Art means different things to different people. For Xavier Cortada, A.B. ’86, J.D. ’91, M.P.A. ’91—a professor of practice at the University of Miami—one of art’s most important purposes is opening people’s eyes to the potential power they have. By using this creative medium to explore societal issues, he is able to stir the hearts and minds of those impassioned by his work.
“I think that what my art does is it allows you to tap into your own creativity to try to find innovative approaches to addressing problems,” Cortada said.
The problems most central to Cortada’s art are climate change and its impacts on the well-being of humanity and wildlife. Cortada’s work, comprising over 150 public collaborative art pieces, installations, murals, and other projects, has been featured across six continents and even the North and South poles. His pieces aim to bridge the divide between the art and its audience, and in turn create opportunities for greater understanding, involvement, and attention to problems like sea-level rise and biodiversity loss.
As one of Miami’s leading ecological artists, Professor Cortada’s unique approach to creating engagement through art offers valuable insights for anyone working to promote social change.
“What I’m really doing is building community and immersing people in situations that they wouldn’t have been in before, with other people that they would have never met, doing things that they weren’t planning on doing,” Cortada said.
This fall, Cortada spoke at the TED Countdown London Session, which is a series aimed at showcasing solutions and driving action around climate issues. In November, the University community got a sneak peek of the TED Talk during an “Awakening Climate Action” event at the Bill Cosford Cinema. There, Cortada and University experts held a panel discussion on climate change in South Florida.
Cortada’s TED Talk recounts his journey as an artist and activist, when during a 2006 National Science Foundation artist’s residency in Antarctica, he was inspired to use art as a means of encouraging social discourse and engagement in preparing for and preventing sea-level rise in South Florida. In the TED Talk, Cortada shares how he began to view art as having the ability to connect with its audience in a deeper and long-lasting way, inspiring change and participation in the face of societal challenges.
“The art is the process, the art lives in the interaction, in the community coming together to plan, to strategize. It is in this way that socially engaged art provides a mechanism that brings different people together around the shared challenge, and, importantly, generates a sense of agency, of responsibility.”
Earlier that year, he had launched the “Reclamation Project,” which encouraged participation in mangrove reforestation. The project showcased mangrove tree seedlings in urban spaces where they had thrived decades before, reminding residents of the abundance of native habitats that used to be widespread in coastal cities like Miami. This installation also educated the public on how mangrove forests protect coastal communities from the dangerous effects of storm surge, rising sea levels, and hurricanes. The seedlings were later planted in Biscayne Bay, restoring over 10 acres of coastal habitat.
Cortada later established the “Underwater Homeowners Association” to visualize and bring an urgent understanding to Miamians of their vulnerability against rising sea levels. Residents were encouraged to install an “Underwater HOA” sign, similar to real estate signs, on their front lawns. Numbers on these signs indicated how many feet of melted glacial water would put the property underwater, and their backdrops included Cortada’s watercolor paintings of glacial Antarctic ice. This project, in Cortada’s words, helped make the threat of rising seas “impossible to ignore” in neighborhoods across South Florida.
Now, with funding support from the 2022 Creative Capital Award, Cortada is implementing a new iteration of the project titled “The Underwater.” In the spring, he worked with the University of Miami Laboratory for Integrated Knowledge’s “On the Move: Climate Migration and Retreat in South Florida, the Caribbean, and Beyond” interdisciplinary research team to engage over 2,000 students from Miami Senior High School, his alma mater. This project catalyzes action and awareness on sea level rise in a similar way to Underwater HOA but goes further by providing a curated selection of educational resources such as videos, books, and podcasts, which allow people to delve into climate education at their own pace. It also provides opportunities for involvement with various Miami-based organizations focused on climate issues.
Although addressing an issue as multifaceted and monumental as climate change’s impacts may seem too difficult or hopeless to some, Cortada sees art as a unifier that can inspire people to be “caring instead of despairing.” One of the ultimate goals of his artwork is to help individuals and communities recognize and harness the power that they have to make positive change.
“I want people to feel that they have agency and that they have their own creativity,” Cortada said. “I want others who may be stuck to look at art as a way of getting unstuck; you know, of allowing themselves to think creatively again, and do some creative thinking and problem-solving.”
Cortada credits his upbringing and University of Miami student experience as major factors that shaped his artistic outlook. He was raised in what he describes as a “house of artists;” Cortada’s father and uncles were painters who were active in their local art community. It was through these family members and surroundings that Cortada was exposed at an early age to art’s ability to bring together communities, where Cuban exiles in Miami in the 1970s used art as a form of healing and addressing the misfortunes they experienced in being displaced from their homeland.
At the University, where Cortada participated in medical research, studied law, and a variety of other subjects, he formed an interdisciplinary perspective that gave him a unique approach to creating and understanding art. He describes his diverse education as one that helps him “understand things from a systemic level from different perspectives, from a different point of view,” and that “what emerges is an artist who uses the elasticity of art to work across all those disciplines to engage people, and address and solve social problems.”
Cortada serves as the inaugural artist-in-residence for Miami-Dade County and has an art gallery and studio in Pinecrest Gardens, where he is also the artist-in-residence. These appointments cement his role as an artist within these local communities, where he can participate in events and create art while having access to resources, studio space, materials, and equipment. With the establishment of the Xavier Cortada Foundation, whose team comprises many alumni and students from the U, Cortada plans to widen the reach of his art and message for the betterment of communities.
Cortada hopes that his works will continue to inspire people in the South Florida community and beyond to fully engage with their environment and take ownership of the solutions needed to protect it. Ultimately, to Cortada, art serves as more than just the visual representation of the art itself.
“It's bigger than that, in many ways, because you’re really changing society by having individuals understand that they have a role as environmental stewards or as empathetic citizens or as people who are supposed to love one another.”
You can visit cortada.com or click here to learn more about his work and watch his TED Talk.
