Here’s How You Can Be Included in The Gramps Yearbook

On any given night at Gramps, you could walk in alone and still end up knowing half the room. That was the magic of this misfit Wynwood bar: karaoke bleeding into drag shows, a death metal set overlapping with a comedy show, regulars stacked three-deep at the bar swapping stories, sweat dripping on the dancefloor. With the beloved venue days away from closing, photographer and creative director Lex Barberio is racing against the clock to preserve the stories of the people who made it what it was.

Their project, The Gramps Yearbook, is exactly what it sounds like, and a much-needed shift in perspective on what, for many, feels like another tragic loss for Miami’s underground. During this final stretch, Barberio is photographing the regulars who filled its hand-painted walls, pairing each flash-lit portrait with a handwritten memory of what Gramps meant to them. The result is part punk archive, part family album, and part cultural record created in real time.

“Gramps was one of those pillars in the community from the very start,” Barberio says. “It was one of the places you could go by yourself on any night and know 20 or 30 people in the crowd. Everybody was just hanging out in such proximity.”

That kind of closeness, they argue, is increasingly rare in Miami, a city with a “disinterest in preserving cultural history,” where beloved spaces are often “turned over for money at any moment.” Gramps’ closure pushed what started as a loose idea into something bigger and more focused. “I didn’t initially plan to do an entire yearbook,” they say. “I thought I’d come out for a day, shoot a couple of portraits. Then I really thought about it. Gramps draws so many types of people. Karaoke, drag, a fucking death metal band. I realized I needed to be there every day and photograph as many people as I possibly could.”

So far, they’re more than 40 portraits deep, aiming to capture close to 200 faces by closing day on January 4. Each subject is photographed in their favorite spot inside the venue, then handed an index card to write their name, Instagram handle, and whatever they’d typically sign in a yearbook — a memory, a doodle, a sentence that still stings or fills their heart with joy. Barberio later scans and collages those handwritten notes directly onto the images, treating text and photo as interconnected pieces of a puzzle.

“A photo is just a photo until you add that human touch,” they explain. “The words change everything.” Paired with the portraits, the handwritten thoughts turn each image into an impactful piece of lived archive. The process is painstaking, since every portrait is shot in different lighting, different corners of Gramps, different moods. There’s no batch editing here. “Every single photo has to be individually treated,” Barberio says. “It’s been an exercise in craft.”

But the work goes deeper than technique. For Barberio, the yearbook is inextricable from their own return to Miami after a decade away. They grew up here, left around 2016 to pursue a career in advertising in New York, then came back in 2024 to a city that felt almost unrecognizable. “It was jarring,” they say. “I felt the loss of what we once had almost immediately when I got back.”

That push and pull between loss and reconnection shapes the project from the inside out. “Art is self-exploration exposed,” Barberio says. “You’re going through some shit, and then you make some shit about it. Those things are connected.” Where their earlier work centered on identity and queerness, this chapter is about place and where they fit within it. “My self-exploration now isn’t as much ‘Who am I?’” they say. “It’s more, ‘Where do I fit into this?’”

Crucially, The Gramps Yearbook is not meant to be a eulogy. Barberio is adamant that it’s a celebration. “This project is not a sad occasion,” they say. “It’s a happy occasion. It’s about highlighting the best parts of these communities, the power of them, because that’s how you invite more of that into our spaces.”

The project came together quickly, with support from Subtropic Film Festival, which helped connect Barberio with Gramps’ team and clear the path for them to document the venue’s final days. “Once places like this are gone, their stories tend to disappear with them,” say Subtropic cofounders José Zaragoza and Noelia Solange. “Lex’s photography feels like a necessary documentation of a Miami that’s changing before our eyes.”

When the portraits are done, Barberio will produce a physical yearbook, followed by a launch and signing party. But Gramps is only the beginning. The Yearbook reflects a larger mission they’re actively pursuing: documenting Miami’s niche communities before they’re flattened, forgotten, or branded into something unrecognizable.

“I want to paint a real picture of Miami through my work, from underground cinema clubs to chefs to people in the Everglades,” they say. “If there’s a community worth documenting, I want to know about it.” Consider this the open invitation: Barberio encourages anyone who feels their corner of the city deserves to be seen to reach out. And for those who want to be part of The Gramps Yearbook itself, the instructions are simple: DM Barberio to set up a time, or show up at Gramps and look for them as they shoot in the coming days, before the gates close for good.