Art Basel Miami Beach week - The Saturday report

The crowds at Context Art Miami crowds were the largest that I have evr seen in any art fair in 20 years! They just kept coming all through the day.

The only issue was an apparent lack of sales everywhere, which is rather unusual, since art sales at an art fair are in direct proportion to the amount of people attending the fair.

Other than several drawings on Bisque, in our case, we again failed to materialize a significant, larger priced sale.

Sunday remains to "save" the fair.

Tomorrow morning, we'll pre-stage the vans around 6AM on the streets around the fair. We do this in order to save significant time during pack out. 

Art Basel Miami Beach week - The Friday report

Friday saw a lot of people strolling through the fairs, heard a few collectors discussing what fair was good and what fair sucked - also that there are about half as many fairs this year as usual, which makes sense as the world recuperates from Covid.

Sold multiple Bisque pieces again and also one of the Cuba series pieces.

Cuba - Isla Encadenada c. 1980

Art fair shoes

Art fair shoes

Life imitates art

Art Basel Miami Beach week - Thursday report

Decent crowds again, although mostly "strolling" through the fair -- not a lot of interested buyers, heavy Florida rains at times, and rather windy by the water.

Press coverage has been good - although rather "recycling" ideas from more than a decade ago, when know-it-alls where predicting the demise of the art fair model. The Art Newspaper calls it "the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess", which is somewhat true, but showcases the art medias well-known antipathy towards the commodification of art.

Valentina Di Liscia from Hyperallergic title tells you all that you need to know about her outdated angle: Why Is There No Spanish at Art Basel Miami?  But she does opine about "art that is mostly drab and uninspiring" and gossips about a rush for "Anna Weyant (who happens to be dating the influential art dealer Larry Gagosian)." She also notes that Latino Miamians are "the most common ethnic group living below the poverty line in the city" in discussing fair ticket prices, but does not tell you that more that half of the wealthiest 1%centers in Miami are also Latinos.

She does nail it with this observation though:

"... an installation by the Brooklyn art collective MSCHF epitomized the worst of art fair gimmick: an ATM retrofitted with a screen that displays users’ account balances when they swipe their debit cards. It was presumably conceived as commentary on wealth disparity, but instead comes off as pretentious and reductive. I’m sorry, but we don’t need an art installation to know that some people have $2M in their checking account and others have $4.50."

I've heard from multiple collectors, including those who bring other collectors from their home states, that the big miss (again) this year is the Untitled art fair, which has been described to me as "too much fiber" and also as "heavy handed curatorial hand."

Artsy's Ayanna Dozier opines on the 10 best booths there... five gets you ten that all of those selections have Artsy accounts. She starts her article like this... cough, cough...

The beachfront setting lent soft, cool lighting to the 11th edition of Untitled Art, Miami Beach, and gave way to an impressive showcase of art. At the VIP preview on November 28th, the breezy atmosphere was matched by a vibrant audience dressed in vivid tones that perfectly complemented the bright white tent and the dazzling works on view. While droves of out-of-towners descended upon the fair, Miami locals were present, too, acquiring works on view while wearing chic beachwear like hot pink shorts and sheer glitter dresses.

Maximilíano Durón from ARTnews has seven different booths as his top choices for the same fair, including a nice look at my good friend Amber Robles-Gordon:

Building on two previous bodies of work, both created since the pandemic, With Every Fibre of My Being (2022) by Amber Robles-Gordon presents a visual summary of the ongoing research that the artist has conducted into her identities as an Afro-Latina of Puerto Rican heritage and as a U.S. citizen living in the District of Columbia. The work, installed in a U shape, is made up of dozens of textiles, many of which are stretched over differently sized hoops used in embroidery and needlepoint. There are prints, florals, sheer fabrics, and fragments of the American flag. In other places are small texts that read “Keep Abortion Legal,” “Make Womanhood Legal,” and “Keep Democracy Legal.”  

Five of the seven are Hispanic/Latinos/Latin(x)/Latinas, etc., which tells me something about the Durónmeister's approach... cough, cough... 

Finally, Anja Maltav at Miami's iconic Brickell Magazine, and thus the local set of eyes honors me with a selection for their top choices:

Among his most popular productions is his “Cuba Series,” an ongoing collection of art pieces started in the early 1970s. Some were completed before he started formal art training, and the bulk of the work was executed as art school assignments between 1977-81 at the University of Washington School of Art. 

 

Art Basel Miami Beach week: Wednesday report

Today Context Art Miami and Art Miami opened to the general public at 11AM, and people dropped by throughout the day, with warnings of heavy showers all day.

Yesterday, at the VIP opening we sold a few of my Bisque pieces and one of Christina Helowicz's unique sculptural works.

Sculpture by Christina Helowicz

The visual stimulation is overwhelming as usual, and the parade of "Art Fair people" begin...

I continue to sell Bisque pieces steadily throughout the day, and later on two of Tim Tate's smaller sculptures find a home in Miami.

Art Fair "tie guy"

Christina Helowicz with a Janis by Frank Hyder

Random art fair visitor with a Janis by Frank Hyder at Projects Gallery

Art Basel Miami Beach week: VIP Preview

Today is the VIP preview for Art Miami and is co-joined sister fair, Context Art Miami.  The day starts around 9AM with last minute hanging, re-hanging and labeling... most of the work has been already hung by the crew who arrived here on Sunday, but there's still a lot of work to do.

The booth before hanging the work

We're staying on the 22nd floor of the Doubletree skyrise in Wynwood, two blocks from the fair, with an exceptional view of the water and the fair itself.

The hanging is skillfully choreographed, with Christina Helowicz, on her first art fair ever, showing the aptitude and skills of a seasoned pro!

J. Jordan Bruns hanging his work at Context Art Miami

I have a special projects wall on the focus of the Cuba series works that I did in Art School, and I hang that and Christina labels everything.

By noon or so the booth is done except for some touch up work and labeling here and there.

Alida Anderson Art Projects booth at Context Art Miami 2022

At 4:30, the VIP Platinum opening starts - by 6:30, when the other VIPs arrive, the crowds really begin to show up - Context Art Miami has started!

At one point, Nora Atkinson, the very fair Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum stops by to chat with Michael Janis and Tony Porto.

And thus the fair begins...

Art Basel Miami Beach - VIP Opening minus one

As I write this, it is 3:26PM, EST and I am somewhere flying over the Atlantic coastline heading to Miami for the Art Basel Miami week of art fairs.  The airline is Frontier, which is essentially such a no frills airlines, that my roundtrip ticket to Miami was about half the prize of Ubering from my house to BWI and back!

The nonsense of that equation alone is staggering to comprehend in the strange economics of the post Covidian Age.

The fair is Context Art Miami in Wynwood – we’ve done this fair before, in fact we’ve done it many times over the years, including the very first time that the fair made its debut a handful of years ago.

For this iteration, the booth is A29 and will host the work of Tim Tate, Michael Janis, Erwin Timmers, J. Jordan Bruns, Steve Wanna, Marianela de la Hoz, Christina Holowicz and Cory Oberndorfer.

The fair opens tomorrow to the VIPs and Wednesday to the public – in an ideal world, by Friday one hopes to have sold enough work to cover the costs of the booth, thus leaving the last two days to pure capitalistic joy – after all, art is a commodity, isn’t it?

I will, as usual, try to provide my daily report.

By now a lot of work has already happened, vans have been packed and driven (Wanna, Janis, Helowicz and Timmers), unloaded at the fair site in what I have described in the past as the “dance of vans and trucks”, and most of the work hung.

Tomorrow morning the booth is finished hanging by noon (we hope) and labeling affixed, tired bodies are showered and dressed up for the VIP opening, and then the real dance begins.

Today is Artists Sunday!

 Today is Artists Sunday!

Artists Sunday is an annual event that showcases the work of artists and artisans local to you! This year it takes place November 27, 2022.

✓ Artists Sunday is a day to support local artists in your community.

✓ Artists Sunday was created in 2020 to encourage people to shop with artists and buy art as gifts during the holidays.

✓ There’s perhaps nothing more personal than a gift of the arts.

✓ Give something special, unique, and handcrafted this holiday season and support local artists and the local economy.

✓ More than 500 communities across the United States have come together for the second year to champion local artists and promote the giving of the arts this holiday season.

✓ Communities from coast-to-coast, large and small, are celebrating Artists Sunday on Nov 27, 2022 by highlighting local artists, creators and makers and promoting the giving of artistic items and experiences for the holidays.

✓ Positioned during the year’s busiest holiday shopping weekend, Artist Sunday, falls between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.

✓ Artists Sunday unites artists and communities across the country, all promoting shopping with local artists.

✓ Artists Sunday, the Sunday after Thanksgiving (Nov 27 this year), is the world’s largest art event, dedicated to supporting artists and recognizing the impact they have in enriching our lives, communities, and the economy.

By supporting the work of these artists and artisans and creators we not only support and stimulate your local economy, which as most of us know is in dire need of stimulations, but as I’ve discovered over the years, it also offer all of us the opportunity to gift and/or collect one-of-a-kind pieces of art and crafts.