The Tao of the Patty

Last month, we went on a joyride exploring the public art of Miami. In a vivid retelling, Lauren Baccus, our guide and the Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, recounts the experience.

The thing about patties is their ordinariness, their everyday, meat-pie-based simplicity. Still, there is deep wisdom in the patty: design a life for movement and flexibility; be economical with resources; and always, always remember that there are layers to this shit. This is how we began our downtown rumba tour, gathered at JRK with a tray of patties, Ting, Tito’s, and a grounding pause before stepping into the city. That moment, simple but intentional, reminded us that seeing differently often starts with the familiar. It’s in the act of slowing down, tasting something we know, and asking what stories might already be folded inside.

That bright and sunny Saturday, Commissioner members moved through the city in an open top bus and branded cups (what might patties also teach us about marketing?) Downtown’s monuments gave way to the yelled greetings of Overtown and the incessant pulse of Wynwood. We weren’t looking for the new, we were exploring what was already here: Oldenburg’s fallen fruit bowl as a meditation on abundance and loss; Mark Fleuridor’s mural as a lesson in care and resilience; Robert McKnight and Marielle Plaisir speaking to lineage and persistence; and Mantra’s butterflies drawing our gaze upward, fragile and steadfast all at once.

Our single pause took place at Quiet Hours, a more intimate shift from monumental public work to the gestural abstraction and experimental practices of Andrew Arrocho. That stop reminded us that Miami’s art ecology thrives as much on public space as it does in the intimacies of studios and galleries and every time we gather together.

In Downtown Miami, where the skyline is all crane and scaffolding, the city is refashioning itself out loud and in real time. In the midst of the clang of progress, Isamu Noguchi’s Challenger Memorial, a double helix of white granite and steel, continues to rise quietly into the air. The weekend of our tour marked the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and the sculpture’s simplicity felt almost defiant compared to the looming arcs of the Fountain Bridge to the north. That contrast between Noguchi’s clarity of form and the bridge’s titanic performance is an exercise in meaning-making. What does  restraint, silence, and intention tell us about a broader, perhaps lesser known, city in transition? 

We’re in a construction zone, literally and metaphorically, streets shifting and skylines changing faster than memory can keep pace. But maybe that’s why these tours matter. Each stop asks us to slow down, to collect stories rather than objects, to look again at what we’re building and what we’re losing in the process. In Miami’s constant state of becoming, perhaps our task is not only to watch the new emerge but to keep seeing with care; seeing in ways that let us imagine transformation without erasure. Let us stay humble and radiant, layered and whole.

This is the way of the patty. 

Photography by Passion Ward, Roy Wallace, and Studio Ambrosia.