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M12 | Friday, September 4, 2015 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
MANSION
GURU
IN EVERY SPACE,
SOME ART
Miami-born artist Michele Oka Doner often begins with
an architectural challenge and ends with
an art installation in a private home or residential building
Branches collected in the countryside
are piled high in her workroom and
two sections in her library are de-
voted to the ancient world.
As a child in the 1950s, Ms. Oka
Doner visited France with her par-
ents and saw how old European
buildings were integrated into the
modern street—a contrast to the
build-it-fast-and-cheap approach she
saw in America.
“What’s wonderful about working
now is I’m able to bring those no-
tions that were formed really 60
years ago in these fabulous old and
ancient cities to the developers who
want to incorporate art into their
buildings in a very traditional way,”
she says. One example: 68-inch han-
dles—spiny, burnt-looking—on the
doors of a contemporary condo
building in Soho.
Ms. Oka Doner grew up in Miami
Beach, where her father, Kenneth Oka,
served as mayor, though she says his
previous career as a judge was a big-
ger influence.
“It wasn’t a home where it was like,
‘What’d you do in school, what’s on
TV, go to bed.’ No. It was bigger-pic-
ture. He was a thinker and a philoso-
pher,” she recalls.
Ms. Oka Doner studied art at the
University of Michigan before mov-
ing to New York City in 1981. A turn-
ing point in her career came six
years later, when she won a national
public-art competition and installed
“Radiant Site,” a 165-foot-long wall
of 11,000 gold-luster tiles, in the sub-
way station below Manhattan’s Her-
ald Square. For Ms. Oka Doner, it
brings a “moment of respite” to trav-
elers and is something lasting, much
like Diego Rivera and other Mexican
muralists, whose work she had ad-
mired as a student.
Since then, she has created several
dozen permanent artworks in the
U.S. and Europe, most notably “A
Walk on the Beach: From Seashore to
Tropical Garden,” a mile-plus-long
work on the floor of the Miami Inter-
national Airport.
Ms. Oka Doner’s work also trans-
lates to more intimate settings, says
Patricia Hanna, art director of the
Related Group, the developer of One
Ocean. Ms. Oka Doner also designed
a mural for the company’s Apogee
Beach condo tower, completed at the
end of 2013.
“Michele is a Miami legend,” says
Ms. Hanna. The terrazzo floor, she
adds, is “a breath of fresh air.”
ARTIST MICHELE OKA DONER
donned a construction helmet and
closed-toe shoes this past week to
pour sections of blue-green terrazzo
for the lobby floor of a Miami condo
tower, laying down vortexes of bronze
palm fronds, then hand-tossing shells
and mother-of-pearl to add texture.
The 3,500-square-foot floor is for
One Ocean South Beach, where units
have sold for $1.2 million to $7.9 mil-
lion. It is the kind of art project Ms.
Oka Doner is known for: an amalgam
of carefully selected materials de-
signed to bring the ancient, natural
world into a hectic modern setting.
The 69-year-old artist sees little dif-
ference between her free-standing
sculptures, public-art installations, fur-
niture, jewelry, and commissions for
condo buildings and private homes.
“People come to you with their
quote-unquote problems, with their
strange spaces they can’t figure out
what to do [with],” says Ms. Oka
Doner, swathed in white fabric and
slim white leggings in her Soho live/
work studio.
And so they end up with a work of
art, such as the amethyst and bronze
doorbell for Hollywood producer Joel
Silver’s Los Angeles home, the coral-
like balustrade for a staircase in a
Houston home, or the 132 gilded,
dragonfly-pattern scrim panels for a
disco room in a home in Gstaad,
Switzerland.
Prices start at $20,000 for a small-
scale scrim. A balustrade starts at
$150,000 and a doorbell costs about
$7,000 to $10,000.
Ms. Oka Doner also is making a
sunken seating area for Louver House,
a 12-unit condo building also in Miami,
priced from $2.5 million to $3.9 mil-
lion, set to be completed in winter
2016. A riff on a Roman altar, the
space is “functional art,” says Camilo
Miguel Jr., the CEO of Mast Capital,
the developer. It features a bronze ta-
ble, a hanging sculpture and a bench
of cipollino marble, a swirling green
and ivory stone.
“People connect to it at a visceral
level,” says architect William T. Geor-
gis, a longtime collaborator and
friend, about Ms. Oka Doner’s work.
This summer, working in a Chicago
home, Ms. Oka Doner completed her
first fountain—a bronze piece shaped
into branches that quietly weeps water.
“Her art has this beautiful ges-
tural, spiritual quality. It’s always in
dialogue with nature,” says architect
Dirk Denison, who designed the home
and has known Ms. Oka Doner since
he was a boy. She wouldn’t disclose
the price, but a similar fountain
starts at $125,000, she says.
Evidence of Ms. Oka Doner’s pro-
cess is littered throughout her loft.
BY LEIGH KAMPING-CARDER
BIGGER PICTURE 1. Artist Michele Oka
Doner in her New York City studio. 2. A
bronze fountain installed at a Chicago
home. 3. Costume sketches for a Shake-
speare ballet. 4. A prototype for her
Scrim Door. 5. The artist’s Soho studio
and home. 6. The studio interior, filled
with natural objects the artist collects for
her pieces. 7. ‘The Totem’ sculpture.
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