Xavier Cortada

As 2025 comes to a close, we are grateful for the partners, educators, agencies, and people who made this a year of public engagement at scale—one in which creativity served as a powerful tool across educational, scientific, and public spaces.

Throughout the year, the Foundation supported 40+ public programs, lectures, workshops, and performances, working with 30+ partner institutions across government, schools, universities, museums, and civic organizations. These engagements reached audiences from K–12 students to professional and executive leaders, from Canada to Chile. Along the way, the Foundation helped unveil more than a dozen of Cortada’s environmental public art projects across eleven different cities, while educational initiatives and convenings advanced conversations around climate adaptation, ocean justice, truth, and art for social change.

At the heart of this work is a simple premise: when communities can see shared risk and shared responsibility, they are better equipped to imagine, and build, shared solutions. Here’s a look back at 2025:

• Centennial Public Art Sculpture | Coral Gables
• Miami Art Week Panel Discussion
• College of William & Mary Muscarelle Museum Lecture
• Helped Shape Aspen Institute’s National Water Strategy
• The Air Between Us | Laramie, Wyoming
• Seahorse Society Mural | Key Biscayne
• In Gear: Lifelines and Vital Signs | Palm Beach County
• Cortada Challenged Incoming UM Med School Class
• 2nd Annual Community Climate Conversation
• Green Sports Alliance Summit Collaborative Mural & Speech
• Cortada Spoke at ‘Upwell: A Wave of Ocean Justice’
• Cortada Eco-Art Courtyard Launched in Hialeah
• Cortada & Roberti Lectured at Frost Museum of Science
• The Underwater: Broward | Public Schools
• Steven & Dorothea Green Critics’ Lecture Series
• Water Columns | Jacksonville Beach
• Florida Artists Hall of Fame Induction
• National Academies Gulf Coast Roundtable
• Broward County Mayor Unveiled Elevation Sculpture
• Cortada Spoke at Chilean National Congress

Ten years ago, I brought CLIMA to Hialeah.

In late 2015, while the world’s attention was on the Paris Climate Talks, I turned the Milander Center for Arts & Entertainment into a science art platform on sea level rise, climate change, and biodiversity loss. For the first twelve days of CLIMA we convened daily participatory performances and panel discussions to move the conversation from abstraction to lived reality here in South Florida.

CLIMA also carried work born from my 2015 Rauschenberg Residency Rising Waters Confab, including a screening of my short film “5 Actions to Stop Rising Seas.” That residency brought artists and scientists together around rising seas, and I brought those ideas back home to the community most at risk.

A decade later, the questions CLIMA asked feel even more urgent:
What do we owe each other when the water rises? And what does real local action look like before “later” becomes too late?

Fifteen years ago, in 2010, I created the Ancestral Dinner Party as a participatory performance within my larger Ancestral Journeys project with National Geographic — an exploration of our shared human story through the lenses of art, science, and community.

Through DNA-inspired plates and the act of “hunting and gathering” a meal with others, we reflected on the migrations that brought us all here, from our ancestors’ first steps out of Africa 60,000 years ago to the vibrant cultural tapestry of Miami today.

Ancestral Dinner Party was a reminder that despite how different we appear, we are all part of one human family, connected by deep lineage and shared journeys.

Looking back on this moment, I’m grateful for the conversation, connection, and insight it sparked… insights that continue to shape my work and our collective understanding of who we are and where we come from.

In 2005, twenty years ago, the Florida Capitol hosted a solo exhibition of my paintings and works on paper entitled, “Mangroves.”

“We are delighted to host an exhibition of works by Xavier Cortada,” said Secretary of State Glenda Hood. “His bold works are truly reflective of his Cuban-American heritage — such a significant part of our state’s heritage.”

Nature can transport us, not just to another place, but to another time. It reminds us of what was here before all the concrete was poured. As generations and growth transform Miami, we as a people are grounded by nature, the one constant in this ever changing and wonderful city.

Xavier Cortada, “Mangroves (on Green),” 48″ x 36″, acrylic on canvas, 2004.

HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE!

Each season, a different banner from the Four Elements series greets visitors as they enter the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. For winter, the museum features Ignis, the “fire” element in the quartet.

Four Elements (at the Frost) consists of four large-scale digital tapestries—Aer, Ignis, Aqua, and Terra—named for the Greek classical elements. In Greek thought, these elements described fundamental realms of the cosmos. Today, air, water, fire, and earth are understood as atoms on an ever-evolving Periodic Table. From ancient philosophy to theoretical physics, there is a continuous search for interconnectedness—this is the space the work inhabits.

The banners invite viewers to look more closely at their surroundings, question assumptions, and discover new worlds in the familiar. In vivid colors—red for Ignis, blue for Aqua, yellow for Aer, green for Terra—they mark four symbolic “seasons” in a place that really only has two: wet and dry.

The leaf forms across the banners come from native trees that once grew on the land where the museum now stands. As visitors move up the cantilevered staircase, they are surrounded by these images as if climbing through a tree canopy. From that vantage point, they can imagine the original ecosystem at the edge of the lagoon and consider a more balanced way of coexisting with nature.

Credit line:

Xavier Cortada, "Ignis," digital tapestry / sublimation dye on fabric, 40′ x 10′, 2008.

Public commission for the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum

State of Florida Art in State Buildings Program

Part of Four Elements (at the Frost), on permanent display in the museum foyer.

More: https://cortada.com/art2008/four-elements-at-the-frost/

Twenty years ago, in 2005, I painted “Five Flags / Florida” to celebrate Florida Heritage Month 2006. I was using our coastline to show our heritage: each wave represented a new wave of immigrants who set roots and established communities. The mangrove roots metaphorically depict our interconnectedness as people who share a rich and diverse cultural history.

The work was reproduced as a poster that was given to every fourth grader across the state. It contained this artist statement on the reverse side:

—

FIVE FLAGS / FLORIDA

The mangrove root on the left symbolizes Florida’s indigenous people. The two clusters of clouds above mark their first encounter with Europeans: Juan Ponce de Leon’s landing in 1513.

Each of the mangrove plants rising above the horizon represent the five flags that have since flown over the peninsula:

The first plant has two sets of leaves representing Spain’s two periods of control: 1513-1763 and 1784-1821. The leaves on the second plant resemble the fleur-de-lis on the French flag when it was flown over Florida during 1564-65. Great Britain’s reign over Florida, 1763-1784, is shown as a mangrove plant with sliced leaves as it divided the territory into East Florida and West Florida. As the war for American independence ended, all of the territory was returned to the Spanish.

In 1821, the United States bought Florida from Spain for $5 million. The fourth plant represents the American flag. Back then the American flag had 24 stars. That number grew by three when Florida became the 27th state in 1845. The plant is bifurcated because Florida split from the Union in 1861 to join the Confederacy. After the Confederacy was defeated, Florida returned to the Union at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Finally, the shriveled mangrove plant represents the demise of the Confederacy.

The mangrove root on the right honors those whose search for freedom (e.g., Seminoles, slaves using the Underground Railroad, Holocaust survivors, Cuban exiles, and Haitian refugees among others) brought them to Florida’s shores.

Xavier Cortada, “Five Flags / Florida,” 61.5″ x 96″, acrylic on canvas, 2005

https://cortada.com/art2005/five-flags-florida/

GOOD ANCESTORS

In my The Nature of Cities essay, The Art of Good Ancestry: Moving Humanity Forward, I focus on a specific question: how humanity actually carries meaning forward across time.

Biology explains inheritance, but ideas move faster than DNA. They allow us to leapfrog the slow randomness of mutation. In the essay, I look at ideas as the mechanism of ancestry, and culture—and particularly art—as the vehicle that carries those ideas across generations.

I frame art not primarily as expression or symbolism, but as infrastructure: a system that allows meaning to survive misunderstanding, disruption, and even death. Culture becomes real only when it is shared, and once activated, it becomes self-perpetuating—reshaping both the giver and the receiver, and orienting lives toward futures they will never see.

For me, being a good ancestor is not only about care or preservation. It is about forward motion—helping those who follow begin a little farther along the path. That is what I mean by moving humanity forward.

Find the essay (and those of my 44 fellow authors) here:
https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/2025/12/16/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-ancestor-to-the-people-places-and-things-we-care-about/

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credit lines:
Xavier Cortada, “Ancestor,” acrylic on canvas, 60” x 72”, 2010.

Very excited for this next generation of leadership in the City of Miami! Congratulations to Mayor-elect Eileen Higgins for her big win yesterday.

Last night, at the victory party, I saw a photograph of Julia Tuttle, our city’s founder, hanging in a small oval frame between curtains on the wall at the Miami Women’s Club. Although it took us 129 years, I am proud to see our city elect its first woman mayor.

I look forward to helping build creative and innovative ways of engaging, educating, and empowering Miamians as we address our ongoing climate challenges.