Miami Beyond the Fairs, Part II

Tokyo-based painter Tomoo Gokita makes really, really creepy work by sampling Western black-and-white media. His paintings simultaneously recall illustrations and their film-based source material. Details are obscured, figures come in-and-out-of focus along with the quality of his surfaces, and no one ever has a face. They are weird and wonderful.

This is also the inaugural exhibition at Bill Brady’s new permanent home in Little River, a building that the gallery wisely bought, a trend that’s thankfully being followed by many arts venues migrating north from hyper-gentrified Wynwood.

The Ocean Terrance Hotel has been slated for a major renovation, and thus provided a major opportunity for exhibitors who would normally not be able to leave so much as a piece of tape on the walls. In this show, every artist or curatorial collective has agreed to completely transform their room into a new installation space.  The best part about all this: the cost to participate was only $250, which opened the doors to a whole new group of exhibitors who otherwise couldn’t afford to participate. Selected exhibitors include: Platform Gallery, Open Space, Ghost of a Dream, Transmitter, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and us!

All of which is to say, come to our opening!

We’re launching Fine Art Gallery, AFC’s new project space here with F.A.G. Bar. You’ll see work like Macon Reed’s neon Dyke Bar signs, Edie Fake’s Memory Palace book, which include reproductions of shuttered and imagined gay bars in Chicago, and a video by Wickerham & Lomax that chronicles a night out on the town in Baltimore while critiquing the conventions of performance art.

Artists include:Edie Fake, John Criscitello, Matthew Leifheit, Macon Reed, Rachel Stern, and Wickerham & Lomax

Curator Oliver Sanchez describes this show as “a lighthearted look at the history of mechanization and the influence of machines on the development of modern civilization.” Considering the artists whose work I know on this list, I can’t begin to speculate what this will look like. Brookhart Jonquil makes quiet sculptures informed by geometry and existential musings and David Rohn assumes a staggeringly-convincing cast of drag characters. The TM Sisters bounce seamlessly between choreographing roller disco, synchronized swimming, and neon-hued video installations. And the last time I saw Liz Ferrer, she was dressed as a giant papaya/labia lip-syncing to Cuban music (papaya is a colloquial term for vagina in Caribbean Spanish, for context).

At any rate, this is a good line-up of some of Miami’s strongest and most ubiquitous artists (expect to see most of these names throughout the week at various galleries) and I can’t wait to see them take on the topic of the industrial revolution.

Artists: Bhakti Baxter, Robert Chambers, Mark Diamond, Liz Ferrer, Brookhart Jonquil, Karelle Levy, Justin Long, Daniel Newman, Jeffery Noble, Brandon Opalka, TM Sisters, Raymond Brown, Clifton Childree, Douglas Hoekzema, Paloma Izquierdo, Coral Morphologic, Franchesco LoCastro, Hugo Montoya, David Rohn, Jason Hedges, Tao Rey

Ok, we strive to be the exceedingly rare type of art world publication that does not list fancy after-parties on our “Must-See-Art-Basel-Miami-Beach” lists. But let’s face it, that type of art world publication is so rare that it doesn’t exist.

This is a few blocks from the Swampspace opening, and it’s a must-see because POORgrrrl is performing. She’s the invention of Miami artist Tara Long, and makes noise-dance-unclassifiable music inspired by an alter-ego created to be performed for Instagram.

Besides, it wouldn’t be ABMB if we weren’t all already hungover by Wednesday.

Liz Ferrer is returning to curate Edge Zones again this year, which is great. Full disclosure: I co-curated last year’s festival with her, and this year she’s bringing back many of the artists who made that experience so great. Expect everything from subversions of drag-inspired queer pageantry to gutter punk antics. Last year, Puerto Rico’s Poncili Creacion rolled up to the venue in a giant truck converted to an enormous whale puppet/stage, Rainé Rainé ate a Styrofoam wig-head, and Kalan Sherrard was escorted from an upscale shopping center for dragging a life-size crucifix through Black Friday crowds. Oh yeah, and Julia Maria Sinelnikova is the oracle of Vector Gallery, the official art gallery of Satan.

This ain’t your corporate art investor’s Basel. And we love them for it.

Artists: Kalan Sherrard, Poncili Creacion, Bow Ty, Rosé Hernandez, Efrén Arcoiris, Keijaun Thomas, Local Honey, Rainé Rainé, Dino Real, Whit Forrester, Jon Konkol, Julia Maria Sinelnikova, Orlando Estrada, Sleeper, Diem Massad Al-Jouni, Rick Diaz

Artists Barron Sherer and Kevin Arrow opened Obsolete Media Miami (OMM) as an archive of pre-digital audio/visual culture and analogue makerspace. Come play with 35mm slides, archaic video technology, and other relics of the 20th century. There will be informal discussion about the challenges and rewards of archiving and preservation, donuts, and likely a lot of weird cultural detritus to sift though.

The Rubell Collection is arguably one of the most impressive private collections of contemporary art in the country. No art-tourism trip to Miami is complete without a gander. This year, they’re devoting the entire exhibition space to No Man’s Land, an all-woman show with over 100 artists, from Cindy Sherman to Cady Noland. So awesome.

Even more awesome, our friend Cara Ober is launching the print-only journal extension of Bmoreart.com. Full disclosure, I [Michael] am interviewed in the publication and am an occasional contributor to the blog. Even if I weren’t, I’d still recommend it. BmoreArt has excelled as a Baltimore-focused art criticism outlet, and increasingly, a journal that’s very much engaged with the national and international arts discourse. Proof of this: it’s entering the stacks of the Rubell’s bookstore.

Swing by for the meet-and-greet, Cara would probably be happy to answer questions about how she’s managed the impressive task of founding, funding, editing, publishing, and promoting a new arts journal from our humble hometown. If you can’t make it to the mainland, swing by the opening we’ve listed at The Betsy on Thursday, BmoreArt will be having another reception there for the Beach crowd.

For the fifth year in a row, Leslie King Hammond will be curating the Betsy Hotel’s arts programming during Art Basel. This year, she’s showing later paintings by Grace Hartigan, one of the great few women abstract expressionist painters who almost received the same recognition as her male peers. In the last decades of her life, Hartigan embraced figuration, but never her bold mark-making or acerbic color palette.

Also on view: Christopher Metzger’s raw photographs of the Baltimore Uprising and artwork from the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder in police custody. It goes without saying that this is an important inclusion in a week of city-wide programming that often focuses on the shiny, escapism, and luxury-brand-vodka.

Good god, this event sounds like everything Basel does best—bask in disgusting decadence while giving a knowing wink-wink to let you know that it’s all somehow a self-aware commentary on art and real estate’s relation to fucked, fucked capital.

Here, a home about to demolished in an upscale neighborhood (likely to be replaced with a much fancier home) has been handed over to a group of artists to be transformed into a celebration of Miami’s opulence, raunchiness, and waste. We’re not entirely sure what that will entail, but based on the photo above, we might be in for an onslaught of DIY-gold spray paint, dollar bill decor, and naked mannequins dangling from the ceiling. It’s like a haunted house scaring you with horrors of faux-conspicuous consumption.

Artists: Stuart Sheldon, Michael Loveland, Brandon Opalka, Randy Burman, Hoxxoh, KEMO/MSG, Benji Cospolite, Andrea Nhuch, Lori Nozick, Gary Feinberg, Karen Starosta-Gilinski, Wyatt Gallery, Tamar Zohara Ettun, Annie Lee-Joon Youn … and featuring Strawberrita Dreams with Autumn Casey, Jesse Laino, Kelly Breez, Bootsie Castillo, Kyle Chapman, Makane, Annabell Penelope Lee, Renata Rojo, KC Toimil.

We’ll be honest, if past years have been any indication, getting in to this popular party will be next to impossible without an invitation/RSVP. It’s also pretty far to go just to get turned away at the gate, so if you’re unsure, head in the opposite direction to Fancy Nasty. That being said, this exhibit has scheduled programming all week and is definitely worth a visit. And if you can come to this all-out Saturday night event, do.

Villa Vizcaya is a faux-Italian mansion constructed by a wealthy businessman between 1914 and 1924, surrounded by acres of lush gardens. Today, it’s a museum that has invited artists to produce site-specific installations and performances in dialog with its architecture and aura of fantasy.

Sebastian Duncan Portuondo will be using transparencies and overhead projectors to create or enhance architectural spaces. It sounds like it’s going to be beautiful. Knowing the respective practices of Misael Soto and David Rohn, we’re expecting an injection of mischievous performance that embraces/calls-out the pomp and spectacle of the place.

Artists: Dona Altemus, Pip Brant, Amalia Caputo, Cara Despain, Sebastian Duncan Portuondo, Alan Gutierrez, Daniel Milewski, Maritza Molina, Misael Soto and Homo-Sapiens Collab, David Rohn, Danilo de la Torre