As the excitement around Miami Art Week starts to die down, and the last of the Drake and Drake-adjacent performances end, we decided to head out for one final round of perusing the fairs. In addition, we ran into a certain famous duo who are usually hanging outside bodegas in The Bronx, but more on that later.

James Pettemgill of Wingate Studios showing an Elizabeth Atterbury print

First up was NADA Miami, which is the only major American art fair programmed by a nonprofit (New American Art Dealers Alliance). It seeks to  “[explore] new or underexposed art that is not typical of the ‘art establishment.’” We chose NADA as one of the final fairs to see because of its embrace of the underexposed and we needed to see works by Maine artist Elizabeth Atterbury who was named an Artist to Watch at fair by NADA organizers.

Northampton resident James Pettengill represented Wingate Studio out of Hinsdale, New Hampshire, which had some of Atterbury’s sculptural, embossed prints. Pettengill helped his father, master printer and owner of Wingate Studio, move the print shop in a new direction towards publishing contemporary and emerging artists. He was excited to show Atterbury’s work since her medium and method seem to match the shop’s new direction. Pettengill thought NADA was just the place to do it. “We do a lot of print fairs so it’s usually us and other print makers,” he says. “But to be at a contemporary art fair is really nice because we work with artists who are showing in that context.”

Wingate Studio not only operates as a publishing space for emerging printmakers; it also offers artists from around the region a small residency program (much like what Macrina Newhouse is doing at Mary Sky). The folks at Wingate Studio invite artists for short period of time to collaborate with staff while they live on their family farm in Hindsale.

Holi #16, 2013, Melted plastic, expanded foam, paper, artificial flowers, pigment 24 × 24 in 61 × 61 cm Sculpture by Judy Pfaff

Our final fair stop was Art Miami, the largest of the Art Miami/Aqua/Context network of Miami art fairs. Art Miami is less like a NADA, Untitled or SCOPE, and more like a PULSE or even Basel. At Art Miami,  there’s less fodder around programming and events, and more about packing the tent with people and sellable art.

This is where we tracked down James Baron Art, a booth full of interested buyers and contemporary works on paper and sculptures. Barron divides his time between Rome, Italy, and Kent, Connecticut, and has sold works by works by Picasso, Matisse, Warhol, Diebenkorn and LeWitt (just to name a few). “We work with collectors that are selling works. We don’t sell works directly from artists,” says Hascy Cross, director of James Baron Art. “Maybe the pieces have already been on the market sometime in the past or people will consign pieces to us in hopes that we’ll sell it for them.”

tomorrow is desus and mero’s first art auction and yes, these are the best art pieces money can buy #miamiartbasel

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After the long haul across town through two different fairs, it was time to laugh at ourselves a little bit. So we cutt out to Wynwood to see Desus Nice and The Kid Mero of Viceland cable’s illustrious late night talk show Desus and Mero. They stood atop the Viceland Bus and conducted an art auction to benefit Planned Parenthood featuring props from the set of their show, one of Desus’s signature (allegedly) unused chap sticks and, of course, an enormous picture of themselves.

Top photo sculptures on view at Mrs. Gallery by Elizabeth Atterbury | Photo courtesy the artist website

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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

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On day three of Miami Art Week, all the press previews and openings are over, but the fair perusals don’t stop here. Back when this art extravaganza was first organized, these first three days were key. Folks would flood to the openings and previews (or vernissage for those in the know), see the works at a few fairs, make their art purchases and/or sales, then take the weekend off. Today, it’s a much different game. Not only are there more buyers than ever, but each gallery owner and, in some cases, the artists who accompany them, have to remain present and working until late in the evening Sunday.

First up for us on this third day of holy art fair perusals is one of the longest running art fairs in Miami and the last big Miami Beach art fair we haven’t visited; PULSE.

Katelijne De Backer, the newly anointed director of PULSE, says the fair seeks to create more accessibility around the kind of works being presented at Art Week. “Even for those who cannot collect, the fair offers an opportunity to meet and talk with artists you would never otherwise have access to. I think this kind of generosity is important, especially now,” she told the New York Times.

William Baczek, owner at William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampon Massachusets, agrees that the fair is more accessible not only for folks who aren’t art collectors, but for smaller galleries that are essentially locked out of the larger Art Basel scene. Baczek presented paintings by Jaq Chartier and Jana Burke as well as sculptures by Anne Lilly. By the time we caught up with him, Baczek had already made a few sales.

After leaving PULSE, it was time to see a good Take Magazine pal — one of our 2017 Artists to Watch, Tanja Hollander. We met Hollander in the swanky VIP collectors’ lounge at Art Basel, easily the largest and most talked about fair at Art Week Miami. MGM Resorts Art & Culture presented her work as a participatory installation where attendees, much like at her past Mass MoCA installation, can add to her growing collection of sticky notes where people write their definition of a “true friend.” The folks at MGM Resorts Art & Culture chose to include one of Nick Cave’s sound suites in the suite, making the interactive exhibition felt like a spiritual continuation of her work with Mass MoCA since her installation there was positioned immediately before the entrance to Cave’s sullen yet sparkly meditation Until (both shows curated by Denise Markonish). 

One of two interactive installations by Tanja Hollander at Art Basel | Presented by MGM Resorts Art & Culture

Though most of the fairs are populated by galleries from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco (and all the other art hot spots across the world), there’s still much to explore in terms of New England artists, galleries, and their intimate connections to the broader art world.

Check in with us tomorrow for more coverage of Art Week in Miami when we chat with Auerus Contemporary of Providence Rhode Island and Mary Sky of Hookset, Vermont. 

Top photo interior of the collectors’ lounge at Art Basel featuring Nick Cave’s sound suite and Tanja Hollander’s interactive exhibition entitled Are You Really My Friend presented by MGM Resorts Art & Culture.

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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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At Art Week Miami, UNTITLED, Art Fair Miami is one of the big fairs. Though there are nearly endless booths to peruse featuring galleries and artists from around the world, UNTITLED seems even more concerned with providing novel experiences for the art kids and elders frequenting the fair. Ten limited edition free posters by famous artists, six different “special projects” installed and curated by UNTITLED throughout the fair, and nearly moment-to-moment programming add up to create what feels less like an art fair and more like a bazaar.

Anyway, amongst the madness were two New England galleries: Steven Zevitas Gallery from Boston, Massachusetts, and LaMontagne Gallery from Winchester, Massachusetts.

Alex Jackson | (C)(S)ell(ar)(er), 2017, oil on canvas, 72 x 66 inches

Steben Zevitas Gallery showed selected works from Alex Jackson, who graduated from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Skowhegan, Maine in 2015 and then went on to earn an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. His works are daunting, both in size and thematic exploration.

Excuse MeKim Faler, 2017, Graphite Print

LaMontagne Gallery brought works from two New Englanders and one New York artist. Kim Faler’s work was on the scene alongside two of Joe Wardwell’s large wordy collages, sort of a minimized version of his massive work on view right now at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

What They Want I Don’t KnowJoe Wardwell, 2016, oil on canvase, 60 x 50

Though Take Magazine isn’t necessarily a space for promoting art from outside New England, we can’t help but mention a few folks in this roundup. First, Eugenio Ampudia’s kinetic sculpture that morphs from the word “time” into shapes and patterns, then back again, serenely offers viewers a soothing, tangible work that found a way to assert itself amid the din of the fair (fun fact: the artist’s name was just scrawled into the wall below the piece, near the floor with no description and barely legible.)

A post shared by JohnW (@microwavedkale) on Dec 5, 2017 at 3:46pm PST

Additionally, the New York City-based gallery The Hole presented a selection of languid portraits by Eric Yahnker that spoke to basically everyone who walked by the booth. Donald Trump blow-drying his hair, a late-Victorian mother nursing her baby with a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and Justin Bieber painted in reverence like the Madonna Child all done in a sfumato that would rival da Vinci.

Mother’s Dew Eric Yahnker, 2017, Oil pastel on paper, 68.5 x 52″

Check in with us tomorrow as we give you the exclusive first look at SCOPE and INK Miami. 

Top photo courtesy UNTITLED, Art Fair

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Yes, of course, we’ll be at Art Basel. However, there’s so much more to Miami Art Week than the big fairs pushing big name artists and throwing parties. Art Week in Miami also consists of dozens of smaller fairs showcasing emerging, mid-career, and straight-up famous artists from all over the world. We’re looking to take our talents beyond South Beach and explore any and all fairs with New England connections. Yes, it’s an audacious task, but we think we can pull it off. Here’s our plan

UNTITLED, Art
Dec. 6 – 10

“Untitled, Art is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. Untitled, Art innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify, and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: Kim Faler & Joseph Wardell, both represented by LaMontagne Gallery.

INK Miami
Dec. 6 – 10

“The Ink Miami Art Fair transforms the historic Suites of Dorchester Hotel into distinctive art galleries, surrounded by a verdant and tranquil courtyard. Visitors are invited to explore our main galleries offering a wide range of works on paper including new and noteworthy editions.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: Childs Gallery, which will have its whole booth transformed into an immersive print environment by multimedia artist Sara Zielinski.

Adam’s Nest at Art Gasel 3
Hotel Gathering
Dec 6 – 10

“Adam’s Nest is an idea that has been brewing for ages and the universe provided an opportunity to grab a retail space in Provincetown’s east end. The physical shop opened its doors in June 2016. We are located right next to Wired Puppy coffee and feature art, apparel, jewelry, and whatnot! We select items that appeal to our unique sense of humor, values and our lifestyle. We seek out artists and items through friends, our travels and various social media avenues and are always on the lookout for something interesting to share.”

NADA Miami 2017
Dec. 7 – 10

Mrs. Gallery out of Maspeth, New York, will be presenting varied works from Portland, Maine artist Elizabeth Atterbury.

Tanja Hollander at Art Basel

We’ll be visiting the Maine-born, Facebook-famous photographer Tanja Hollander at the Art Basel Collectors’ Lounge where Hollander will be signing copies of her new book Are Your Really My Friend, which is a collection of photographs that originally appeared in her installation of the same name at MASS MoCA this year.

PULSE Miami
Dec. 7 – 10

“Founded in 2005, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is an established part of the annual art calendar and is recognized for providing its international community of emerging and established galleries with a dynamic platform for connecting with a global audience. PULSE offers visitors an engaging environment in which to discover and collect the most compelling contemporary art being produced today.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: William Baczek Fine Arts from Northampton, Massachusetts

This is just a few of the artists, fairs and galleries we plan to check on over the next week. Come back to our website everyday for more Art Week Miami updates and follow us on social for up-to-the-minute coverage.

Top photo courtesy PULSE Miami

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