Queen of the Swamp


@ The Nest Gallery

Sydney Maubert’s Queen of the Swamp , acknowledges Miami’s Bahamian history and its vital ties to a cultural geography of Caribbean and Southern aesthetics.

Listen to Sydney speak on her installation below.

Queen of the Swamp
Sydney Maubert

The installation draws upon Miami's history of Bahamian laborers' construction of Miami's infrastructure on porous rock and their present descendants' influence on Miami Bass culture, a genre of musical impropriety rooted in Miami’s Bahamian neighborhoods. This work is interested in identifying a Miami architectural vernacular and uses its aesthetics as a solution to our swampland’s woeful reputation as being uninhabitable. Miami was once a significant location in the Saltwater Railroad, which allows research and discussion to traverse a larger cultural terrain, including the Caribbean, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. This proposal examines Bahamian contributions and legacies while creating new architectural possibilities that emerge within aesthetics of impropriety. 

About Sydney Maubert

Sydney Rose Maubert is a Miami architect, artist, and professor. She holds post-professional and professional degrees in architecture from Yale (2022) and the University of Miami (2020), with double minors in writing and art. She has received several awards including the Yale Moulton Andros Award (2022), and the University of Miami Alpha Rho Chi Award (2020). She is the founder of Sydney R. Maubert LLC., her art and mural practice.

Her scholarly research interests are architecture, geography, and cultural production in the Caribbean and American South. The work is largely shaped by black studies, gender studies, decolonial studies, history, and cultural geography.

Currently, Sydney Rose is the predoctoral fellow at Cornell's Strauch Fellowship, where she will be teaching and producing research (Fall 2022- ongoing). Her research explores racial-sexual perception in the built environment.

Images from the exhibit can be seen below. The exhibit will be shown in the AIRIE Nest Gallery at the Ernest F. Coe Visitors Center in the Everglades National Park. The gallery is free for all visitors, Monday through Friday 9 am - 5 pm EST.

On July 29th, 2023, AIRIE held “Queen of the Swamp” a two-part event that began with the opening of Queen of the Swamp in which over seventy people came to enjoy the work. See the recap and photos from the event.

Images courtesy of the artist and photographer Passion Ward.