PAST

Curated and designed by Philip Lique 

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In 1926, this building opened as the American Bakeries Company—an Art Deco-era factory designed to feed a booming city. Through hurricanes, economic shifts, and neighborhood change, it nourished  the community for half a century before falling silent in 1978___. In 1985, artists reclaimed the abandoned bakery, transforming ovens into studios and production lines into spaces of creation. Bakehouse has been a working home for Miami’s artists ever since, serving as an anchor of culture for the surrounding neighborhoods while providing vital sustenance for Miami’s growing creative communities. 

PAST—or more precisely, the many different pasts that intersect here--draws on history, but it does not attempt to trace events in a straight line or return to a single point of origin. Instead, it gathers fragments from archival documents, photographs, catalogs, brochures, legal documents, and media that, when combined together, convey the shifting identity of the Bakehouse over time.

Bakehouse’s story can be reconstructed through deeds, permits, grants, and correspondences from more than 1,500 artists who have worked here. But facts and dates are only a skeleton. The soul of Bakehouse lies elsewhere. It is in understanding that the past is as much compilation as it is confabulation. Memories, sometimes real and sometimes invented, fill the gaps and resist a fixed linear account.

This installation tells the unlikely story of how an abandoned bread factory became one of Miami’s first artist-run studio spaces. It is not a portrait so much as a character sketch, and like any sketch, it is incomplete; it suggests features and gestures but leaves much unsaid.

This vision of the past need not be accurate. What matters is how we weave separate moments into a larger story—one that allows us to live more fully in the present while imagining the future with confidence. The Bakehouse tale is still being written. What has already unfolded gives us a clear sense of the direction ahead, but there will always be more to remember.

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