Art Basel Miami Beach is the Las Vegas of contemporary art: If you let it, the annual mega-art-fair and its bevy of satellite attractions will steal your wallet and your soul, leave you wondering whether art means anything at all, then abruptly shower you with visual riches. Last week I drove down to Miami with a mere 36 hours to dip into the insanity, checking in with several Tampa Bay area artists and gallery owners who were doing business amid the palm trees and martinis. Here are the highlights of my visit.
Friday, 6 p.m.: César Cornejo at Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach. Cornejo is a Peruvian artist who works in New York and London in addition to Tampa, where he teaches art at USF. His project, Puno MoCA, was being exhibited at Art Positions — a branch of the main art fair inside the Miami Beach Convention Center devoted to up-and-coming artists and galleries — by Lima-based gallery Galeria Lucía de la Puente. Puno MoCA re-imagines the contemporary art museum for Puno, a Peruvian city of 80,000 residents that attracts thousands of tourists each year on the way to nearby Lake Titicaca and archeological sites. Under the aegis of Puno MoCA, Cornejo works with Puno residents to build or complete the architecture of their homes — e.g., adding on a room — in exchange for which the residents agree to exhibit contemporary art in their homes for a limited amount of time. At Art Positions, Cornejo was promoting the Puno MoCA project through an installation of sculpture and drawings; his sculptures take the form of undulating architectural canopies made of corrugated metal and wood scaffolding supports, evoking both the resources used to construct actual buildings in Puno and the design of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao.
Saturday, 12 p.m.: De la Cruz Collection, Miami Design District. I started the day with a visit to the newest of the private collections that have sprung up like mini contemporary art museums in Miami's gallery and design district — the three-story, 30,000-sq.-ft De la Cruz Collection. Two floors featured recent work by contemporary artists whose careers are hot, but most moving was a third floor devoted to works by artists including Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ana Mendieta. Visitors were invited to take from a sculpture first realized in 1990 by Gonzalez-Torres (who died in 1996) that consisted of two stacks of paper, one reading "Nowhere better than this place," the other reading "Somewhere better than this place." A room devoted exclusively to Mendieta's work — including her outdoor performance-sculptures, in which she engaged the landscape by leaving impressions of her body behind — emerged for me as one of the weekend's most soulful experiences.
1:30 p.m.: Primary Projects, Miru Kim's "The Pig That Therefore I Am." After several people mentioned Kim's unusual performance piece, I had to go see it for myself. Sure enough, inside an arcade of high-end furniture stores in the Miami Design District at the experimental art space known as Primary Projects, the artist was enclosed with a pair of pigs in a glass storefront transformed into a sty. Roughly 80 hours into her 100-plus hour performance — which consisted of rescuing the animals from a slaughterhouse and sharing their sensory environment for four days — Kim lay naked, caked with dirt and half asleep as the pigs dozed nearby.
4 p.m.: SCOPE Miami. Two St. Pete galleries — C. Emerson Fine Arts and Mindy Solomon Gallery — had booths at SCOPE Miami, one of the brasher art fairs this year. By Saturday, C. Emerson's booth was studded with red dots. Owner Lori Johns explained her strategy for attracting collectors: offering affordable works like a grid of prints and drawings by Miami-based artist Rocky Grimes that people were buying several at a time for $25-75 a pop. Johns was also showing (and selling) work by a number of artists based in Tampa Bay and Sarasota, including Daniel Mrgan, Kim Anderson, Kim Radatz and Justin Nelson. Across the aisle, Mindy Solomon's booth was stocked with sculpture by Sunkoo Yuh, Wookjae Mang and Tampa-based Gregory Green, along with glass works by Einar and Jamex de la Torre and paintings by Bart Johnson and James Kennedy, whose abstract paintings were proving to be especially popular with collectors, Solomon said.
9 p.m.: Con-Sealed Photo Shoot by Selina Roman, Miami Beach. Over in Miami Beach, I caught up with Tampa-based photographer Selina Roman at The Executive, a tony condominium tower on Collins Avenue. Inside the building's lobby, an anonymous woman in a blue burqa was directing guests on their way to an Art Basel-themed party into a room where Roman waited with a camera and a table of props. Working as her assistant, fellow artist Sarah Krupp invited guests to try on the props — a mix of hats, scarfs, wigs, a bird cage and other objects — before having their pictures snapped by Roman. The catch? Guests had to conceal their faces in order to have their portraits made. Roman, whose work often explores identity and disguise, says the project was inspired by the push and pull between anonymity and surveillance as characteristics of 21st century life. Roman plans to post the portraits on her website, selinaroman.com.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2011.