Meet the artists of Tunnel Projects, the Miami art hub that’s truly underground
When Miami artist Luna Palazzolo-Daboul went looking for affordable studio space for herself and some friends, someone suggested she check out a set of vacant spaces available for cheap in the drab, dark basement parking garage of a Little Havana strip mall. She passed.
But when she came across the listing again sometime later, something clicked. Maybe this space was, in the words of the friend who suggested it, “so ugly” and so far off the local art scene’s map that it could actually work as something singular and new.
Three years later, the appropriately named Tunnel Projects has become an underground sensation in Miami’s young and burgeoning art scene, where inexpensive, functional studio space is scarce and there’s no critical artistic mass in any one neighborhood.
FULL STORY: How an ‘ugly’ underground garage in Little Havana became Miami’s buzziest art hub
Today, Palazzolo-Daboul and some 14 other artists — including Marie Franco, pictured above — work in former shops and offices scattered throughout the nondescript three-story El Capiro mall and office building, on the busy corner of Southwest 12th Avenue and Third Street. It’s a place they share with notaries and tax preparers, a dentist, a hair salon, a barber shop, a convenience store, even a storefront Evangelical church.
The artists work in a multiplicity of media — painting, sculpture, photography, installations and more — and their work ranges widely across themes of identity, community, representation, immigration and the perplexing landscape of Miami, among others.
What they all share is a growing but tight-knit community with a collaborative spirit of exploration and a very strong Miami vibe.
Here are portraits of just a few of the artists who work at Tunnel Projects.
