Wave of Car Crashes at Art Spaces Spreads to Florida

The site of Wednesday's crash at Art Forever Studios in Miami.
Photo: Via Google Street View.

Last month saw a dramatic and alarming spike in car crashes at US art spaces, with a museum in Montana and a gallery in California finding themselves on the wrong side of reckless drivers’ bumpers. That frightful trend seems poised to persist as news reaches us from Florida that on the afternoon of Wednesday July 2 an SUV crash-landed into an art studio building in the Liberty City section of Miami.

According to the Miami Herald, artist Addonis Parker was hard at work on a painting—he specializes in figurative, often surreal paintings of famous Africans and African Americans—around 3pm, when a gray SUV smashed through the front door of his Art Forever Studios complex at 6140-A Northwest 7th Avenue, narrowly avoiding a landmark mural of Martin Luther King Jr. just a few feet away on the building’s facade.

“I am trying to understand how this could happen,” Parker told the Herald. “There are tens of thousands of dollars in damage.” Dismayed though he may have been, Parker was relieved that the MLK mural made it through the ordeal unscathed, noting: “I just restored that.”

According to the Herald, Parker “represented the Global African Diaspora at Art Basel Miami” in 2013.


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