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At Zones: Lamia Endara’s “Adorned” series, 2006
Edging In
By Michelle Weinberg
Miami’s history as a cultural mecca is brief. Lacking the engine of any big production industry here, and the propulsion of legion hipster/art students that swing a vibrant cultural life in most other cities, it has often seemed that developers, collectors, museum trustees, and other well-heeled movers and shakers have been calling the shots. However, almost half of the story of Miami’s recent rise as an arts destination is due to viral-type art initiatives seeded and propagated by bottom feeders; in this case, artists themselves.
Intrepid artists operating outside the confines of commercial galleries and museums kick-started a scene here that culminates in the annual glitter of Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) weekend, and is steadily growing during the rest of the calendar year.
Elana Herzog’s “Untitled 2006 (Peacock),” cotton chenille bedspread, staples in gypsum panel, at Grendel
Collectors and art aficionados now know that they will have to be just as savvy and venture beyond the big top ABMB and the numerous satellite fairs that have sprouted in its wake to get the full picture. They will be rewarded by multifaceted projects launched by artists, curators and promoters from all corners of the world who have determinedly scouted locations in the grittier fringes of Miami. Here are some of the events not appearing on the official map.
New Yorkers have always had a soft spot for Miami, often considered the sixth borough. A troupe of Miami-struck Big Apple artists has decamped to a homely, green, former supermarket squatting on the corner of 29th Street and North Miami Avenue in Wynwood, affectionately naming their venture Grendel, the unruly beast of the epic poem “Beowulf.” Touting works that “would be impossible to display in the confines of an art fair,” Grendel is the brainchild of Jack the Pelican Gallery in Williamsburg and features work by whiz artist Elana Herzog.
Jessica Dickinson, a Minnesota artist relocated to Brooklyn, N.Y., will show paintings for The View From Here at Bas Fisher Invitational, the alternative exhibition space run by Miami artists Hernan Bas and Naomi Fisher. The opening reception will be Saturday, Dec. 9, 7-10 p.m. Bas Fisher Invitational is located in the Buena Vista building in the Design District at 108 NE 39th St., Suite 210. Check out their Web site at www.basfisherinvitational.com.
Local artist Charo Oquet has opened the doors of the Edge Zones building at 22nd Street and North Miami Avenue to a mini-fair called Zones.. Oquet’s program has always been inclusive and welcoming to emerging artists, and this fair is a new endeavor by the prolific artist and promoter. Miami-based artist Julie Lara Kahn reprises her Open Season collection of artist baseball cards begun in 2002, with a Havana edition. Appropriately plugging free trade here in the art world’s annual mega-marketplace, Open Season presents 88 “players” in the Havana art community including artists, collectors, curators, critics and museum directors. Kahn and her collaborators, Miami-based curator Susan Caraballo, Havana-based curators Nahela Hechavarría and Aylet Ojeda Jequín and Miami’s own daring Circ X troupe, will peddle and exchange the cards with any and all takers. Friends With You has corralled their friends David Choe, PaperRad, MumbleBoy, Misaki Kawai, Devil Robots and Jim Drain & Ara Peterson to present Skywalkers, a good old-fashioned parade to align the art spirit with universal, cartoony good vibrations. The parade begins at 2 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 7, on the beach at Lincoln Road and then hugs the shoreline until the end at Fifth Street, around 4:30 p.m. Friends With You has enlisted the participation of the public to serve as balloon handlers to keep the spirit aloft.
Preferring to be everywhere and nowhere, this year’s Frisbee Fair flouts the unhealthy obsession with real estate and takes directly to the streets, coordinating a viral attack of artist posters that can be swiped, rather than purchased. The brainchild of curator Anat Ebgi, Frisbee Free is comfortable as noncommercial ephemera. Images of posters by the monster roster of artists, which numbers more than 50, can be seen on the Web site www.freefrisbee.com.
Another project that exploits the free float is “Place” the World in a Suitcase. A travel journal, a video camera and a T-shirt trotted the globe to record the meditations of 35 designers in as many cities. Writers contributed text to an imaginary travel book. This experiment, instigated by Vasava, a communications studio in Barcelona, is a testament to the fugitive, transitory nature of contemporary life, and it will touch down at the Centro Cultural Español, located at 800 Douglas Road, Suite 170, off SW Eighth St. in Coral Gables.
Seeking to nail down with precision the condition of being off-kilter, New York curators Micaela Giovannotti and Joyce Korotkin have put together an exhibition called Out of True that features the work of artists Eric Baudelaire, Sebastian Bremer, Jay Davis, Robert Lazzarini, Joshua Levine, Beatriz Millar, Enrico Tommaso de Paris, Pawel Wojtasik, Tobias Wong, Cheryl Yun and others. This meditation on indeterminacy and nonalignment appears at the Chatham Building, located in the Design District at 155 NE 40th St., Miami.
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