The
Oolite Arts Awards
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
1111 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, 33139
5:30 p.m. Cocktails
6:30 p.m. Award Ceremony
7:30 – 10 p.m. Party
Honoring visionary arts leaders Mario Cader-Frech and Robert S. Wennett for their enduring legacy and transformative contributions to the advancement of arts and culture, cultivating research into and the dissemination of Central American art and its diaspora through **The Museo Reina Sofía’s Cader Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) and **Y.ES Contemporary. They are also recognized for their pivotal role as founding members of the Art Basel Global Patrons Committee and for their continued patronage of Miami’s art institutions and artists.
The 2026 Ellies will be presented across four award categories, the Lifetime Achievement, inspired by Michael Richards, honoring an artist whose career has made a profound and enduring impact on South Florida’s cultural landscape; the Better World Award, recognizing artists whose work sparks dialogue around critical issues including social justice, climate change, gender equality, and racial equity; the Teacher Travel Awards, providing five grants of $5,000 each to support Miami-Dade public school educators in enriching their classroom curriculum through travel; and the Creator Awards, empowering artists living and working in South Florida.
2026 The Lifetime Achievement Winners
Roberto Behar & Rosario Marquatdt / R&R Studios
Rosario and Roberto are artists, educators, and childhood friends, and the founders of R&R STUDIOS, a multidisciplinary platform merging art, architecture, and the city. Their artworks create encounters between stories and places, weaving together the everyday and the fantastic, the poetic and the political. They create architectural social sculptures that blur the boundaries between art and life and perform as instant landmarks.
The $75,000 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to these trailblazing artists which works include the biggest “M” in the world in Miami; All Together Now in downtown Denver; The Living Room, their iconic Miami home turned inside-out; Bésame Mucho at the Coachella Music Festival, Building Blocks, a square in Seattle and Peace & Love a Parkland Memorial sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. They recently unveiled three artworks for Princeton University Art Museum documented in The Home We Share: Three Social Sculptures for Princeton University (Park Books, 2025), and Beauty for All, a visual manifesto for the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial.
2026 Better World Winner
william cordova
william cordova is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner working with site-specific installations. His work is based on a creative engagement with architecture, geometry, and history. These are essential components that have continuously shaped his worldview. cordova is interested in the fundamental origins of abstraction, including cultural encoding and non-linear narratives, from the African, Andean, and Asian diaspora point of view that originates in Peru, where he was born and raised. william’s work continues to invest in this cultural, ethnic, and Racial synthesis, as a method of disrupting, challenging, and reassessing these influences on the history and practice of Western secular architecture, modernism, and theory. It has been a continuous process of illuminating and connecting historical evidence of ritual labor and its theory to contemporary examples. It is an attempt to reconsider how the abstracted evidence of cultural matter plays a large role in the modern world.
About the Ellies
The Ellies—Oolite Arts Awards are now unrestricted and open to artists living and working across Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties, reflecting our commitment to meet artists where they are and support their growth as they seek new, affordable spaces to create and thrive. This year, the winning artists will collectively receive $425,000 in direct financial support, with an additional $75,000 in direct artist support through acquisitions, bringing the total awards to an outstanding $4.1 million in support through the eighth editions of South Florida’s premiere art award program.
Your support will provide vital resources that empower artists to create, connect, and grow through residencies, exhibitions, and public programs, fueling the continued vibrancy of our cultural community.
More Information
For more information about supporting The Ellies, including tailored sponsorship opportunities, please contact Nuria Richards, Director of Development and Advisor for Strategy, at [email protected] or by phone at 305‑674‑8278 Ext. 304.
