On July 29th, AIRIE held “Queen of the Swamp” a two-part event with June and July AIRIE fellows Sydney Maubert and Atéha Bailly in Everglades National Park. This event began with the opening of Sydney Maubert’s large-scale work “Queen of the Swamp” in the AIRIE Nest Gallery at Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center. Over seventy people came to enjoy the work, which acknowledges Miami's Bahamian history and its vital ties to a larger cultural geography of Southern and Indigenous aesthetics. It draws upon Miami's history of Bahamian laborers' construction of Miami's infrastructure on porous rock, and their present descendants' influence on Miami Bass culture.
The second part of the event occurred in the newly renovated Guy Bradley Visitor Center at Flamingo in Everglades National Park for “The Cookout” where attendees ate and listened to the powerful musings of our July AIRIE fellow Atéha “Jojo Sounds” Bailly. Jojo Sounds is an Indie R&B artist who pulls rhythms and wisdom from his West Indian, West African, and Black American heritage. The event was a large success and an amazing experience that was made possible by our AIRIE team and Everglades National Park rangers.
The Queen of the Swamp event was photographed by Passion Ward.
Atéha “Jojo Sounds” Bailly is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer based in Somerville, MA. He is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School with a Master of Divinity where he studied music’s role in religious and racial identity formation and the ethics of artistic persona. Inspired by his multiethnic and multi-religious family background, his music blends musical traditions across the black diaspora. Combining West African rhythms and production techniques spanning various black electronic music traditions, to explore life in the interstices of cultures, places, and identities. He is currently working on a collection of songs that consider the relationship between waterways and ideas of migration, home, and homeland.
Sydney Rose Maubert is a Miami architect, artist, and professor. She holds post-professional and professional degrees in architecture from Yale (2022) and the University of Miami (2020), with double minors in writing and art. She has received several awards including the Yale Moulton Andros Award (2022), and the University of Miami Alpha Rho Chi Award (2020). She is the founder of Sydney R. Maubert LLC., her art and mural practice. Her scholarly research interests are architecture, geography, and cultural production in the Caribbean and American South. Black studies, gender studies, decolonial studies, history, and cultural geography largely shape the work. Currently, Sydney Rose is the predoctoral fellow at Cornell's Strauch Fellowship, where she will be teaching and producing research (Fall 2022- ongoing). Her research explores racial-sexual perception in the built environment.