The artist known as JEFRË doesn’t stay in one place for long. He has installed his larger-than-life sculptures in cities worldwide, from Manila to London to Abu Dhabi. Still, there’s no place quite like home—and for JEFRË, home since 2004 has been Orlando.
The Lake Nona resident, who was born in Chicago to immigrant Filipino parents, is now busy prepping for a new local exhibition called Points of Impact, which will showcase his works via scale models, graphics, photography and videography inside City Hall’s Terrace Gallery.
Points of Impact will debut on Thursday, November 12, with an opening celebration from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the gallery. Additional programming is being planned throughout the run of the exhibition, which will extend through next January. Follow the city’s social media channels, including @thecitybeautiful on Instagram, for details as they are finalized.
“The city has played an important role in my development as an artist,” says JEFRË, who may be best known in Central Florida for his now-iconic works clustered within the Lake Nona Town Center.
There you’ll find The Beacon, a 60-foot-tall, six-story multimedia tower shaped like a stethoscope to recognize the development’s health and life sciences park, and The Code Wall, which uses binary code patterns and dazzling digital projections to transform an adjacent parking garage into a centerpiece of community art.
JEFRË (whose birth name was Jefrë Figueras Manuel) took courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago prior to receiving a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from The Ohio State University. He also completed graduate courses in landscape urbanism at The Architecture Association in London.
For years, he worked as an urban planner for major architectural firms. However, after surviving a major heart attack at age 35, he decided to dedicate his life fully to public art and founded Studio JEFRË in Orlando.
Flynn Dobbs, Public Art Coordinator for the City of Orlando, is excited to salute the artist’s global body of work in such an accessible way. “Public art is usually experienced one project at a time,” says Dobbs. “This will allow people to see the larger story and the ideas that connect the work across many different communities.”
Also in November, JEFRË will unveil a quartet of sculptures—figures perched atop Doric-style columns—placed in four of Orlando’s Main Street Districts. The works will be installed in Curry Ford West (a boy flying a paper airplane), Thornton Park (a swan), Mills 50 (a dragon) and the Milk District (a cow, naturally).
Each landmark will stand approximately 20 feet in height and will be constructed from heavy-duty, outdoor-grade fiberglass-reinforced co-polymer and finished with a unique stone texture. The $400,000 project is a partnership between the city and the individual district boards.
“I want people to leave thinking about the places they move through every day and how art can change the way those places feel, how people gather and how a community sees itself,” says JEFRË. “Once a public artwork belongs to a place, it belongs to the people who experience it.”
The Terrace Gallery is located at 400 South Orange Avenue, on the first floor of Orlando City Hall. For more information, call 407.246.4279 or visit orlando.gov.
