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PORCH PASSAGES:
CREOLE COLLAGE

Marshall L. Davis, Sr. African Heritage Cultural Arts Center | Liberty City, FL | 2025




    Presented as part of Knight New Works at the Marshall L. Davis African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, Porch Passages: Creole Collage, brings Cornelius Tulloch’s Porch Passages series to the Melton S. Mustafa Concert Hall, in a new, site-responsive iteration. Porch Passages began as an inquiry into the veranda as a civic instrument, cultural archive, and storytelling space. Tulloch’s work reimagines porch ornament, tectonics, and material presence as an architectural language that registers diasporic memory and daily life across Miami’s Black and Caribbean communities.

    Originally realized for the Florida Prize at the Orlando Museum of Art, Porch Passages: Creole Collage was designed to be an adaptive, site-responsive, modular architectural installation. This iteration foregrounds sustained community research and has expanded the installation into a public stage and vessel for testimony and intergenerational exchange.

    Under Knight New Works, the project integrated summer youth workshops led by Tulloch and Arsimmer McCoy: AHCAC and Miami Fab Lab students authored poems and 10 x 10 inch collages that were digitized and fabricated into breeze-block inspired panels, embedding student work throughout the modular, architectural installation. The outdoor public activation Porch Passages: Liberty debuted concurrently with the exhibition opening, serving as a complementary public moment of activation, performance, and community celebration.

    “The porch is where stories gather and stay,” Tulloch says. “This project returns those stories to the people who live them, in Liberty City and greater Miami-Dade.”

    Porch Passages: Creole Collage opens Saturday, November 29, 2025 and runs through Saturday, January 17, 2026; at the Marshall L. Davis African Heritage Cultural Arts Center. Public programs and performances accompanied the run.

    This exhibition and programming was made possible by the Knight Foundation, Oolite Arts, Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau (GCVMB), YoungArts, Black Miami-Dade, Fringe Projects, Fab Lab Miami, the Marshall L. Davis African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, Key Biscayne Women’s Giving Circle, our fabricators, contractors, and studio team.


Images by Zachary Balber