Home : Lunch with Lydia

• 
• 
• User rating: Log in or register to rate this

| | | | |

Artist Michele Oka Doner. Photo: Andrew Uloza/For The Miami Herald

Related Links

• See more celeb lunchtime chats.

Tropical treasures

By Lydia Martin

Sitting here in the courtyard at Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in the Design District, the place she calls "Miami's salon, " artist Michele Oka Doner is giving high priestess.

There is something almost transcendent about the Miami Beach native who has spent her career exalting the trinkets of her childhood: the seashells, palm fronds, seed pods, bits of coral and tropical leaves and blossoms that washed up at her feet or floated toward her on the breeze.

Perhaps her trademark look gives her that spiritual air: The flowy, handmade silk tunics that fill the closets of her SoHo loft and her mid-Beach condo (black ones for New York, white ones for South Florida), the dark hair pulled into a classical bun, the regal way she carries her tall frame.

Or it could be the way she speaks. Luxuriously, in unhurried, committed sentences, as if there were nothing but time.

"I was always conscious of my enormous bond and reverence for the place where I was born, " says Oka Doner, whose book Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden, written with another native, Wolfsonian Museum founder Mitchell Wolfson Jr., was recently reissued by a HarperCollins imprint. Originally published by Germany's Feierabend Unique Books in 2005 for double its $49.95 list price, it is not only a personal scrapbook (Oka Doner and Wolfson are from prominent Miami Beach families, and their fathers served as Beach mayors) but also a broad historical, social, even geological and botanical, account of how the city came to be what it is today.

"My earliest memories are all natural events, " Oka Doner says over falafels and greens. "I remember when we still lived on 30th Street, it poured at Flamingo Park, where we were playing. My father had a 1949 black Cadillac, very curvy. And we got into the car and drove six or seven minutes to the house, where the sun was shining. I just couldn't reconcile this, to the point that I remember the exact feeling today. How could there have been all this rain at the park, and here the ground wasn't even wet? The other thing I remember was standing on the lawn and smelling the smoke and seeing the clouds from the Everglades when it burned.

"I remember the great hurricane of 1950, and that the palms that stood on either side of the sidewalk were gone in the morning. They hadn't fallen; they weren't bent over. They didn't exist at all. All there was were the holes. These are my primal memories."

But what she remembers most clearly is being transfixed by the Atlantic. Because she still is.

"From the horizon, I understood the concept of infinity even before I knew the word. I would watch the waves, how they kept coming up and back. And I saw that it was something that had been there before me and would be there after me. Don't ask me how I understood this. But it was the leavening to everything I did."

Miami Beach, the book is a collection of memories and memorabilia. Inside: sheet music, blueprints to iconic architecture, recipes from the Wolfson and Oka families, photos of long-gone lushness and still-standing landmarks befitting two nostalgic old-timers who, in the mid-1990s, took a road trip to check out Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps buildings through the South.

"Mickey was driving, and I was singing, " Oka Doner says. "As we crossed the Suwannee River I somehow remembered the Orange Blossom Song, and he started singing it with me. I said, 'Now, how do you know that?' That got us into a 'Do you remember this? Do you remember that?' We had never talked about doing a book, but by the time we hit Ohio I was taking notes. We played with titles between Ohio and New York."

Oka Doner is an internationally acclaimed artist who has lived for years with her family in a SoHo loft that also serves as her studio.

Her work encompasses sculpture, furniture, jewelry and other forms of design, but she is perhaps best known for more than two dozen public art commissions, including A Walk on the Beach, the striking black granite floor embedded with bronze marine-inspired shapes at Miami International Airport, which she has been expanding for several years, partly in white marble and partly in more black granite; and Radiant Site, a 150-foot wall composed of 11,000 gold tiles at the Herald Square Subway complex in New York.

In 2006, one of her pieces, The Bee, was exhibited as part of a group show at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden that centered around works by Dale Chihuly.

Even when her organic imagery is not specifically subtropical, the 62-year-old Oka Doner is borrowing from her childhood.

"My spiritual matrix is Miami; my studio is New York, " Oka Doner says. And she comes home often, to perch on the banquette she built against the east-facing windows of her condo on Collins Avenue and 52nd Street where she can spend whole days reading books and the subtle changes of her ocean.

"I walked down the boardwalk to 21st Street the other day. It was just beautiful. When I am walking south, I look left. I'm an optimist, " she says with a smile, meaning that she prefers to look toward the water than at the endless new condo towers encroaching on what once was her Eden.

There is no question she still cherishes its magic: "The sunsets at night, that orange color in the skyline, the palm trees against it. That is still my sanctuary." But she is not beyond slamming the modern incarnation of the place.

GROWING PAINS

"You can't hold back the fact the cities of the future are vertical, " she says. "And maybe it's a good thing that they didn't take up more green space. But Miami right now is all about excess, all about being showy. It's going through this really rude adolescence. I hope the developers here would be glad to have their grandchildren live in these new buildings. The definition of a civilized culture was when you did something with your grandchildren in mind. A barbarian was somebody who didn't."

She has no passion for the boxy, glass-and-steel architecture that keeps sprouting here.

"Where are the people in Miami who care about making magnificent buildings? I want to see the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building."

She sure can sound like one of those transplanted New Yorkers who loves to be here but loves even more to cut the place down to size, you tell her. And she doesn't get ruffled.

"I don't think this has to do with being a New Yorker. I'm saying that those people put their hearts into those buildings. I'm saying that in Miami, a lot is getting built cynically. Buildings are thrown up, and they start falling apart from the day they open. They are not loved. Miami is a kid with too much beer and too much testosterone, and it's just drunk on itself right now."

And New York is much more evolved?

"Two hundred years ago it was dirty and corrupt, and I'm sure the people who came from Amsterdam with their venerable institutions thought New York was flashy and horrible. We still have flashy and horrible people in New York. But we're bigger, so we can afford to have those people and other kinds of people, too."

But Oka Doner doesn't fixate on Miami's immaturity, not when the broader culture is cruising for a comeuppance.

'PAGAN TIMES'

"We are basically back to pagan times. There is an emphasis on the body, an emphasis on too much food, on too much of everything. I never understood the vomitoriums, but now I do. They just didn't call it bulimia back then. We didn't used to go out every night. We went out on Saturday nights. We're Rome right now. We are a country of people who want what we want when we want it. We have bred generations of soft people. I think abstinence would be a very dignified response right now. A very real option to the orgy."

That, and going back to valuing the simplest treasures.

"From an early age, the things that meant the most to me were not for sale. The palms silhouetted against the sunsets, that's still there. And there is all of that infinity, running up and down. You just have to be conscious of it. Unfortunately, there are lots of sleeping souls in Miami. People who don't hear their number called at Epicure Market."