"Aqua Vitae" Sculpture by Judy Pfaff
Commissioned for the Police Station 1992
Relocated to the Convention Center 2001

The commissions for the Miami Beach Police Station were awarded in 1992, after a national competition. Proposals from dozens of artists were reviewed by a Professional Advisory Committee, composed of museum curators and art historians from outside Miami, who recommended three finalists to the City.

In the final stage of the selection process, the Art in Public Places Committee, in consultation with the Chief of Police and his officers, chose Judy Pfaff's proposal for a large sculptural installation as the major commission for the building.*

JUDY PFAFF, born in London in 1946, received her MFA from Yale University in 1973. Since then she has been actively exhibiting in this country and abroad and has achieved an international reputation as an artist of originality and importance. Her work is included in the permanent collections of many museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art. She has received a number of important grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and two awards for sculpture from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Among her large scale commissions for public buildings are a 1991 site specific sculpture for the GTE Corporation in Irving, Texas and a 70,000 square foot installation, completed in 1995, for the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.

Her abstract sculpture, aq'ua vi'tae (water of life), evokes the essential nature of Miami, its weather and its water. The clusters of wire and metal mesh, the thin metal tubing with which the artist draws in the air, the hand blown shapes of colored glass, all suggest currents of water or of air, and the movements of light, clouds, sun and rain.

A mural by Ellen Lanyon, who was among the three finalists, enhances one of the walls of the lobby and a painting by Roberto Juarez enlivens the Community Room. In the Community Room, visitors can also view some documents of the selection process, including a model submitted by Cynthia Carlson.

ELLEN LANYON has had more than sixty solo exhibitions of her work over a distinguished career. Her paintings and murals have been commissioned for public buildings by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bicentennial Project; The State of Illinois Building, Chicago; The Workingman's Cooperative Bank of Boston; The State Capitol, Springfield Illinois.

Her mural for the Police Station, Miami Metamorphosis, draws on the nostalgic images of vintage postcards to narrate the transformation of Miami's natural forms - - the tropical birds, shells, palm fronds, snails -- into the stylized motifs of Art Deco architecture.

ROBERTO JUAREZ works and lives in New York City and Miami Beach. He has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute and at galleries in the United States, Canada and Europe. His work is included in a number of important public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and El Museo del Barrio in New York.

For his painting, Bringing the Beach Inside, Juarez combed Miami Beach for forms and objects and glued beach sand to the surface of the work in seaweed shapes. To relate the piece to the police station, he included images of handcuffs, a policeman's shield and gun, all embedded in the colors and shapes of nature.

*Judy Pfaff sculpture to be restored and relocated to the east atrium of the Convention Center (Summer 2001)