Robert Thiele wins 2022 Ellies Creator Award

Congratulations to Robert Thiele on receiving a 2022 Ellies Creator Award!

Robert was awarded for “And Elsewhere” a survey catalog documenting the artist’s body of work, allowing for a new scholarship on his achievements and contributions to Miami’s art scene

Oolite Arts celebrates its 5th anniversary of The Ellies. Miami’s Visual Arts Awards celebrates the individual artists who are the backbone of Miami’s visual arts community, making Miami the dynamic cultural capital that it is. The Ellies are offered in four categories, The Creator Award, Teacher Travel Grant, Social Justice Award and the Michael Richards Award. These awards and grant support Miami-Dade working and emerging artists, art educators, and established, professionally accomplished artists.

Thank you to the teams at Oolite Arts and the Bass Museum for organizing such a beautiful event and continued support Miami’s artistic community 

About the Artist

Robert Thiele’s calm intensity emanates equally from his person and his works. An established figure in the South Florida art scene for more than forty years, Thiele sustains a remarkable studio practice that, first and foremost, builds on itself. In paintings that he calls wall constructions, he embeds found objects from the environment. He creates apertures through which we can see a hint of an object. The shape and translucency of the window is essential. The construction is about 5 inches deep, and if the sides are straight, then he wraps them in canvas, painted white.

Thiele holds a Masters and Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting from Kent State University. Pat DeLong, then Chair of the Art Department at Miami Dade College, recruited Thiele to move to Miami to teach. He moved to Miami in 1966. In 1975, he and Salvatore la Rosa were the first two Florida artists to participate in the Whitney Biennial. He took part in the wonderful series of “New Work Miami” shows at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (then the Miami Art Museum), with a show in 2004. He showed with OK Harris and Howard Scott in New York and with several Miami galleries before working with Emerson Dorsch on his 30-year survey show, cryptically titled “30,” in 2009. Tyler Emerson-Dorsch curated his show at MDC Museum of Art + Design in 2015. He had a second survey show at the Museum of Art – Deland in 2019.

His work is widely collected in South Florida, with a presence in the public collections of at least 12 Florida public institutions, including the Bass Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Frost Art Museum, the NSU Art Museum, the Boca Raton Art Museum, the University of South Florida, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, FL, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. His work has been covered in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, Ocean Drive, The Biscayne Times and ARTnews, among others.