The first thing one likely envisions when thinking about Prada and art is the iconic “Prada boutique” sculpture set in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert about 35 miles from Marfa, Texas. Erected in 2005, it is “a faux store built following Prada’s boutiques aesthetic codes and provocatively conceived,” according to the Prada Group’s website under the rubric Third Party Projects. Its creators, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, refer to it as “a pop architectural land art project.” Beyoncé famously posed for a couple of “candid” photos while jumping joyously into the air at the site—a Texas native being a Texas tourist—as if the friend (or husband) who snapped it were a faux Steven Meisel or a faux Philippe Halsman. The art had conjured some real joy for her, and her joy conjured it for us. A jolt of joy is great branding for a singer or a work of art or a fashion house. But the brand did not commission the artwork. Miuccia Prada, the keenest of connoisseurs, appreciated Elmgreen and Dragset’s malleable conceptual construct as well as the specificity of the construction itself and decided not only to give her permission for the artists to use the brand’s name, but also to donate a selection of pieces from Prada’s Fall/Winter 2005 collection to be displayed inside that subtly referenced the palette of the desert that framed it all. So much of the art world is transactional, consisting of the highest bidders and the lowest impulses. But Miuccia Prada’s instinctive impulse when contacted about this Marfa project was to be kind and then, with that keenness of hers, to understand that kindness when artfully employed can enable joy. That never goes out of fashion.
Which brings us to the YoungArts Project and Prada’s continued instinctive kindness and enabling of joy in each of the next generation of artists through its and its founder’s support of this remarkable organization. YoungArts is headquartered in Miami, but since its inception in 1981, the organization’s reach has been national. The YoungArts Project scope is interdisciplinary, much like a fashion house’s itself—with not only its reliance on the artistic vision of its leader, but also those artisans it enables who specialize in buttons, embroidery, beads feathers, gloves, shoes, pleats, fabrics, and the very drape of it all once it comes together in that just-so moment. A juried selection process at YoungArts awards fellowships to 15- to 18-year-old high school students in the visual, literary, and performing arts. The fellowships include—along with financial support—mentoring programs and studios in which to paint or rehearse and, most important, the opportunity to meet the other artists in these other disciplines; sharing their individual experience to create not only a chance to make work together but also a sense of community. Past YoungArts fellows have included actors Timothée Chalamet and Hunter Schafer, poet and activist Amanda Gorman, conductor Jacomo Bairos, artists Ambrose Murray and Mark Fleuridor, and interdisciplinary artist and designer Cornelius Turroch. The Metropolitan Opera even opened its season this fall with an adaptation of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the memoir of the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, by past YoungArts fellows composer Terence Blanchard and co-director/ choreographer Camille A. Brown.
Prada first got involved with YoungArts in 2018, the inaugural year of its Prada Mode in Miami, where even more interdisciplinary endeavors were to occur—music, conversation, food, and fashion—that could be experienced as a site-specific experience as if the construct of “Marfa” were morphing into a more Miami-centric experience, one guided by Prada itself instead of just being used as a beacon for others down in Texas, where it was used not as a branding iron, but a bit of branding irony. An event co-organized by YoungArts took place that year in the reconfigured Freehand Miami, an eclectic hotel transformed by Prada into a club and events space replete with design and art and a nightly lineup of DJs. Call it a pop-up architectural land project. One memorable night, Prada Mode cohosted with YoungArts a performance by Elena Ayodele, a 2013 YoungArts Winner in Jazz and Voice and a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts.
Prada has continued to express support for YoungArts and was one of the co-sponsors of the YoungArts 40th birthday party on November 20 held on its Miami campus to celebrate the 20,000 artists the YoungArts foundation has supported over the last four decades. Queen Esther, a theatre fellow from 1983, served as the emcee and performed with her orchestra. And on December 1, YoungArts board members along with its donors and artists plan to gather at Prada in the Miami Design District for cocktails and conversation to exchange stories about that birthday party.
Another connection that Prada has with YoungArts is the appreciation that each has for ballet and the art of choreography. Back in 2015, ballet dancer David Hallberg performed as part of artist Francesco Vezzoli’s Fortuna Desperata Fortuna Desperata in a costume created by Prada’s design director, Fabio Zambernardi. That same year, Miuccia Prada collaborated with the Tanztheater Wuppertal to design costumes for its dancers. This year, during Art Basel Miami, YoungArts is presenting an exhibit of collages it commissioned from choreographers during the COVID-19 lockdown. Conceived and curated by Kristy Edmunds, a YoungArts board member who has recently been named the director of Mass MoCA, and titled The Choreographers’ Scores: 2020, it is a collaboration with 26 U.S.-based choreographers who created handmade scores that will also be offered as fine art prints. YoungArts partnered with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Pomegranate Arts, and Lapis Press to present and publish this exhibition, which will be at the YoungArts Gallery from December 1 to 17.
Balletomane Sarah Arison is the chair of the YoungArts board of directors as well as the president of the Governing Trustees of American Ballet Theatre. Those are just two of her myriad endeavors supporting the arts, including her own Arison Arts Foundation. She is kind of modern-day Miami Medici—without the Catholicism and the need for internecine machinations. She’s too nuanced for that, too imbued with class unencumbered by snobbery. Her sense of noblesse oblige doesn’t seem obligatory at all but comes instead from her own keen sense of kindness that can enable joy in others. Let’s finally circle back to that: kindness as an instigator of art. And let’s as well circle back to that just-so moment in a fashion house when everything comes together. I was wondering what the “just-so story” was for YoungArts. So, who better to turn to than Arison herself, whose grandfather, Micky Arison, founded Carnival Cruise Lines but as a teenager dreamed of being a concert pianist. He took some of his billion-dollar wealth and founded YoungArts for other teenagers who have such dreams to be artists.
“I have an aspiring artistic soul,” his granddaughter Sarah tells me over Zoom. “But no artistic talent whatsoever. I was more of a science nerd. I was on the math team in school. I was in premed my first two years in college. But for a while I didn’t understand the incredible impact it had on me because every interaction I had with my grandparents when I was growing up revolved around the arts. We’d go to the symphony together. We would go to the ballet together. We would travel together, but in traveling we would always go to museums. Whatever was going on culturally wherever we were, that is where we were. It was unconsciously a really huge part of my life growing up, being surrounded by artists and the arts. But I was on a very traditional academic path.
“When I was 19, I went to our annual YoungArts gala in Miami with my grandmother—not that I was particularly interested. Like I said, I was in the middle of studying organic chemistry at that point. I was pretty serious about it. One of the mothers of a visual arts winner that year had heard I was connected to the founding family. She came up to me with tears in her eyes. She said, ‘I have to thank you so much for what you’ve done for my son. He used to come home from school and want to sit on the floor and draw. I would yell at him and tell him to go do his real work—his math, his science.’ She told me that seeing him there and seeing him honored for his talent and being encouraged to pursue this in his education and career and being mentored by luminaries in his field and being offered scholarships for what he was doing made her realize that his art was real work, too. I was a little bit dumbstruck by that for a while. I went home thinking about it and thinking about the impact of YoungArts not only on the artists that go through the program, but also the impact it can have on society as a whole and the perception of the value of artists within society. So, the next morning I knocked on my grandmother’s door and I said, ‘Grandma, I would like to help.’ I actually went back to school and changed my major from biology to a double major in business and French with a minor in art history. And I joined the board of YoungArts.”
It is that combination of Arison’s business acumen with her love of arts and appreciation of artists that she so gracefully brings to each board of each art institution to which she belongs, but especially YoungArts, which is such an integral part of her heritage. A multitasker, she has also produced films, including the documentary The Price of Everything, directed by Nathanial Kahn, which is about the transactional aspect of the art world. Its title is based on the Oscar Wilde quote in which he says that a cynic “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It seems to have been Arison’s mission to keep cynicism at bay in her work at YoungArts. What does she herself value? “Collaboration,” she says without hesitation. “And not only with our cultural partners who give us such huge support, but also our donors and board members and our corporate ones. It’s easy for corporate partners to be there when there are events that they can put their names on. But for them to stick with us—like Prada—is so important. They worked with us on our 40th- birthday party. Since 2018, when we did our first event with Prada, we have stayed in touch with them and are constantly figuring out how we can continue to work together. So not being a kind of one-off support is really important and being instead a sustained source of support because you really get to know each other and integrate your programs a lot more. I look on them more as a partner,” she says, yes, without cynicism and even that sense of joy that she and Prada and YoungArts inspire in others.
