Since its debut in 2002, Art Basel Miami Beach has become a global phenomenon. A spin-off of one of the world's biggest art fairs — Art Basel, held yearly in Basel, Switzerland — the Miami event mixes art-world commerce with the see-and-be-seen mania of South Beach.
More than 100 galleries from around the world exhibit at Basel itself, the main fair anchored at the Miami Beach Convention Center. In addition, a host of smaller fairs and events have sprung up in hotels, warehouses and tents around the area.
At this year's edition, which concluded Dec. 10, four groups from Tampa traveled to Miami to strut their stuff. The Tampa Museum of Art threw a bash to celebrate local artist Jeff Whipple's multimedia installation at a South Beach hotel. Graphicstudio represented at Ink Miami, a special fair devoted to printed works on paper. Flight 19/Experimental Skeleton worked with Locust Projects of Miami to showcase work by Negativland at Scope, and Bleu Acier set up shop at the Bridge Art Fair.
For a complete account of how the Tampanians fared, read my blog posts from the fair on Creative Loafing's blog, blurbex.com. For a taste, here's a report on Bleu Acier's successful experiment in retail on an intimate scale.
In a row of postcard-perfect art deco resorts on Collins Avenue sits the Catalina, a smaller hotel with modestly sized rooms and shag-carpeted halls. As site of the Bridge Art Fair, for four days the hotel's 60-plus rooms were stripped of furniture and converted into intimate exhibition spaces for galleries from the U.S. and Europe.
This year marked the debut of Bridge, which was the brainchild of the folks who run the Nova Art Fair yearly in Chicago and Basel, Switzerland. Where the main fair at Art Basel Miami Beach aims at blue-chip collectors with offerings from A-list artists, the smaller, alternative fairs like Bridge set their sights on a crowd with a smaller budget and a willingness to discover new talent.
While price tags in the hundreds of thousands are no surprise at the big Basel fair, around $2,500 seemed to be the limit for most Bridge buyers, said Erika Greenberg-Schneider, whose Tampa Heights gallery and print atelier, Bleu Acier, scored one of the coveted rooms.
During the fair, she sold her heart out in an effort to make up for slow business in Tampa, where her gallery is supported largely by the printed editions she turns out for clients in major U.S. cities and Europe and by teaching at USF. The artists she represents tend to fit into one of two categories: graduate students and professors she has met during her tenure at the university — MFA grads Marie Yoho Dorsey and Steve McClure, professors Elisabeth Condon and Neil Bender — and mid-career European artists like painter Herve di Rosa and her husband, sculptor Dominique Labauvie. Most of her prices fall in the $1,000 range, though some of the established European artists she represents easily command $5,000 for a work.
"Dominique has had five one-man shows at Basel, Switzerland. People come to see him because he's famous in Europe," she said.
Conducting business in the cramped hotel room was a hairy proposition. Its diminutive dimensions — roughly 12×12 feet, plus a tiny bathroom, where art hung on the shower door — made for close quarters when Schneider, a helper or two, and a prospective buyer clustered around her display table. As a small crowd amassed to take a look at the work she'd brought — a variety of paintings, prints, multi-media and metal sculptures — elbows started to collide.
"I've seen more people in two days than in a year in Tampa," she said. "And I've sold more in two days than in two years in Tampa."
Selling to Bridge buyers came with its own challenges. Many were on the hunt for something to fit a specific space or match a particular color scheme, Schneider said. She fielded requests for paintings on square-shaped paper (when an artist's work used mainly rectangular sheets), prints in red ink (when the originals were in blue), and custom-sized versions of a metal-and-glass table by Labauvie. Except for the change in ink color, she accommodated — or at least attempted — the changes.
Marie Dorsey's landscape photogravures were a bestseller. The suite of four images got a plum spot in the hallway outside the gallery's room, where many visitors lingered while making the rounds. The prints, four different renditions of the same mountain landscape during spring, summer, fall and winter, were displayed at the Tampa Museum of Art this summer during the underCURRENT/overVIEW exhibition.
Many visitors expressed surprise that Bleu Acier is based in Tampa, Schneider said. It wasn't a selling point — often she had to explain that she represents European artists and USF professors who have New York credentials before potential buyers would take a serious look. When we discussed whether Tampa could ever support something even remotely like Miami Basel, she was skeptical, to say the least.
"The thing in Tampa is: We have to realize who we are, and we're nothing as far as the arts go. It's going to stay that way until there's a real venture happening, and that venture is not only private enterprises coming into town but it's also the protocol, or the government, or arts people, which we do not have now," she said. "It can't [happen] unless you have the collector base."
Schneider struggled to get support in Tampa for her Bridge endeavor. In the face of miserable gallery sales, she turned to the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, which does not ordinarily fund private, for-profit galleries, and managed to convince them to grant her $1,000 to publish a catalog. At the fair, she proudly passed out copies as visitors packed the tiny room.
That grand, as grateful as she was to have it, was a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $12,000 in shipping, framing, exhibition fees, lodging and other expenses she took on to come here. But by December 8, with two days down and two days to go, she'd already managed to break even.
And once she saw what was selling, she stood ready to rearrange her tiny temporary gallery for maximum effect.
"If it's not selling, it's out. I'm not here to promote, I'm here to sell. If it's not selling, it's relegated to the bathroom."
For more on Tampa's role in this year's Art Basel, look for Megan Voeller's blog posts in the December archives of blurbex.com.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2006.