by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on December 21, 2015
At the Rubell Family Collection, dozens of contemporary women artists working in every conceivable medium left us very impressed.
Michael: Here, the blue-chip market and a private collector managed to accomplish something many institutions or independent curators haven’t—presenting an all-female show that feels as if it has nothing to prove.
Paddy: I still can’t get over how many monumental art works in this show so effectively dominated the space that you’d literally feel awestruck by their presence.
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by Michael Anthony Farley on December 4, 2015
Now in it’s 12th year, NADA Miami Beach is still full of surprises, even compared to younger satellite fairs. For the first time, NADA is taking place in the storied Fontainebleau hotel. Since 2009, the fair had been located in the nearby Deauville’s quirkier, seemingly grander mid-century ballrooms. Paddy had mixed feelings about that context, but I find myself missing it. The Fontainebleau’s more recently-renovated spaces feel a little more generic and paradoxically fancier but less glamorous. The ceiling is lower, there’s no sweeping ocean view from the booths, and visitors must now pay a $20 admission fee. This iteration of NADA is only slightly geographically closer to the convention center, but significantly less far-off from Art Basel proper in spirit.
But while we were disappointed by Basel’s predictability and lack of variety, NADA 2015 is wonderfully inconsistent. NADA’s exhibitors seem to have grown out of a collective trend-invested “cool kid” adolescence and matured into thoughtfully idiosyncratic connoisseurship. Gone are the days of interchangeable booths with matching pastel-and-neon abstractions—here there’s a greater diversity of good work than we’ve witnessed at art fairs recently. Part of this might be attributed to NADA’s shifting demographics: the fair feels less New-York-centric and more international. Many of the booths that impressed us the most were from Germany, Latin America, or Japan.
Below, highlights from the fair, delightfully all over the map:
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