Cornelius Tulloch

Project Room

Set in the ruins of a Miami Home’s porch space, this installation shadows the dystopian future we face due to current climate gentrification in our city. We must ask ourselves, what happens to the cultures we don’t preserve? Will their memories and presence drift away with the rising tides of new development. What happens to these people and this place? These are the questions Poetics of Place presents us as an immersive site specific installation composed of projection, video, and architectural interventions. This space will serve as the memory of Miami’s past, present, and future as a cultural stage for what must be protected and preserved.

"As both an Artist and Architect my work is shifting the narrative of cultural identities’ importance within the built environment by exploring how space shapes cultural identity and how cultural identity cultivates landscapes. In this architectural installation I wanted to bring visibility to many underrepresented stories and lived experiences of communities just blocks away from Locust Projects. Miami’s Black communities are at a very vulnerable stage within history, and as an artist I want to use my creative voice to amplify the many unheard voices within our city.

I plan to activate this space with an interdisciplinary performance depicting the lived experience of the porch space as integral vernacular for social development, placemaking, and cultural identity. I am glad to partner with a forward thinking space like Locust projects that is allowing me to not only push the narrative and scales of my work, but also the media and mediums I work with as an interdisciplinary artist. “Poetics of Place” is an homage to the Miami we once knew, and a plea to protect the future of its vulnerable Black and Caribbean communities."

—Cornelius Tulloch

Cornelius Tulloch is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist and architect. His work transcends boundaries of photography, fine art, and architecture. Tulloch combines and subverts creative mediums to tell powerful stories. Cinematic moments, spatial complexity, light, and color are important characters in his practice. His work explores the importance of cultural identity within built environments and how space shapes culture, which in turn cultivates landscapes.

Tulloch’s work has been shown in institutions such as the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.; NYU Center for Black Visual Culture, New York; Faena Art Project Room, Miami; and the MAXXI, Rome. He was a 2016 Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and his work is presented as part of the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Tulloch has won numerous prizes and residencies; he was named an Emerging Visionary Grantee by Instagram and the Brooklyn Museum’s Black Visionaries Program in 2022, is a two-time Oolite Ellies Award recipient, and received the 2023 YoungArts Jorge M. Perez Award.

Many of Tulloch’s projects have been grounded in his upbringing and communities in Miami, as well as inspired by his Jamaican and African-American heritage. His work expresses the ways in which bodies exist between cultures and borders. Tulloch’s multidisciplinary practice seeks to redefine and reshape the boundaries of art and space.