FIFTY-FIFTY is an artist collective founded by Lisa Bulawsky and Laurencia Strauss, working at the intersection of individual experience and the public sphere, negotiating cultural tensions through socially engaged participatory art practices. Their work includes Portable Memories in Rising Seas at the Miami-Dade Public Library, Miami, FL and at The Studios of Key West in Key West, FL (2018), the first iteration of Stories for Fishes at O Cinema Wynwood, Miami FL (2016), Ferguson (with Emily Squires), as part of Signs in the Public Sphere in Knoxville, TN (2015). Proposals for future projects include Portable Memories in Rising Seas in other US coastal cities and Sea Alms in South Florida.

Lisa Bulawsky is an artist/printmaker known for her mixed media works on paper, installations, and temporary public projects. Her work explores the reciprocal influence of culture on the individual, especially as it is shaped by history and memory. She is Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, chair of the MFA in Visual Art program, and the director of Island Press, the Sam Fox School’s collaborative publishing workshop.

Laurencia Strauss is a non-binary queer mixed Latinx first generation US artist and landscape designer based in Miami. Their participatory projects, interventions, and community-based designs have been shared nationally and internationally as experiences of mutual vulnerability and care that challenge us to adapt towards a greater sense of interdependence. Amidst social and environmental justice, their work attends to grief as a catalyst.