ART: CALL IT BASEL DAZZLE
Dynamic Art Basel fair helps establish Miami as a thriving city for artists and cutting-edge work
By TANYA PEREZ-BRENNAN
MIAMI BEACH -- Here in the city of skin, tourists throng to the beaches, gawk at the sculpted bodies of models prancing down Lincoln Road and listen to the Latin American melange of music that fills the air.
But now Miami Beach has a new drawing card: art.
As host of the Art Basel fair, which wrapped up last week after showing the works of 190 galleries from around the world and drawing more than 33,000 art lovers, Miami is showing its other face, that of a thriving city of artists with a flourishing downtown arts district and alternative art spaces at every turn. Suddenly New York art dealers are coming down for more than just an escape from winter's bitter cold.
Those intimate with the art world say Art Basel, a spinoff of an international arts festival based in Basel, Switzerland, has provided the necessary "stamp of approval" for a city whose artists have been hitting the canvas for years and the fair's presence has far-reaching implications beyond Miami.
Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator at Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art, said Art Basel gave the necessary push to something that many already knew to be true.
"It's validated the fact that Miami is an important international arts center," she said. "There's a very strong group of artists, and we've been showing them from the beginning."
Clearwater said the view of Miami as an arts hub has shifted over the years. "When we first opened, there was some skepticism that Miami could compete," she said.
But with Art Basel and the fringe arts events that followed, that attitude has changed. "The Miami model has proved so dynamic with everyone doing exciting things," she said.
The Miami fair has a unique kind of energy. You'll see long lines of people at coffee stands, looking for a caffeine rush -- not only to get over a night of partying -- but to make it through the endless walls of art at the Miami Beach Convention Center. People pass out fliers on the street corners for art openings and art projects.
Other arts institutions in Florida have taken notice.
George Kinghorn, chief curator and deputy director of the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, said Miami's unique mixture of international culture and arts activity led him to actively look for artists in Miami to bring to Jacksonville.
"For JMOMA, we're interested in exhibiting artists of international reputation, many of which are down there," he said.
The "Push Play: Redefining Pop" show that JMOMA opened in June featured two Miami-based artists, Ray Azcuy and Federico Uribe. In September 2005, JMOMA will have an exhibit called "A Survey of Contemporary Regional Painting" from the Southeast, which will feature some Miami artists.
" Miami is well on its way as being another hub of activity," Kinghorn said. "This may well be the secondary location of cutting edge [art]."
One of the painters included in the JMOMA show is John Bailly, who has been active in Miami's art scene since the '80s and has witnessed firsthand the city's artistic transformation.
"Art is about trying to investigate who we are, and Miami is doing that as a city," he said over lunch at Versailles, a Cuban restaurant in Little Havana.
And while Bailly acknowledges the importance of Art Basel in helping to bring exposure to Miami's arts scene, he says artists have been creating there for years.
"For us it's an amazing event," he said, "But it's an event. I'm painting all year . . . you can never paint for the fair."
Bailly's new work is a departure from his previous narrative works. His new paintings now feature several random images and motifs that led him to his ideas, instead of the ideas leading to the image.
"While my earlier paintings were expressions or illustrations, these are more explorations of ideas," he said. "To abstract for ourselves our system of knowledge, how we process and categorize information and formulate our reality."
In Cabeza de Vaca (2003), two blue globes at the bottom stare out at the viewer in a grid of squares, hands and rusty red tones that seem to play with space and time. Bailly says many have interpreted the painting to be the struggle between the New World and the old, a result of his depiction of the voyages of Columbus and images of Florida and Cuba in the piece.
Bailly has also shown at the J. Johnson Gallery in Jacksonville Beach with fellow artist Carlos Betancourt in a group show called " Miami: Visions of Now" that opened in September.
Bruce Dempsey, J. Johnson's gallery director, turned to Miami eight years ago through a gallery friend who introduced him to scores of Miami artists.
One of the best changes Dempsey has seen has been the alternative art spaces that have emerged around Miami. "I love all the venues that open up for younger experimental artists," he said. "It's remarkable down there; you could spend the entire time going from warehouse to warehouse seeing some damn good art."
Since Art Basel first came to Miami three years ago, several alternative art fairs have cropped up, including New Art Dealer's Alliance, a non-profit group of mainly New York dealers featuring 60 exhibitors; scopeMiami, in the Townhouse Hotel in Miami Beach, featuring 70 one-person exhibitions of emerging galleries; and the Frisbee Art Fair, which began with a few friends deciding to rent out rooms in the Cavalier Hotel on Ocean Drive to show their art.
In the end, having Art Basel in Miami is beneficial to the growth of the arts scene in Florida overall.
"It makes the art world in Florida itself much smaller," said Clearwater.
Dempsey said several of J. Johnson's artists have attended Art Basel.
"Suddenly it doesn't become this narcissistic localized art group," he said. "They have been exposed to new techniques and art . . . and all that is good for the arts in Jacksonville."
Tanya Perez-Brennan is the art critic for The Florida Times-Union. This article was originally published in The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville on December 12, 2004.
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