Thanks to the hard work and dedication of many people, Pompano Beach has a gorgeous new cultural center. It opened last weekend, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday, May 11 featuring Mayor Lamar Fisher, Broward County Commmissioner Chip LaMarca, and Representative Kristin Jacobs. Guests at celebrations that ran through the weekend were feted with a wide range of entertainment. Thursday’s and Friday’s performances were produced by acclaimed playwright/actor/producer Michael McKeever, and ranged from Fushu Daiko – Taiko Drummers to Sax Fire sax quintet to Florida Singing Sons to Cirquesco to the Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus to New Century Dance Company Living Sculpture. Wandering musicians and pop-up concerts delighted the estimated crowd of 1,000 who showed up for the Thursday evening festivities alone.
The center’s raison d’etre is to help discover the most incredible local talent and visionary artists, “to find artists we don’t know we have,” says Alyona Ushe, president and CEO of the Pompano Beach Cultural Center. The center exists to support, celebrate and admire local talent. As Byron Swart, the center’s curator, tells us, having the center is forward thinking on the part of Pompano Beach. As Ushe says, “Art needs to be in every place, not just galleries. Art is life.” A highlight of the festivities was the opening of the exhibit “Shipwrecked of Reason, Half a Century in Cuban Art,” curated by internationally acclaimed Cuban curator Isabel Maria Perez-Perez. (See our separate blog post on that.)
The 46,000 square foot building housing the center (a building including a library that has not opened yet) was created to suit three entities — the Broward County Library System, the City of Pompano Beach, and the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency. Architect Alejandro Silva, who designed the building in partnership with Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean of Architecture at Princeton University, tells us that having three clients with different goals made it a better building, “an intertwined hybrid that made the whole project better.”
Among the building’s many delightful features is the way silhouettes of tall palm trees swaying in the breeze dance on the south-facing second floor translucent windows — nature and architecture combining to create art.
And when you stand at the top of the wide stairway that connects the first and second floors, you can see people in the lobby at the same time as people on the roof terrace, the latter through “eyelid” windows on the wall above the stairway. Silva, who was born into an architectural and engineering family, says the design concept encompassed allowing as much natural light into the building as possible, while framing views.
The outdoor patio, a gesture to old Pompano, is a public space, but you don’t see it when coming upstairs because access to it is partly hidden, Silva says. The architects put the patio window above the stairs to let people know the patio is there. That window ties the upper and lower lobby and outdoor lobby together, he says.
The building features spaces on the ground floor designed for heavy everyday use, such as the library, the creative center entrance, and media labs and recording studios. The second floor features the theater space, which has pull-out upholstered seating for 400. Eventually, the planners look to add density to the site, with parking garages, retail, restaurants and night life.
The Center has a full slate of performances moving forward, featuring its 11 resident companies, including dance, music and theater. It offers opportunities for “arts ambassadors” — volunteers to help the center present its spectacular events. For more information on becoming an arts ambassador, contact LaCora Funches at lacora@thecreatives.org or 954-839-9578.
