Christina Pettersson and Carlos Betancourt Win 2023 No Vacancy Awards, Miami Beach

Christina Pettersson Wins $25,000 Juried Prize for 

2023 No Vacancy, Miami Beach

Carlos Betancourt Wins $10,000 GMCVB’s People’s Choice Award

The Garden of Evil, Christina Pettersson. Installed in the Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club. Image credit: Zaire Aranguren. 

Miami Beach, FL — The City of Miami Beach, in collaboration with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority (MBVCA), is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 edition of No Vacancy. The Juried Prize has been presented to Christina Pettersson, who presented The Garden of Evil at the Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club. Pettersson has been awarded a prize of $25,000. The $10,000 People’s Choice Award, sponsored by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB), has been awarded to Carlos Betancourt for his work entitled The Future Eternal at the Betsy Hotel. Both works debuted for Miami Beach Art Week on November 16 and concluded on December 14. 

Jurors Nate Freeman (Culture Correspondent, Vanity Fair) and D.J. Hellerman (Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Fabric Workshop and Museum) awarded the Juried Prize to Stockholm-born Miami-based artist Christina Pettersson. Her work, The Garden of Evil, is a large-scale allegorical drawing on wood panels installed in the lobby of the Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club. It imagines a futuristic Miami Beach overwhelmed by invasive animals, a lushly tropical yet ultimately apocalyptic world where only the most opportunistic creatures remain. The work serves as a reminder to the viewer that an environment absent of native flora and fauna will soon find itself absent of humans.

The People’s Choice Award is determined by the public via an online vote. Their selection, The Future Eternal by the San Juan-born, Miami-based artist Carlos Betancourt, is an animated video projected onto the iconic “Betsy Orb,” a skybridge placed in between the two buildings of the Betsy Hotel. The colorful, kaleidoscopic installation reflects the Christmas decorations and tree toppers of Betancourt’s childhood, which he and his mother left behind when they moved from Puerto Rico to Miami. This memory led him to collect discarded decorative lights from second hand stores, which he has layered to explore themes of memory, beauty, and the passage of time in The Future Eternal.

No Vacancy is a juried art competition that supports and celebrates mainly local artists, provokes critical discourse, and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as temporary art destinations in their own right. No Vacancy 2023 included 12 participating artists drawn from a call for submissions and selected by representatives from the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places Committee, Cultural Arts Council (CAC) and MBVCA. Each artist created a site-specific work for display at one of 12 different hotels throughout Miami Beach. For the fourth edition of this competition, $35,000 in prizes were awarded, including the $10,000 Public Prize by the GMCVB and the $25,000 Juried Prize awarded by a panel of art world professionals.

For additional information please visit: www.mbartsandculture.org/no-vacancy.

Funding for this project is provided by the City of Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council, Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority, and the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. For additional information, please visit mbartsandculture.org.

###

About Christina Pettersson

Christina Pettersson explores resurrection and savage demise on a grand scale once reserved for history painting. Her drawings, sculptures, and most recently performances, reference classic mythology and literature, revealing a deep allegiance to the wilderness of a bygone era, the sorcery of the night, and the experience of a world in decline. It is a stage materialized from the often brutal but beautiful Everglades of her hometown, which she has spent a lifetime exploring.

About Carlos Betancourt

Carlos Betancourt (b. 1966 in San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Miami, FL) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring issues of memory, dwelling in issues of nature, the environment and matters of beauty, identity, and communication. Through re-examination, he recycles and reinterprets the past by delivering it in a fresh and new relevant context. 

About the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places Program
Art in Public Places is a city board responsible for the commission and purchase of artwork by contemporary artists in all media. The program allocates funds totaling 2% of hard costs for City projects and joint private/public projects. Funds from construction projects may be aggregated into the Art in Public Places Fund and allocated for artwork at public sites and for collection maintenance. The fund is administered by a City Commission-appointed citizen’s board of seven members, the Art in Public Places Committee.

About the Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council
The Cultural Arts Council (CAC) is an eleven-member council created in 1997 for the purpose of developing, coordinating and promoting the performing and visual arts in the City of Miami Beach. The CAC serves as arts advocates before governmental bodies, coordinates collective marketing initiatives for the local arts community and funds not-for-profit arts organizations. Since the program’s inception, the CAC has awarded approximately $18 million in cultural arts grants, supporting thousands of performances, exhibits, and other cultural activities in Miami Beach.

About the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority

The MBVCA is a seven-member authority, appointed by the City of Miami Beach Commission, with the goal of encouraging, developing and promoting the image of Miami Beach locally, nationally and internationally as an outstanding tourist destination. To this end, the MBVCA strategically focuses its funding investments in a balanced manner, fostering outstanding existing programs, stimulating new activities, and encouraging partnerships. The MBVCA is committed to a careful, long-term plan for allocation of resources to help Miami Beach thrive as a destination with something for everyone.

Media Contact:

Katrina Stewart or Andy Cushman

E: [email protected] or [email protected] 

T: 212.675.1800