Oka Doner, Michele interview

Permanent Link:: http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dpService/dpPurlService/purl/MBVM000006/00001

Material Information

Subjects / Keywords:: Oral histories -- Miami Beach (Fla.)
Artists and Community -- United States -- Florida -- Miami Beach
Genre:: Video Recordings
Spatial Coverage:: United States -- Florida -- Miami Beach
Coordinates:: 25.790654 x -80.1300455

Scope and Content:: Michele Oka Doner, renowned artist and designer, talks about her childhood growing up in the Chase Avenue area of Miami Beach and how the light and fauna of the semi-tropics influenced her aesthetic core. Her family lived in a house designed by Russell Pancoast, son-in-law of John Collins. Sitting under a banyan tree she climbed as a child, she reminisces about the rich social and intellectual life of her childhood. Her father, Kenneth Oka, was a popular three term-mayor, who served from 1957 until 1965. She remembers having to be well-behaved, especially in public, because her father said they had to be examples. Her paternal grandfather lived with them and often took care of her when she was a child. He told her stories from Russia which scared her. Michelle talks about her formative influences, why she went away to school and set up her studio in New York. She was in town for a retrospective of her work at the Perez Art Museum Miami. She expresses despair over sea-level rise: “I can see the edge of the cliff.”