Artist Michele Oka Doner Adds Nature to Homes
Her creations often begin with an architectural challenge
Artist Michele Oka Doner donned a construction helmet and closed-toe shoes this past week to pour sections of blue-green terrazzo for the lobby floor of a Miami condo tower, laying down vortexes of bronze palm fronds, then hand-tossing shells and mother-of-pearl to add texture.
The 3,500-square-foot floor is for One Ocean South Beach, where units have sold for $1.2 million to $7.9 million. It is the kind of art project Ms. Oka Doner is known for: an amalgam of carefully selected materials designed to bring the ancient, natural world into a hectic modern setting.
The 69-year-old artist sees little difference between her free-standing sculptures, public-art installations, furniture, jewelry, and commissions for condo buildings and private homes.
“People come to you with their quote-unquote problems, with their strange spaces they can’t figure out what to do [with],” says Ms. Oka Doner, swathed in white fabric and slim white leggings in her Soho live/work studio.
And so they end up with a work of art, such as the amethyst and bronze doorbell for Hollywood producer Joel Silver’s Los Angeles home, the coral-like balustrade for a staircase in a Houston home, or the 132 gilded, dragonfly-pattern scrim panels for a disco room in a home in Gstaad, Switzerland.
Prices start at $20,000 for a small-scale scrim. A balustrade starts at $150,000 and a doorbell costs about $7,000 to $10,000.
Ms. Oka Doner also is making a sunken seating area for Louver House, a 12-unit condo building also in Miami, priced from $2.5 million to $3.9 million, set to be completed in winter 2016. A riff on a Roman altar, the space is “functional art,” says Camilo Miguel Jr., the CEO of Mast Capital, the developer. It features a bronze table, a hanging sculpture and a bench of cipollino marble, a swirling green and ivory stone.
“People connect to it at a visceral level,” says architect William T. Georgis, a longtime collaborator and friend, about Ms. Oka Doner’s work.
This summer, working in a Chicago home, Ms. Oka Doner completed her first fountain—a bronze piece shaped into branches that quietly weeps water.
“Her art has this beautiful gestural, spiritual quality. It’s always in dialogue with nature,” says architect Dirk Denison, who designed the home and has known Ms. Oka Doner since he was a boy. She wouldn’t disclose the price, but a similar fountain starts at $125,000, she says.
Evidence of Ms. Oka Doner’s process is littered throughout her loft. Branches collected in the countryside are piled high in her workroom and two sections in her library are devoted to the ancient world.
As a child in the 1950s, Ms. Oka Doner visited France with her parents and saw how old European buildings were integrated into the modern street—a contrast to the build-it-fast-and-cheap approach she saw in America.
“What’s wonderful about working now is I’m able to bring those notions that were formed really 60 years ago in these fabulous old and ancient cities to the developers who want to incorporate art into their buildings in a very traditional way,” she says. One example: 68-inch handles—spiny, burnt-looking—on the doors of a contemporary condo building in Soho.
Ms. Oka Doner grew up in Miami Beach, where her father, Kenneth Oka, served as mayor, though she says his previous career as a judge was a bigger influence.
“It wasn’t a home where it was like, ‘What’d you do in school, what’s on TV, go to bed.’ No. It was bigger-picture. He was a thinker and a philosopher,” she recalls.
Ms. Oka Doner studied art at the University of Michigan before moving to New York City in 1981. A turning point in her career came six years later, when she won a national public-art competition and installed “Radiant Site,” a 165-foot-long wall of 11,000 gold-luster tiles, in the subway station below Manhattan’s Herald Square. For Ms. Oka Doner, it brings a “moment of respite” to travelers and is something lasting, much like Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists, whose work she had admired as a student.
Since then, she has created several dozen permanent artworks in the U.S. and Europe, most notably “A Walk on the Beach: From Seashore to Tropical Garden,” a mile-plus-long work on the floor of the Miami International Airport.
Ms. Oka Doner’s work also translates to more intimate settings, says Patricia Hanna, art director of the Related Group, the developer of One Ocean. Ms. Oka Doner also designed a mural for the company’s Apogee Beach condo tower, completed at the end of 2013.
“Michele is a Miami legend,” says Ms. Hanna. The terrazzo floor, she adds, is “a breath of fresh air.”
