We stepped away from the big fairs for another day to check out some of the peripheral Miami Art Week fairs featuring familiar work from emerging and established artists, as well as some more DIY-oriented, artist-run spaces.

figure abstraction-fetish nuance. 24 x 24 in, oil on wood panel | photo courtesy Auerus Contemp. website

Aqua Art Miami is a smaller fair relative to its sibling fairs in downtown (Art Miami and Context). “It’s what I like to call a middle-class fair, not like Art Basel. Much more accessible,” says Kevin Havelton, art dealer and director of Aureus Contemporary in Providence Rhode Island. Havelton is a seasoned Miami Art Week presenter with  “a true passion for the work.” Unlike some art dealers, Havelton personally collects the work of all the artists he represents, and it shows when carefully he describes an artist’s work to interested buyers and folks who frequent just for fun. Havelton presented works by Carina Schott and Karim Hamid, both Rhode Island residents, and Eben Haines who lives and makes work in Boston.

Though Aqua is a beautiful fair staged in a posh, sun-soaked hotel in Miami Beach, for dealers like Havelton, it’s no afternoon jaunt. “This is a big week in the art world, a lot of people come pouring in. I refer to it as the Olympics of the contemporary art world,” says Havelton. “You have to work real fucking hard for your money.”

One of Andrew Fenlon’s “Procedural Paintings” featured by Mary Sky at Satellite Art Show

Next on our list was Miami Beach’s most rogue show (#NOTBASEL), all the way up North Beach past SCOPE. It’s called Satellite and seeks to “offer patrons and collectors a unique experience where art is at the forefront of creative expression, activism, and curiosity.” The charmingly dilapidated Ocean Terrace Motel housed dozens of spaces curated by gallery owners and artists. Some of the booths showed work all the way into the bathrooms of the converted hotel suites, which were usually painted or even incorporated into the works featured there.

At Satellite, we sought out Macrina Newhouse, director at Mary Sky, a gallery and rural individualized residency program in Hancock, Vermont, where, according to the artist, she “brings artists out of the city to have a rural experience and support them by giving them time to be quiet, be in nature and really engage with their work in a meaningful way.” Newhouse also has a space for Mary Sky at Spectrum Miami, but chose to bring the largest works she displayed by Andrew Fenlon, to Satellite. “I think this work is playing really well in Miami. It’s bright, colorful and poppy. People have been really receptive.”

Check in tomorrow for our final daily dispatch covering all the New England happenings at Art Miami and NADA.

Top photo courtesy Satellite website

The post Day 4 at Miami Art Week: Satellite & Aqua appeared first on Take Magazine.

INK Miami held its private preview on the morning of December 6th in the decadent courtyard at the Suites of Dorchester on Miami Beach. Though the fair is small relative to its Art Week neighbors in South Beach, INK still features lots of galleries from around the world, from Ireland to Boston.

Childs Gallery from Boston was the only New England gallery showing at INK, offering a varied exhibition from two Alexander Calder pieces to an installation by Boston-born artist Sara Zielinski.

Zielinski’s installation, The Dolls House at INK Miami, was unique, filling an entire room of Childs Gallery’s suite. Every inch of the room was covered in printed fabrics, hand-sewn works and printed messages ranging in tone from emo to depraved.

Detail of Sara Zielinski’s installation at Childs Gallery entitled The Doll’s House

The install description sums up the work as “an immersive printed environment for fair-goers to explore,” but it seems much more personal than that. Whether we’re staring into Zielinski’s actual inner world or some version of what every girl (or grown woman) does in her bedroom, Zielinski’s careful placement and crude human figures call us back to our own alone-time memories and late-night journal-scribblings. In the same way that artists like Kathleen Hannah revealed themselves to us through their early bedroom pop musics, Zielinski revealed to INK Miami attendees just what it’s like inside the mind, life and room of another.

The SCOPE preview was next, and was quite the contrast to INK in size and style. SCOPE, much like UNTITLED (they are neighbors on the beach by the way), programs a packed fair, featuring a seemingly endless lineup of galleries from all over the world, works of all kinds, and different programming throughout the week.

The Bridge – 2017, 85 x 104 acrylic on canvas

Though we could easily talk about the hyper-minimalist artists emerging from Seoul and our favorite strange large-scale installation (head to our Instagram page for those broader, up-to-the-minute insights), we’ll focus on the handful of galleries from New England.

Clark Gallery from Lincoln, Massachusetts, was stationed near the entrance to the fair showing several artists, some of whom are from New England. Dana Salvo, owner of Clark Gallery, pointed us to Jessie Morgan, a Boston-based abstract painter whose work hung in the middle of the booth beside North Adams, Massachusetts painter Warner Friedman. 

Aureus Gallery from Providence, Rhode Island, was on the opposite side of the fair (Aureus is also showing some other artists up the road at AQUA). In addition to a daunting number of nationally well-known and international artists, Aureus Gallery featured a few artists making work in Rhode Island — sculptor Laura Kramer and painter Karim Hamid.

Selected work for “Unafilliate.us” by Tom Fruin

Just as we thought we’d seen most, if not all, the galleries and organizations from New England at SCOPE, we stumbled upon the “Unafilliate.us” exhibition, one of the Programs + Special Projects presented at SCOPE. A product of Craft Guile and Boston-based Column Health’s recent initiative to “help de-stigmatize mental illness and the disease of addiction,” the show at SCOPE features intricate quilts sewn from tiny drug baggies and hanging neon nooses by renowned New York artist Tom Fruin. All folks who visited the booth walked away with addiction counseling materials, and, surprisingly, one dose of Narcan with proper instructions for how to administer it on someone who’s overdosing.

Selected work for “Unafilliate.us” by Tom Fruin

Check in again tomorrow for our coverage of PULSE and one of our favorite Maine artist, Tanja Hollander. 

Top photo interior of Sara Zielinski’s installation The Doll’s House for Childs Gallery

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