Gallery and Museum Shows To See Around Miami During Art Basel Week
While there are plenty of opportunities to get lost amidst the many booths of the fairs this week, be sure to step out for air and make a trip to some of Miami’s other cultural hubs. With galleries and museums alike debuting a range of shows during ABMB week, as well as a few that opened a few weeks back, there’s plenty to see around town. Artsy's gallery and museum teams shared some of their top picks with us for the week. Travel into the future with Daniel Arsham at Locust Projects, wander amidst cemetery-inspired installations at Emerson Dorsch, or make a visit to the “doctor” at Pedro Reyes’ “Sanatorium.”
Galleries:
“Daniel Arsham: Welcome to the Future” at Locust Projects
Miami-raised Daniel Arsham has installed a mass of his signature volcanic ash and crystal “artifacts” in non-profit exhibition space Locust Projects, creating a modern-day excavation site. A sunken pit in the gallery’s floor is brimming with thousands of boomboxes and walkmans, SLR cameras and television sets, VHS tapes and cassettes, cell phones and calculators, guitars and keyboards, an endless melange of eroding, monochrome relics of the present day and recent past. Arsham took two years to complete all the pieces seen in “Welcome to the Future;” the crumbling sculptures have been shown around the world in that time, seen most recently at Galerie Perrotin in Paris and Hong Kong and at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London.
Regina Rex presents “CEMETERIUM” at Emerson Dorsch
Regina Rex travels from its homebase gallery on the Lower East Side down to Miami for the first week of December, mounting an exhibition at Emerson Dorsch during the run of the fairs. Inspired by a traditional cemetery—and art fair booths—the group show will feature over 30 artists, each given a four-by-eight foot plot within a 50-by-50 foot yard, creating a sculpture garden that celebrates the immortality of art beyond artists’ lifetimes. Sculptures, installations, and performances are presented by Nicholas Buffon and Allegra Crowther, Artsy’s own Julia Colavita, Corey Escoto, Elise Ferguson, Elizabeth Ferry, Amanda Ross-Ho, BREYER P-Orridge, William Powhida, Esther Ruiz, Davina Semo, Adam Parker Smith, and Siebren Versteeg, among others. “CEMETERIUM” is open Dec. 1–7, with an opening party on Dec. 5 at midnight. Regina Rex can be found elsewhere during the week at NADA Miami Beach.
“Mana Miami” at Mana Contemporary
This year marks Mana Contemporary’s Miami fair debut, and the Jersey City-based gallery is filling a 140,000-square-foot facility sprawled over 22 acres in the Wynwood arts district with three different projects—“Mana Monumental,” “Dirty Geometry,” and “GLE at Mana.” With works by some 50 artists, Mana Miami is geared towards promoting collaboration and community amongst artists and viewers. “Mana Monumental” will unite a selection of large-scale works by a varied group of 21 artists, including Mana Contemporary founder and president Eugene Lemay and co-founder/Art Director Yigal Ozeri, along with Stanley Casselman, Carole A. Feuerman, Ron Gorchov, KAWS, Alfred Leslie, Milton Resnick, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and Ray Smith. “Dirty Geometry” showcases the work of 23 Latin American artists—Emilia Azcárate, Willys de Castro, Jaime Gili, Joaquín Torres-García, and exhibition curator Osvaldo Romberg, to name a few—working in geometric abstraction; in this show, they will present works that bend the rules of geometry, pushing the boundaries of traditional, straightforward forms. And “GLE at Mana” will present a selection of recent limited-edition prints from Gary Lichtenstein Editions (GLE), made in collaboration with Bob Gruen, Charles Hinman, Robert Indiana, Richard Meier, Yigal Ozeri, and Jessica Stockholder.
“Great Expectations” presented by Gallery Diet at the home of Nina Johnson-Milewski and Daniel Milewski
Examining the principles that inherently guide life in a home—architecture, interior design, color, texture, shape—Gallery Diet presents “Great Expectations,” a group show curated in part by INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, Samson Projects, and The Box, in the 1928 bungalow home that Gallery Diet owner Nina Johnson-Milewski and her husband Daniel Milewski recently moved into. “Great Expectations” takes into consideration not just the ways an interior may determine an artwork’s function and place, but how the work’s content may also dictate its role in the household—the instinctive feeling that this work is such a kitchen piece, while that one belongs over the fireplace. In addition to the artists and works selected by the three galleries, on view are also new works by Katie Stout, Jim Drain, Magic Flying Carpets, Christy Gast, Nicole Cherubini, Nicholas Lobo, David Brooks, Virginia Overton, and more.
Museums:
“Pedro Reyes: Sanatorium” at ICA Miami
Initially presented at the Guggenheim in 2011, Pedro Reyes’s “Sanatorium” has morphed over the years with each new installation, while still adhering to the tenets stated in the project’s manifesto. For its latest iteration, Reyes has created a makeshift clinic within the second floor galleries of the ICA Miami, where receptionists and faux-therapists—whom the artist has trained specifically for the exhibit—welcome and attend to visitors through various interactive activities. Upon entrance, visitors are interviewed, “diagnosed,” and then sent off through the different groups. The attendants of the “Sanatorium” use a combination of Gestalt psychology, psychodrama, hypnosis, trust-building and conflict-resolution exercises, and even theater warm-up games calibrated to visitors’ specific needs. The installation also includes props and relational objects, which can also be seen at Lisson Gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Miami Beach.
Project Gallery Commissions at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
One year after moving into its new Herzog & de Meuron building, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has commissioned five projects for the 2014-2015 season, two of which are on view during Art Basel. The museum’s Project Galleries, which are dedicated to single-artist presentations, house two exhibitions: “Nicole Cherubini, 500,” which opened in October, and “Mario García Torres: R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics,” which opens just in time for the fairs on December 2nd. PAMM sought out artists working in a wide variety of media for these projects, introducing these artists into Miami’s creative community as well as the museum’s, as each project interacts with and responds to the museum’s architecture in different ways. Cherubini has filled her designated gallery with organic clay objects, resting on plinths and hanging on the walls, alternately left naked or glazed with bright drips of color. Torres links together a series of displays, including photographs, film, music, and other informational objects, based on research he has conducted on surprising or little-known anecdotes in recent art history; the exhibition touches on such subjects as Robert Rauschenberg, climate change, and South Florida.
“Art, Technology, and the Natural World” at The Harn Museum of Art
Contemporary artworks spanning all mediums, from photography to prints to video, by a selection of 30 artists examine, embody, and venture into the intersection of biology, technology, and art. The exhibition features an installation inspired by the curiosity cabinets of the 16th and 17th centuries, which would contain natural specimens, scientific and ethnographic tools, and illustrations; titled “Repurposing the Wunderkammer,” the installation showcases reimaginings of these original cases by Mark Dion, Ben Patterson, and more. Along with the modern-day wunderkammers, 38 Andy Warhol pieces, including prints and polaroids, are on view, celebrating the media, technology, and mass production. The exhibition also presents four bronze sculptures of part human-part animal-part machine creatures by William Kentridge and a spherical, dizzying lamp by Olafur Eliasson, challenging viewers’ relation to space and time.
Explore Artsy’s Guide to Art Basel in Miami Beach Week 2014.
Top image: Daniel Arsham, "Welcome to the Future," 2014. Rights Reserved.
