At the end of a long driveway overgrown with banyan trees, snaking vines and royal palms, just off a busy boulevard in Coconut Grove, Miami, lies an unlikely cultural oasis. For the past three years, sculptor Mark Handforth and his filmmaker wife, Dara Friedman—two artists whose work draws inspiration from big city streets—have lived and made work in this tropical spot. Ostentatious McMansions are fast replacing the modest neighborhood's bungalows, but the dense vegetation shields the couple's Shangri-La.
"We call it our David Koresh compound," Handforth jokes. The property consists of a spacious four-bedroom 1920s Spanish colonial house, a converted garage, and a single-story concrete studio. A hodgepodge of artifacts populates the landscape: a toy Vespa, coils of thick blue rope, a green and white Hobie Cat. Smoke rises from a boulder fire pit, and a picnic table has been set for dinner. A tall, easygoing Englishman with hair pulled back in a graying ponytail, Handforth wears a white T-shirt, shorts, and is barefoot. He eyes a plate piled with uncooked rack of lamb. "God, I hope you're not a vegetarian."
"We probably should have asked that before you got here," Friedman adds. She's strikingly pretty, and a bit more put together than her husband.
As the lay of the property attests, both artists are enjoying a heightened level of success. Still, each remains humble and gracious. Perhaps parenthood has helped keep things in perspective; they have two daughters, Violet and Cherry, aged seven and five. Or maybe it's the deeper kind of seclusion that Miami affords, the distance from the cacophony and competition that is the New York art world.
Handforth's works in progress are scattered about the grounds. Behind the main house, he shows me a model of a seven-foot-high, five-pointed star scheduled for installation this spring in front of Washington, D.C.'s Hirshhorn Museum—once it is cast in aluminum, it will take the place of Alexander Calder's Two Discs. Any sculptor would kill for such an honor, but Handforth takes it in stride. "They asked me to make a proposal, and it was Washington, so I just crumpled a star. You need a big old crumpled star in front of a museum."
We move on to another piece, a twisted lamppost fitted with a magenta-tinted fluorescent bulb. This month, it will rise from the sidewalk outside a show at his New York gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise. With the aid of two oak branches in the yard, Handforth has managed to bend the metal pole into another star. "There's something absolutely inevitable about the form of a star," he says. "It's terribly iconic to all cultures. It's an absolute piece of common currency in terms of a form, in terms of an idea, much in the same way that I see the lamppost. It's not owned by one group or another. Yet, at the same time, it's this really heavily loaded thing."
