Art does more than capture a moment. It keeps stories alive, reminds us where we come from, and asks how we might live together with empathy and care. In the 2025 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, artists Eddie Arroyo, Jiha Moon, and Kelly Joy Ladd each show how art can honor community, celebrate cultural identity, and spark conversations that cross time and place.
Eddie Arroyo: Witnessing Change and Preserving Memory
For Eddie Arroyo, painting is an act of civic record-keeping. For 15 years, Arroyo has documented the dramatic redevelopment of Miami neighborhoods through landscapes that capture vanishing architecture and shifting identities, especially in communities that have long been home to Black and Latinx residents.
His latest series, presented in the Florida Prize, goes deeper: it chronicles the removal and reinstallation of a historic marker honoring Arthur Lee McDuffie, a Black man beaten to death by police in 1979. When Arroyo noticed the marker had come down, only months after its long-overdue unveiling, he returned again and again, capturing each stage of the site’s transformation. These paintings, rendered in stark black lines, evoke the feeling of architectural plans that are forever incomplete. A powerful reminder that public memory can be as fragile as a building scheduled for demolition.
Alongside this series, Arroyo pairs a portrait of Robert-François Damiens, executed in 18th-century France, drawing a sharp line from state violence centuries ago to today’s calls for justice. Arroyo’s work invites us to look closer at how community stories can be erased and asks what it means to witness, remember, and refuse to let names be forgotten.
Jiha Moon: Mapping Hybrid Identities
Jiha Moon calls herself a “cartographer of cultures.” Born in Korea and now living in the U.S., Moon’s practice spans painting, ceramics, and textiles that blend symbols from East and West, high art and pop culture, old traditions and playful new forms.
Her works are joyful, poignant, and deeply layered. A banana peel nods to both Andy Warhol and the exoticism projected onto Asian identity; a peach references Georgia, her adopted home, and a symbol of longevity in Asian culture. Each image is more than what it first seems. Characters, motifs, and colors move freely across boundaries, reflecting the complex and layered identities of our globalized world.
Her 2025 Florida Prize installation brings together two key threads in her practice: expressive paintings that serve as cultural maps, and a new body of ceramic work she describes as “hybrid portraits.” Through both media, she invites viewers to explore how familiar objects can spark personal stories and collective reflection. The installation encourages imaginative connections, a kind of visual storytelling where everyone brings something of themselves to the piece.
Kelly Joy Ladd: Art as a Spiritual Connection
Kelly Joy Ladd creates work that holds space for community and spiritual connection. A Florida-based paper artist, Ladd’s practice is rooted in ritual and energy work. She embeds words like Love, Kindness, and Compassion beneath layers of paper, believing these energies radiate outward for viewers to feel.
Ladd’s process is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. After a traumatic head injury, she found healing through art and meditation. She expands this sense of connection outward with projects like Artists on Couches, where she invites artists from around the world to share reflections on creativity and life. For Ladd, this daily practice is an artwork in itself. A reminder that our creative journeys are linked through small moments of openness and exchange.
In her Florida Prize work, Divine Love, Ladd collects soil from ancestral land, burns old journals, and charges crystals under the full moon, infusing her pieces with layers of meaning that honor lineage and universal belonging. She asks us to pause, breathe, and remember how deeply connected we are to each other and to the unseen forces that bind us together.
Stories We Keep, Stories We Share
In different ways, Eddie Arroyo, Jiha Moon, and Kelly Joy Ladd remind us that art can serve as a mirror to the community. Reflecting its struggles, joys, contradictions, and infinite potential for care. Through their work, we see that cultural stories are not static relics but living threads woven through neighborhoods, families, and friendships.
Their pieces ask us to bear witness, celebrate what makes us unique, and honor the things that tie us together.
