New Cultural Counsel Book Shows the Beauty and Toxicity in Florida’s Cultural History

With The Deep State: Art, Culture & Florida, New York-based communications firm Cultural Counsel didn’t set out to create a definitive art history book on the Sunshine State. What it did instead was capture Florida’s surreal yet earthy and sensual cultural histories through personal moments and creative movements.

“I think the audience [for the book] is people who are interested in seeing Florida with fresh eyes…It’s also for people who are interested in how art, in all of its forms — film, literature, paintings, architecture — can be used and has been used to create a sense of a place,” says editor and Cultural Counsel senior vice president Hunter Braithwaite. 

Braithwaite spent a decade in Miami as a journalist, founding the art-focused publication Miami Rail. “It feels kind of random to publish a book about Florida when you’re a PR company in New York, but when you start teasing out the connections, it’s really organic,” he says.  

Cultural Counsel works with a wide range of artistic organizations in Florida, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the City of Miami Beach, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Founder Adam Abdalla, who has roots in Florida, combined his interests in wrestling and art for the book’s feature on Tampa-based professional wrestler and artist Lee Moriarty. This intersection of activities is also the focus of his brand Orange Crush, its photo book Visitors, and an exhibition set to debut at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, in 2027. 

Moving chronologically, The Deep State takes readers on an adventure, starting with cover art by director and Miami resident Harmony Korine. It explores gorgeous watercolors that famed artist John Singer Sargent painted at Vizcaya in the early 20th century, Andy Sweet’s Shtetl in the Sun photographs of Jewish retirees on South Beach in the late 1970s, and a more recent conversation between businessman and art collector Jorge Pérez and Pérez Art Museum Miami director Franklin Sirmans. “The role of the underappreciated or under-known artist is just as important as Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” Braithwaite says. 

While rooting through storage at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Braithwaite found works from E.G. Barnhill. A tourist art photographer in the early 20th century, Barnhill created a certain salable image of Florida through black-and-white images of sunsets and palm trees that he sold to tourists on the Gulf Coast.

“He was doing something that no one else was doing,” says Braithwaite. “He was using uranium dye to color them. And so it gave it a sort of unearthly, eerily beautiful palette, but also, it was toxic. We couldn’t have made this up,” he says. That mix of toxicity, magic, and beauty as a defining feature of the state’s image is echoed throughout.

Alongside an excerpt from Gary Indiana’s 1999 book on fashion designer Gianni Versace’s murder on South Beach, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, are photos from the crime scene. They were taken by a now anonymous woman who exhibited them in a space curated by artist Kevin Arrow on Española Way in the ‘90s. “Hopefully somebody will read the story and say: ‘Oh, I know her,’” Braithwaite says. 

The book concludes with photographs and musings by Miami-based, internationally renowned artist Naomi Fisher, who shares her experiences as a teenager in the late ‘90s and early aughts, with, she says, “the rising profile of Art Basel in the background.” Fisher’s story is central to the story of contemporary art in Florida, not just for its insider look at the inception of a local art star scene, but because Fisher chose not just to focus on her art career, but to nurture an artist-led community through her work with her organization, Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI).

Cultural Counsel will launch The Deep State during Miami Art Week at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) with speakers Naomi Fisher, Anastasia Samoylova, and Klaudio Rodriguez from MFA St. Petersburg. It’ll also debut Ecologies, a series of public programs and performances in partnership with Knight Foundation, Pérez Art Museum Miami, NADA, and Cultured. The Art Week festivities also include a celebration of Cultural Counsel’s tenth anniversary at the Moore in the Design District.

Cultural Counsel’s Tenth Anniversary. 9 p.m. Tuesday, December 2, at The Moore, 4040 NE Second Ave., Miami; 305-209-2100; mooremiami.com. 

The Deep State with Hunter Braithwaite, Naomi Fisher, Anastasia Samoylova, and Klaudio Rodriguez. 3 p.m. Thursday, December 4, at NADA, 1400 N. Miami Ave., Miami; 212-594-0883; newartdealers.org. Pre-order the book via cultural-counsel.myshopify.com.