We Made a Booklet

A preview of the booklet, including images of the Center for Subtropical Affairs and photographs of members, taken by members and photographer Andrea Lorena.

We’ve just published Commissioner’s first-ever booklet inspired by the photography and storytelling of Johanne Rahaman. Full of photos taken by your community, alongside quotes and information about the program, the booklet—a yearbook of sorts—is a snapshot of our growing movement and the arts-invested collective we’re building together.

A Word from Co-Founder Dejha Carrington

The following is an excerpt from the letter that appears at the beginning of the book.

Communities are stronger when artists are at the fore. At times when we struggle to find ways to relate to each other, and when the fractures in our society distort our ability to see ourselves clearly, we need cultural interpreters, scribes, euphony and abstraction to exercise the parts of our mind that make us vulnerable. Artists change us. They bring transformation to our lives in ways that only nature, spirituality and knowledge can. When we live in a built environment whose architects are artists, musicians, dancers and writers, our experience of each other is constantly in progress—a state of flux.

We need to support the things we care about. Before Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times sold to Diddy for $21.1 million in 2018, the printmaker and painter born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, made his way from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York. Think about his earliest patrons—the ones who saw them- selves in his pieces and who invested in his prints when he was an art student—and what could have been if these earliest patrons did not exist. Would we have been deprived of his rococos, rorschachs and graphic illustrations? Would we have seen representation and joy in his art as radical acts of freedom?

When we are of the community, our collective stories are part of the consciousness of the artist who shares the very same community. It is vital that we support our artists as early in their creative journeys as possible, and that we have the opportunity to do so by experiencing their work, considering their ideas and feeling connection.

Commissioner is an art membership program. More significantly, Commissioner is a community where we learn from each other and become invested in the artists reimagining our city... perhaps even reimaging our worldview.

Thank you for creating this space, for supporting Miami artists, for investing in a future that only we can build together.

Download your copy HERE.