LMNT: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

An Interview with Gino Tozzi and Daniella Sforza

Gino Tozzi and Daniella Sforza at LMNT in Miami’s Wynwood Art District.

In December 2010, LMNT opened in Miami’s Wynwood Art District. LMNT is an art complex that gathers creatives from all disciplines. With two art spaces, a video and photography studio, a recording studio, an outdoor sculpture garden, and six artists-in-residency studios, LMNT will revolutionize Miami’s cultural scene. ARTDISTRICTS spoke with its founder, Gino Tozzi, and its director and curator, Daniella Sforza, about this ambitious project.

By Denise Colson

Denise Colson - Gino, what does this project consist of? What led you to create LMNT?

Gino Tozzi - Victor Hugo said, “Greater than the tread of armies is an idea whose time has come.” A decade ago a close friend and I began dreaming of a space to continue to create the artistic furniture and sculpture we had been developing. Later my production company also began to require more space and a recording studio. The idea I had been mulling over came to concrete reality when I saw the property and envisioned the fusion of all possible artistic disciplines under LMNT (pronounced elementi). The concept of incorporating the restaurant sprang naturally from my Italian heritage of gathering friends and family around a table of good food.  It made sense to cater to all the senses in this initiative.

D.C.- What did you have in mind when you chose this building to house this cultural complex? What areas will it include?

G.T.- I needed a large enough space to enable the scope of the project to be born and grow. LMNT is a 15,000-square ft. space that includes a 5,000 -square ft. art gallery in two versatile exhibit halls that will feature moveable suspended surfaces allowing for a myriad of possible, even labyrinthine, wall space. There are 6 AIR Space Studios for artists in residence, all with natural light, secretarial services, wifi connectivity, individual phone lines, 24-hour security with assigned electronic key entry, access to full kiln room, outdoor welding patio, and the possibility to showcase their work at the gallery. LMNT has a fully equipped cyclo-rama, a 2,000 square foot Photo/Video Studio with green screen and killer sound system to amp the creative process, and a state of the art, 1,300 square foot Recording Studio that includes 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound, dubbing/recording capacity, equipped with musicians and video/film production in mind, making  it Miami’s most versatile option for sound engineering. The LMNT restaurant lounge, along with the exhibit halls and studio spaces, will be open to the public and to events and performances. The menu is under wraps for the moment, but suffice it to say that it will feature organic and vegan-friendly food items while tempting the most discerning culinary palette: Mediterranean tapas, raw food, free-range, grass-fed cuts … and that is as detailed as I will get for now.

D.C.- Daniella, how did you become involved in this project? What plans do you have as director and curator of this new space?

Daniella Sforza - Serendipity, often the midwife of invention, introduced me to Gino through a mutual friend. We met over the course of six months, discussing a shared vision for a cultural space the likes of which we are now undertaking.

I join Gino’s project as Curating Director, with the experience of having worked for and being greatly influenced by the Guggenheim Foundation, where I acquired my approach to the selection process. As an art critic for the Buenos Aires Herald, Moscow’s Element Magazine, and contributing writer for mags and zines, I have tempered my objective/subjective eye.

G.T.- I appreciate that Daniella brings her own personal approach and view of what constitutes contemporary art, and even the very definition of the role it plays for humanity.

D.S.-This is my biggest and most exciting challenge: to find artists who truly represent this, the highest state in the evolution of human consciousness.

Probably Aristotle’s definition of “man” as political animal prompted Berlin Biennale’s Curator Artur Zmijewski-for this year’s edition-to request that artists’ submissions include a statement of their “political inclinations.”

I tend to see us, as Teilhard de Chardin put it so eloquently, as “spiritual beings living a human experience.” So I ask artists to reflect on their own vision of the purpose of this human life.

Let’s wrap our heads around something bigger than ourselves, more than just our socio-economic-political constructs that tend to separate us into exclusionary, confining boxes and keep us in our small-mindedness.

I am with those artists who take that quantum leap out of the box of finite games toward breaking the illusion of separateness. I intend to attract that in LMNT. It takes a leap of faith and also a firm certainty that we are working well.

D.C.- Which artists do you represent? What exhibitions do you have planned for the coming months?

D.S.- We will be exhibiting at Arte Americas, across from the VIP lounge in two booths in our opening year with what I am titling, The Latin American rEvolution, featuring the Guggenheim Fellow, Liset Castillo; the eloquent Angel Vapor; young and talented Tatiana Blanco; and the one and onIy Milcho.

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D.C.- Do you consider art fairs to be valid platforms for promoting your artists?

D.S.- Art fairs are expressions of our inner hunter-gatherer. Watering holes, hunting grounds. They are wonderful opportunities for getting up close and personal with the work you love, for discovering new loves, observing the infinite landscape, sniffing out new tendencies, taking the pulse, and charting the direction where art is going.

Art comes to life at the moment of acquisition, almost as much as when it is being created.

With the recent launch of online VIP ArtFair-and despite its glitches-the tendency in the future (as with Film Festivals) will be that Art Fairs will go the way of online events. After all, how many brick & mortar Art Fairs can boast visitors from 130 countries eyeballing artwork more than 3.3 million times?

D.C.- What plans do you have to participate in fairs in the near future?

D.S.- We are eager to participate when the time is right. The excitement of the fairs is sine qua non, the exposure, the thrill of a sale, the energy that charges the air… All these possibilities are too sexy to forego, but all in good time.

D.C.- Which markets will you focus on?

D.S.- There are two ways to approach art sales chasing after indexes or defining them. The unchartered has always fascinated me, and there is an ever-growing tendency to venture  east to find the next Xiaogang or Songsong. But I am looking inward at the artist, while gazing toward Syria, Burma, Mumbai…

D.C.- Miami has changed its cultural and artistic scene totally with the arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach. What do you both feel still remains to be done?

D.S.- We need to rid ourselves of our self-imposed stigma. That was best summarized a couple of Art Basels ago by Jeff Koons, that “Miami is really just more about a party scene.”

Miami’s arts and cultural heritage has always had to justify, explain, or apologize for itself. Basel saw potential in Miami, and now collectors come to buy-in the seven-figure range-Freud, Rothko, Klein, Twombly, Lam, Basquiat, Fanszhi, Diebenkorn…

Miami has become THE canvas for starchitects Starck, Gehry, Herzog & De Meuron…. If that is not indicative of critical mass, what is?

But speaking toward a deeper cultural identity, Miami is home to rich arts institutions nurturing talent: the New World School of the Arts, the Miami Arts Institute, DASH, the Performing Arts Charter School, the New World Symphony… I look forward into the not too distant future when audiences in Berlin, Shanghai, NY, Venice, and Rome will be lauding artists from Miami.

Next steps? A Miami Biennale, and I would love to see (and take part in) this coming to fruition. In fact, Jorge Gutierrez of The Art Gallery Systems is targeting 2012. If anyone can do this, he can, but we need to have that same vision for the fine arts and capture the attention of angels such as the Arshts, Ziffs, and Echeverrias.

D.C.- How will LMNT enrich the city’s cultural offering?

D.S.- LMNT will be partnering with exceptional artists for exhibits, events, and performances. In the spirit of dissolving the human illusion of barriers and finiteness, LMNT sees a blending of the arts: music, culinary, visual, and yes even tapping the yogic arts as well. We have a vision of bringing together the overarching population in a movement to reach that “critical mass,” toward peace. To make it happen here and now in every thing we do. At one time we could only “imagine all the people.”  I think increasingly there are many people out there that are making it a shared reality. That is our mission.

LMNT, as a facilitator for the arts, seeks to manifest dreams from concept to fruition and acquisition. We will incubate talent within the discourse of a thoroughly contemporary art, which reflects, within our historical context, the highest evolutionary state of consciousness. In simple terms, art that serves to elevate, transcend, and invite new compassionate and integrated ways of thinking about ourselves and the world as we perceive it.

LMNT is located at 55 NW 36 Street, Miami, Florida, 33127. / www.L-M-N-T.com.