How this year's recipient of the Parker Thomson Legacy Award found her happy place.
By Carlos Frías
Home was Rosie Gordon-Wallace’s first art space. Decades before she founded the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator to nurture and promote emerging artists from the Caribbean diaspora, Gordon-Wallace was learning to do just that in her childhood living room.
On Friday nights in Kingston, Jamaica, her father plugged a microphone into a boom box, turned on Harry Belafonte and sang along to calypso. Gordon-Wallace, her two sisters and neighborhood friends filled the house, dancing the three-step. Plates of cow foot and rice and peas overflowed. “Fierce dominoes” were played, she remembers.
And the next day, Gordon-Wallace’s mother took her girls to the local cultural center for a day of poetry, reading, dance, music and theater. “I had two Renaissance parents,” Gordon-Wallace says.
For many artists in South Florida and the Caribbean, Gordon-Wallace, recipient of the 2025 Parker Thomson Legacy Award, has been a surrogate Renaissance parent. Her DVCAI started in 1996 with five artists, graduates from local art schools such as New World School of the Arts and the Design and Architecture Senior High school, coming to her house to talk about art.
Nearly 30 years later, the non-profit DVCAI, based in Miami, has served more than 2,600 artists. Through it, Gordon-Wallace provides a variety of assistance to emerging Caribbean artists, including an artist-in-residence program, securing gallery exhibitions and sponsoring cultural-exchange trips to more than a dozen countries to work with other artists.
“I knew from a very early stage that I had artistic talent deep inside me,” she says. “That was my happy place.”
As much as she loved the arts, Gordon-Wallace felt she needed a straitlaced career, like her mother, a teacher, or her father, the bursar at a college. Medicine and law were preferable, she felt. “I didn’t have the courage to tell my parents I wanted to be an artist,” she says.
She studied microbiology at the University of the West Indies and specialized in immunology at the University of Manchester. She came to Miami in 1978, at age 26, on a fellowship to study vaccines with Dr. Thomas Hoffman at the University of Miami. She later had a lucrative career in pharmaceutical sales.
Her downtime was spent immersed in the arts. Shows at the Lyric Theater in Overtown and the Olympia Theater downtown. Galleries and art openings. Listening to Clint O’Neil spin Caribbean music on public radio. Antigua Gallery on Biscayne Boulevard became a favorite haunt, where she communed with local artists, particularly from Miami’s Caribbean communities.
“There were ample places for us to ignite the joy,” Gordon-Wallace says.
She watched as young artists she met at local galleries went away to study in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Many came home to try to set up an art practice in Miami. But this was decades before Art Basel or Miami Art Week, and the American art world wasn’t opening itself widely to Caribbean artists.
“There was a grumbling, a desire. They didn’t have a community of peers,” she says.
She invited these young artists, friends, to her home, where they spent hours talking into the night about ideas for art projects. But studio spaces were rare. Many found it hard to work at home, where in one case a parent had cleaned their room and accidentally thrown away what looked like a mess but was actually the beginnings of an art project.
Gordon-Wallace reached back into her memories. Those Friday nights of her youth echoed. She contacted friends at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Wynwood and launched Final Fridays, a day to celebrate art on the last Friday of the month.
It became an improvised art walk, with visual art, music, poetry and dance. Gordon-Wallace’s mother, Eglantine “Mama G” Melita Buchanan Gordon, who had immigrated after her father died, helped cook a full Jamaican dinner for a donation. “And the whole time, I’m telling artists not to give up on their dreams,” she says.
Final Fridays became the seed for DVCAI. Gordon-Wallace started the organization with what she calls the “original five,” the first young artists to come to her house in 1996. By 1999, she had taken a cohort of Caribbean artists from DVCAI to Paris, where they exhibited work alongside local artists. The next year, she brought those Parisian artists to Miami to exhibit alongside our locals. That cultural-exchange program has become a highlight of DVCAI.
Gordon-Wallace quit her job in pharmaceuticals and gave her life over to the arts. DVCAI incorporated as a non-profit in 2003. “Microbiology teaches you to see. My ability to see is honed thanks to my medical training. And I think that has helped me [see talent] with artists,” she says.
Since then, Gordon-Wallace has won several awards for her work, including the Knight Foundation Cultural Award and the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center’s Calabash Amadlozi Visual Arts Award. She helps shape the conversation around the arts in Miami. She’s an active member of the PAMM Fund for African American Art and serves on the Cultural Affairs grant panels for Miami-Dade County and Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs. She serves on the Museum Association of the Caribbean curatorial selection board.
Maybe her proudest achievement was spotting and encouraging the artistic talent in her own home. Her son, Gordon Myers, is a jazz musician who studied art and music at Brown University. He’s a founding member of several bands, including the Diaspora Vibe Afrobeat All Stars.
“For me, it’s ultimate joy,” Gordon-Wallace says. “I’m so proud to see him be who he wants to be.”
(Top: Photo courtesy rbb Communications. Bottom: Photo courtesy Rosie Gordon-Wallace.)