South Miami Rotary Arts Festival

Preston Scott positioned a five-foot agave flower stalk under his mouth, and  began to blow into it. Agave flowers, which grow primarily in the deserts of Mexico, were unfamiliar to many of the South Floridians who stood in a small crowd watching him. The stalk was hollowed out and intricately carved and painted in reds and whites.

“It’s a didjeridoo,” Scott explained, blowing into the stalk, which he had turned into a clarinet-like musical instrument. “See, it sounds like a motorboat.”

Scott’s tent was just one of the many that lined Sunset Drive this past Saturday. Small groups and people by themselves stopped at the first few tents of clay orchids, paintings, photography and the finer arts.

The South Miami Rotary Arts Festival has taken place every year at this time for the past twenty-eight years. Children pulled their parents quickly past the paintings towards the tents that displayed hand puppets, bows and arrows and fairy princess wands. Dogs pulled their owners past the toys to the food booths—pursuing the smells of hamburgers, hot fudge and Argentinean wafting food through the air.

But off to the side to the tents, tucked within the entrance to the Sunset Place Mall, there was a different kind of art. Three middle-aged women in black spandex and whittled waistlines that would make women half their age cry stepped in sync to pop music playing. Legs kicking, they threw in the occasional hoot.

The women were promoting Jazzercise—dance classes designed to help women get in shape. But their precision and energy made them worthy of being at the festival as a performing art.

“We’ve been here for 35 years, and it keeps changing with the times,” said Cheryl Wiggins, the first instructor in Miami. “We bring in a little bit of everything in the music.”  

Jazz dance began in America at the turn of the 20^th century, originally reflecting the whole-body movement and free flow of African dance. But the modern forms of it, which began in the 1950s, evolved from Caribbean dances, hitting much closer to home in South Florida.

Also under the influence of the tropics, was painter Eileen Seitz, who began setting up her booth at 5:45 AM that morning.

“I paint on location,” Seitz said. “I travel to Antigua, Fiji, Key West, the Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. A man in George Town saw my painting of an island house and asked if he could build it.”

Seitz uses bold pinks, leafy greens and hot yellows in her watercolor paintings—shouting tropical paradise before you even approach them. A resident of Coconut Grove, she has presented her work at the Rotary Arts Festival for almost 15 years now.

Over the years, Seitz has expanded from paintings to pieces of fabric, pillows, puzzles, coloring books and cards. She said that her paintings are bought and hung in local hospitals and doctor’s offices to bring cheer to patients.  She says her second biggest customer is the hospitality sector, so her paintings can bring the tropic feel of their vacation hot spot.

One of Seitz’s biggest aspirations is designing the fabric to make and sell clothes and she sees promise of it happening in the near future.

“At a show last week, a woman approached me asking to team up to have a clothing line,” Seitz said. “I can sew for me, but I can’t sew for others. That’s my dream.”

Seitz was wearing a tunic made of fabric that she herself had designed—streaked with warm oranges and yellows on a black background, recalling a similar feel to the bold colors of Lily Pulitzer, who was also a Florida entrepreneur.

Storm clouds rolled in by the afternoon, leaving Seitz and her fellow artists scurrying to crowd all of their works under their tent. A few fat raindrops threatened to cut the day short, but as Seitz whipped out her iPhone to check the weather forecast the rainclouds kept moving.

Down the street, Scott kept playing his didjeridoo, not phased by the clouds. He helped a teenage boy position it correctly and play a few sounds.

“Very good man, yeah! You can play!” he said. “What I like about it, is that you don’t have to spend a hundred years learning how to play it.”