MIAMI — Past the undulating panels of Miami Beach Convention Center’s hallowed walls, where Art Basel attendees fight over works that have already been pre-sold, smaller art fairs like NADA, Untitled, and Ink Miami offer some of the most eye-catching and accessible ambiance and works during the city’s Art Week.
On the mainland, the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), best known for exhibiting emerging artists at an affordable price point, is back this year at the Ice Palace Studios. Swaying in a cozy hammocks in the show’s front yard while enjoying Miami’s unusually cool weather — yes, low 70s is cold for us — is a welcome reprieve from the mayhem of Art Week. Back on the beach, Ink Miami Art Fair is an independent and completely free (!) art fair dedicated to works on paper, housed in the Art Deco delight that is the Dorchester Hotel. And just a few streets south, perched on the sandy shoreline, is Untitled Art Fair, which boasts some of the most engaging activations of the week — including a wedding performance, complete with a rainbow cake.
Throughout the three fairs, textiles, the environment, and the lure of ultra-femme softness pervaded. While the world is burning outside the ephemeral veneer of this week, artists are cultivating safe spaces to ponder intimacy, healing, and resilience in the face of oppression. See some highlights from these fairs below.
NADA
At NADA, four booths explore ideas of femininity within Latinidad, the Caribbean, and home, while one presentation, by Mia Ardito for Brackett Creek Exhibitions, contemplates reality television and surveillance by recreating a Love Island-esque house where she plans to film her own pseudo unscripted television show using dolls.
KDR305, a local gallery that just opened a space in Allapattah, is showing sculptures by Nicaraguan artist Joel Gaitan that follow traditional hand-building clay techniques while referencing Mesoamerican art history. Through his cultural storytelling, he explores self-identity, sexuality, and ancestral lineage in anthropomorphic vessels that take on the life of Nicaraguan women. In “Todo Bajo El Cielo” (2023) (which translates figuratively to “everything under the sun”), the terracotta figure’s synthetic hair is dusted with gold luster evoking the regality of a deity. Gaitan’s sculptures sit in the center of KDR305’s booth, grounding the space with a sense of warmth.
Just a few booths down, Embajada, a gallery based in San Juan, Puerto Rico channels a tropi-goth aesthetic. Veiled by curtains made of stitched t-shirts, Tijuana-based Georgina Treviño’s platinum nameplate swingset “Culona Frikitona” (2023) (meaning “freaky fat ass”) hangs in the center. The lighting projects the titular engraving along the ground, welcoming visitors into a space of jagged femininity, where handbags are made of switch blades and scorpion belt buckles but laced shut with a single black bow. One work, “Quitate el Esmalte” (2023), (a lyric from Calle 13’s iconic anthem “Atrévete-Te-Te which translates into “remove your polish,” or “lose the veneer”) features neon colored rings, nail clippers, carabiners, and locks — just what a Culona Frikitona needs on a casual day out.
Around the corner, at Homework Gallery’s booth, Caribbean artists Julián Chams and Patricia Encarnación explore the multifaceted concepts of time, nature, and identity while shedding light on the traces of their similar yet distinct Caribbean cultural heritage. Chams and Encarnación both feature work atop repurposed tree trunks. One of them was found just a few weeks ago after an uncharacteristically brutal storm hit Miami outside of Hurricane Season. Chams’s “Colección #6 (Cielo y rocas, Vieques)” (2023) features a tapestry on cotton batting and jute and other natural textiles sourced from Colombia and images the artist took while visiting Puerto Rico during the pandemic. While Chams is Colombian, he longed for a tropical space that reminded him of home, and Puerto Rico offered him that reprieve when he was restricted from leaving the country.
Untitled
At this fair that’s right on the sand, French-Cameroonian artist Beya Gille Gacha immediately captures visitors’ attention at Keijsers Koning booth. Her life-like sculpture “Orant 5” (2019) features a young child seemingly trying to tidy their mess after breaking a pot with a bird of paradise plant, but after closer inspection, it becomes clear that the figure is breaking the concrete in order to let the soil and the plant prosper. The sculpture is covered in blue beads, evoking the Bamileke tradition from Cameroon, where beading artwork is a way to show value, just like covering it in gold or ivory. Here, Gacha demonstrates the value of each human being’s efforts to bring the earth back to life.
Other artists harnessed the power of textiles to tell stories of trauma and catharsis. At No Man’s Art Gallery, Afra Eisma’s “Taking Acorns Amongst the Stars” (2023) features a hand-tufted yarn display of a Grecian-like urn. Inside, Eisma has crafted a narrative of monsters and creatures where emotion serves as a source of strength and trauma acts as a catalyst for self-empowerment and change. And at Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Jen Clay’s mint-green and pastel textiles center her experience with hallucinations as a child and manifests the monsters she once witnessed. One work features a black snake meandering its way through iridescent turquoise trees; viewers are invited to interact with the snake and weave it through the trees themselves. Along the way, padded flaps reveal the words “I’m going to swallow you whole” in lime-green thread, subverting the biblical iconography of the malicious snake and making way for a mythical entanglement.
Dominican-Lebanese artist Amy Hussein also utilizes textiles to upend femme iconography. At the Casa Quien gallery booth, the artist’s Softly Feral presentation includes a bubblegum-pink tapestry woven by a machine loom and portraying a creature with the body of a fawn and the head of a woman. Hussein draws the viewer in with a soft aesthetic, but the image itself is violent, depicting feral dogs ravenously attacking the femme figure. Hussein is also exploring ideas of Arab migration to the Dominican Republic — one work, “Amina” (2023), features a creature with the body of a shimmery horse and the head of a woman wearing a pastel-pink hijab standing in what appears to be an Arab desert. Hussein says the landscapes of all her works are actually Dominican, even this one.
The School of Visual Arts Galleries’s booth highlights the work of recent graduates including Kiarita, whose show-stopping “From my Follicle to my Toenails (you Love me)” (2023) consists of a full-size queen bed on which the artist has painted a portrait inspired by a couple she knows. The result is an intimate rendering of sleeping lovers with their feet intertwined, conjuring the vulnerability of young love.
Leo Castaneda’s solo booth at Negrón Pizarro displays a video game the artist has been designing for 14 years, transporting viewers into a utopian society populated by evolved sea creatures where mangrove-like plants provide energy boosts. Castaneda, who is based in Miami, takes inspiration from the city’s own climate crisis, where mangroves could be the saving grace for sea level rise.
Ink Miami
At Ink Miami, visitors perused 16 booths featuring exclusively works on paper, all housed in the historic Dorchester Hotel. Instead of traditional fair booths, exhibitors occupy hotel suites, with three rooms per suite. Island Press brought Paula Wilson’s “In the Desert: Convergence” (2016) and “In the Desert: Mooning with Blue Flowers” (2016), monoprint collages with collagraph on muslin that showcase the artist’s deep reverence for both nature and the female form.
Another standout is prints created through sugarlifting, a form of screenprinting. The process consists of painting on a blank plate with a sugar solution before covering it with a thin layer of etching ground. When the ground is dry and the plate is submerged in a warm water bath, the artist leaves the print for about five minutes before placing it between two pieces of blotting. The process results in a painterly aesthetic emphasized by process. Benjamin Edmiston’s monochrome “Untitled (12 Grid)” (2023) highlights this technique.
At the Haystack suite, a limited edition print of Derrick Adams’ “Sitting Pretty” (2016) illustrates his trademark technicolor portraiture of Black American life. Around the corner, Alex Dodge’s “Soft Power” (2023) evokes a sense of what the artist describes as a “balance between levity and gravity.” The pink print is exactly what its title suggests — soft, but deceptively simple. Layered with a mica overprint, the piece is a gentle reminder to cogerlo suave, as we Miamians say it, or take it easy.
