door, Superblue Miami, 2021. Photo: Andrea Mora.
AS: As a Sotheby’s Institute alumna, what advice would you give to those who are looking for their first break in the art world?
SR: I think it is really about not giving up. Initially, I took jobs that I felt were not exactly what I was looking for at that time. But every one of them gave me some experience that I could carry into my next one. If you take a job that helps you pay your rent but at the same time you also keep pushing in the art world through, say, an internship, it will ultimately happen...it takes time, but it will happen.
The most important thing at Sotheby’s Institute is connecting with your classmates. They are going to be a massive network of opportunity for you and so you should make an effort to get to know them. They will be people who will support you for many years to come.
Thank you, Shantelle.
Images courtesy of Shantelle, Superblue and GGA.
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Anindya Sen,
Contributor, MADE IN BED