Miami Art Week - 2024
After a week of art fairs and events, I think I need to hibernate until January.
This year’s Miami Art Week offered a number of surprises, some pleasant and others regretful. My first takeaway was that Miami doesn’t do anything halfway. For 5-straight days, I was completely engrossed in artwork from the early morning hours and well into the night. Whether it was gallery-hosted cocktail parties and brunches, museum openings, art fair previews, panel discussions and lectures, or live performances, the programming for the week felt conscious and thoughtful, and well planned.
Before i really dig in, it’s worth noting the last Miami Art Week I attended was 5 years ago, just before Covid-19 effectively shut down the fair market for what seemed like ages. Compared to 2019, there were some stark differences. This year, I attended Art Basel, Art Miami + Context, SCOPE, Red Dot + Spectrum, NADA, Aqua, Design Miami, INK, PAMM, along with a few smaller events at local museums and galleries.
For one, gone were the massive throngs of art onlookers crowding narrow fair aisles, or at least, noticeably fewer. Instead, I found most of the fairs to be calm and easy to maneuver. This made the viewing experience infinitely more enjoyable, but it does speak to the continuing decline in art fair attendance over the last decade or so. Art Basel received roughly 75,000 visitors in 2024, compared to 81,000 in 2019.
I was also pleased to notice a marked lack of gimmicky viral artworks. In 2019, Miami was sent into a frenzy over a banana taped to the wall of Perrotin Gallery’s booth, and so many celebrity sitings it was hard to keep up. This year, there was more focus around the fairs themselves, attendance, and the clever curation of both blue-chip favorites and emerging artist debuts.
Notable Mentions:
Art Basel featured, by and large, blue chip artists and otherwise tested named. With the booth prices being what they are, this is expected. I was surprised by how much square footage of the show was dedicated to abstract and conceptual art in various mediums. The emphasis of most works centered largely on form, process, design, and materiality rather than storytelling in the strictest sense. However, of the thousands of artists represented, a portrait artist named Kehinde Wiley made perhaps the most significant appearance with no less than four major galleries representing his work; despite the ongoing allegations against him. The most notable of his works exhibited was a massive portrait, The Death of Hyacinth (Ndey Buri Mboup), 2022, that took up an entire wall of the Templon Gallery booth. It featured a young woman lounging on an orange blanket, wearing a red tank top and ripped blue jeans. Her reclined pose recalls various historical portrayals of Venus in a similar pose (albeit with more clothing), and she is surrounded by Wiley’s recognizable floral pattern work that offers a colorful, highly contrasting, and starkly flat lacing of flowers and vines interwoven with the figure itself. His works have earned a spot in my heart for their iconic melding of hyperrealism and symbolism, contemporary themes around black identity and stylistic elements borrowed from the Old Masters.
Across the river at Art Miami + Context, I discovered my current favorite artist. Despite the general emphasis on contemporary (Miami-style) pop art with all it’s flashy colors and pop-culture imagery, there were actually a number of interesting finds. But the one I will dedicate this paragraph to is Nikoleta Sekulovic. Her debut Art Mami appearance, courtesy of Rebecca Hossack Gallery, featured 5 large-scale paintings from her new (and ongoing) Rossetti Collection. Each painting, a portrait of a woman elegantly dressed and sitting in a relaxed manner at the very center of the canvas, surrounded by moody and highly expressive gardens that seem to reflect her very thoughts and demeanor. Each painting is dedicated to a famous female author, poet, philosopher, scientist, etc., and many of her paintings are accompanied by poems that capture the heart of the painting. I am in awe of these works, all of which sold at the fair, and look forward to seeing what she produces next.
Down the street at SCOPE, we saw a mix of local and international artists, mostly emerging, mostly edgy. The art here was more lighthearted than the other fairs, offering a mix of seriousness and and silliness that felt approachable and enjoyable. One such silly artist exhibited at SCOPE was Aris Moore, whose strange creatures are both repulsive, beautiful, and bursting with creativity. As if a Maurice Sendak illustration had astral projected into a two-dimensional Tim Burton universe where creatures that are all teeth, fur, and limbs crawled the Earth (in an oddly endearing sort of way). On the other end of the spectrum, Jonlouis Gonzalez featured a selection of works from his newest series, Imagined Reality, that feature glimpses of scenes from his recent travels to Puerto Rico through the softened and somewhat distorted lens of memory and perspective. These scenes are intimate, magical, and as in all of his works, the figures are represented as astronauts. The use of astronauts is both a connection to his upbringing on the Space Coast of Florida, as well as a way to imbue his figures with a sense of wonder rooted in observation and navigation of social challenges and human experience; as an astronaut navigates in space.
Overall, I think it’s safe to say that Miami Art Week is back, and whatever it may have suffered in slightly decreased attendance compared to pre-Covid years, it made up for in quality of artwork and overall professionalism.
– Jessica Kennedy
