Under Gast’s direction, the AIRIE artists selected for 2012 include several contemporary artists whose work is decidedly challenging. The March 2012 AIRIE residents are a married couple, Dana Sherwood and Mark Dion. Sherwood recently created a mobile museum called Lafcadio’s Revenge, a handbuilt cart bearing “forgotten” histories based on the work of New Orleans ethnographer Lafacadio Hearn. Earlier this year, Dion’s installation The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit: Mobile Laboratory, 2006. was shown at the Miami Art Museum, where it is part of the permanent collection. The work is essentially a panel truck, tricked out as a support vehicle for an imaginary governmental organization, charged with the task of saving wildlife.

In his new show, Mark Dion: Troubleshooting, opening at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa on Jan. 13, Dion creates drawings, prints and epic installations — all ecologically-themed works concerned with “the discrepancy between perceived knowledge and scientific inquiry” as well as the fragile Florida Everglades, according to the museum’s website.

The December 2012 AIRIE residents are Trong Nguyen & Rebecca Reeve, another married couple. Reeve, a British artist, has exhibited at La Biennale de Montreal (2011) and the Freies Museum Berlin; she has most recently been working in Cuba, using flashlights to illuminate and explore domestic interiors, then photographing the spaces.

Nguyen was featured on Bravo’s reality TV show Work of Art, and works in a variety of media, including performance art, painting and video. Raised in Orlando and a current resident of New York, Nguyen has never been to the Everglades and is looking forward to doing something that’s as “broad and generous as the Everglades itself. Or, if it’s too big of a thing to deal with on that level, I might take a narrower approach, like mixing Everglades water into my paints,” he said. “I like to do adaptive installations, and as a contrarian, I might embed artificial elements into the natural state of the Everglades. It’s such a rich environment for an artist.”

Art inspired by the Everglades extends well beyond the AIRIE program.

Visitors to Miami’s Bakehouse Art Complex can see the work of photographer Deborah Mitchell, whose work often depicts the Everglades. Currently Mitchell is serving as a curator for an exhibition, The Preserve: Uniting Nature and Culture drawn from the Big Cypress National Preserve artist-in-residency program. The exhibition features 15 artists, including Ailyn Hoey and Mark Goodenough.

Next July, the residents of the Everglades, storied Florida Crackers, will be immortalized as artists in their own right by the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. The museum is screening the documentary Swamp Cabbage as part of its regular Hot Topics Discussion Series. The film, created by Hayley Downs and Julie Lara Kahn, is drawn partly from Kahn’s previous art installation at Locust Projects and TransEAT/ Food Culture Museum, formerly in Wynwood. The show encompassed videotaped interviews with Crackers, photographic portraits, and the artistry involved in Everglades cuisine and handicrafts.

The Swamp Cabbage screening and discussion should add to the emergence of the Everglades as a generator of art. To Jane Hart, curator of exhibitions at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, it’s a natural step, “The movie...addresses the residents of the Everglades in a respectful and genuine way. I think it’s sensational that more and more contemporary artists are working with this amazing environment, a natural wonder we’re all lucky enough to have in our own backyard.”