Day 3: A New Orleans Artist En Route: Reports from Art Basel Week, Miami

South Beach, Miami, FL.

For the past fourteen years, much of the art world has descended on Miami Beach at the beginning of December. At the core of this annual migration is Art Basel Miami Beach – a sprawling art fair that occupies most of the Miami Beach Convention Center. This year there are twenty or so additional fairs participating and these range from small hotel fairs to massive, beachfront tent affairs. I am here to seek out and share New Orleans art that’s making an impact on Art Basel Miami Beach. If you missed the first two installments of my experience and photographs, you can check them out here and here.

As the week has worn on in the usually sunny Miami, a seemingly ceaseless rain has set in. It’s flooding roads, working its way into the tents to drench artwork, soak dealers, buyers, journalists, and art tourists with meteorological egalitarianism. Overall, it is making it a soggy, difficult mess to get anywhere. Still, we are able to shuffle our damp selves onto a cross bay shuttle. And, a mere hour and a half later we are dashing through another deluge to get into the grouping of tents that house Art Miami and Art Miami Context.

In scale and ambition this set of fairs is rivaled only by the core fair Art Basel. There is a great deal of truly fantastic artwork on view here. Julia Street based Arthur Roger Gallery came down with a diverse and dynamic grouping of work from quite a few New Orleans and Louisiana based artists. These include Willie Birch, Douglas Bourgeois, Stephen Paul Day, Dawn DeDeaux, Lin Emery, and Stephanie Patton. There was much to consider in regard to texture, colors, form, and movement from artist to artist that the rain was almost completely forgotten.

Then we moved onto the Manhattan based Heller Gallery, which was also back at Art Miami this year. They had four works from New Orleans based glass artist Sibylle Perreti, setting in that from Florida to New York, New Orleans can’t and won’t be forgotten.

I will keep my eyes open for the visions of and from New Orleans as I move through Art Basel Week Miami–keeping a piece of home with me no matter where I travel.

For more information on the galleries and art, check out these links:

http://www.artmiamifair.com/

http://arthurrogergallery.com/

http://www.hellergallery.com/