Joe Carollo's Dogs and Cats Walkway Fails to Live Up to Miami's Public Art Legacy

Officially debuting earlier this month, the Dogs and Cats Walkway Sculpture Gardens at Maurice A. Ferré Park consists of 52 aluminum sculptures of various dog and cat breeds painted in bright, garish colors and patterns. There's a longhaired cat painted in tiger stripes, a poodle with a rainbow dye job, a Chihuahua painted Lisa Frank-pink, and so on. Some pets are wearing clothes. There's a basset hound in a hoodie, a dalmatian in an oversized fire hat, and most revoltingly, a Labrador retriever in a police cap named the "Boss."

It doesn't take a trained artistic eye to realize these statues are ugly and unpleasant. None of them are visually coherent or particularly well made, and the whole installation feels pointlessly extravagant and cheap despite costing nearly $1 million of public funds.

Miami has always had an affinity for kitsch and pop art. Local museums and art fairs are replete with displays of art by Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, and the saccharine work of Romero Britto is all over the city. But at least those artists have a vision.
Koons' work reflects the excesses of American culture back at us. His art relies on a sense of mischief and dark humor, as one woman discovered this weekend at Art Wynwood when she accidentally shattered one of his distinctive porcelain balloon animals. But no ideas emanate from the Dogs and Cats Walkway. Looking at a longhaired orange cat with palm trees painted all over it does not stimulate the mind beyond thoughts like That's funny. It's utterly pointless.

The garden is especially pitiful considering Miami's strong tradition of public artworks, stewarded by Miami-Dade County's excellent Art in Public Places program. The collection includes sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein and Isamu Noguchi and murals by Keith Haring and Ed Ruscha.

Miami Commission Joe Carollo and his wife, Marjorie, the progenitors of the Dogs and Cats project, admitted that they ripped the idea off from a similar project in Colombia to attract tourists to Ferré Park. Like Wynwood Walls, the Carollos use art as a means to an end rather than a public good in and of itself.

Worse still, the commissioner rammed the idea through an approval process that led to at least one resignation from the Bayfront Park Management Trust board, which Carollo chairs. According to Cristina Palomo's letter of resignation, the proposal to build the garden had not been vetted before it went to vote, with no bids or input from institutions like Art in Public Places or the adjacent Pérez Art Museum Miami, who surely could have provided better artwork befitting a supposed "world-class" city.
So the Dogs and Cats project was not an original idea, was executed without proper planning, disrespects the existing artistic legacy of the city, and is not made for the people that live here. So why does it exist?

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the sculpture garden comes from the mind of a man currently wrestling control of many of Miami's cultural landmarks. Last year, Carollo led the effort to take over Virginia Key Beach Park from the majority-Black board. He also kicked Miami Dade College from Little Havana's Tower Theater. Carollo dominates and controls everything around him, no matter how ill-suited he is to the task, and this latest vanity project is possibly the worst thing so far.