Miami as a Cultural and Art Historical Caravanserai
An unusually rich and layered artwork, what first appears to be an abstract impressionist painting is actually a collage of paint chips recovered from weathered and crumbling buildings in Havana by Cuban-born Diana Fonseca (now working in Spain) displayed by El Apartamento Gallery (Madrid / Havana) at Untitled Art Fair Miami 2023
It’s very difficult to explain just how much there is to see and experience during Miami Art Week, and although it was not my first time at the fair (or at other large fairs or iterations of Art Basel), it was the most intense, exhausting week I’ve ever spent immersed in art (not to mention Miami’s infamous traffic).
Yes — Miami is a dreamscape, a vision of the future, and a crucial meeting-place between North and South, East and West. One of the world’s truly great destinations for art — and also one of the youngest.
I’ll skip over the parties, the people-watching, and the loads (95-97% of the total) of not-very-good to bad art (much of which I nevertheless enjoyed experiencing).
What I would like to share is what I’m seeing in terms of tastes and trends — there is tremendous diversity of humanity and artistic expression in the world today — more than ever before.
And for new collectors there are a lot of opportunities to begin collecting at very reasonable levels — some original art works that I loved cost as little as $250, with a wide variety of museum-quality pieces starting in the 4-figure range.
No one can guarantee that an artwork will appreciate in value over the long run, and most advisors would say you should only buy what you will enjoy. This could be because it enhances the beauty and meaning of the space you decorate or because know you will derive a sense of satisfaction from the connection you create with the artist, the subject, or the place you first encountered the work.
People who choose to work with me when buying art (and I’ll note that my fees are not only reasonable, they can often be more-than-covered by discounts I am able to negotiate with dealers) enjoy full access to the decades of experience I have in exploring the world, building my own map of contemporary art and the world at large as they have evolved for centuries.
As a traveler, explorer, and connoisseur of transcendence experiences, I bring a unique “outsider’s insider” perspective to the world of fine, contemporary art by contextualizing it with insights from everywhere I’ve been.
Last week’s caravanserai of contemporary art, ideas, and culture in Miami was an experience that I hope to be able to share personally with many of you in the months and years to come. For now I’ll share just a few insights and observations that you might not find elsewhere.
I don’t typically subscribe to conspiracy theories… but this was one of the best installations at Art Basel
Partial view of one of six large canvases making up the installation of Cynthia Talmadge’s Half Light (2023) presented by NYC’s 56 Henry Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach, Dec. 6-10, 2023.
Within the first hour of Art Basel’s VIP first-look opening on December 6, I stumbled upon what ended up being one of the most talked-about installations in the entire Miami Beach Convention Center, experiencing it directly without any notion or forewarning of the artist’s intentions.
I walked into a carpeted but otherwise empty booth (sponsored by New York’s 56 Henry Gallery) whose three walls were made up of six large pointillist-style canvases, depicting the walls of an artist’s studio and covered with trompe l’oeil posters and other ephemera from what appeared to be the 1960s.
I spent several minutes looking closely at these, pondering the meaning of geometric sketches and advertisements for exhibitions at various defunct art institutions in my hometown of Washington, D.C. (such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where I studied black & white photography around the turn of millennium — prior to the attacks of 9/11 convincing me to abandon photography and pursue a career in the Foreign Service).
On the posters I recognized the names of artists, such as Sam Gilliam, Thomas Downing, and Kenneth Noland, very familiar to me as members of the Washington Color School, an abstract expressionist movement that favored the use of color and geometry over the “action painting” style of the more prominent New York School (headlined by legendary artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell).
But other names I did not recognize, and therefore the momentous meaning of this installation remained opaque to me until I picked up the gallery’s brochure that provided some important context.
The brochure explained that Talmadge created Half Light (2023) in honor of a little-known Washington Color School painter named Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964), who was briefly married to a CIA officer in the 1950s and ran in the same artistic circles with other Washington D.C. artists (such as Anne Truitt) whose work is now very well known. Although I am quite fond of the D.C. Color School painters, Pinchot Meyer was certainly not on my radar, although apparently a 1964 geometric synthetic-polymer-on-fabric canvas of hers (also called Half Light) has been in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum for years.
Sadly Mary Pinchot Meyer’s artistic career was violently cut short when her body was found on Washington’s C&O Canal towpath in October 1964. Despite years of inquiry, the case was never solved.
This context helped me understand that Talmadge’s six large canvases portray a blend of factual, contrived, and alternative historical views of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s studio (which, as a matter of fact, was located in the carriage-house of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee’s Georgetown home). Two of these depict the interior of what her studio looked around the peak of her career in 1963.
What’s also factual: Mary Pinchot Meyer had been having an affair with President Kennedy in the years before his assassination. Furthermore, along with other artists in the Color School movement, Pinchot Meyer had been experimenting with psychedelics — before the counterculture of the 1960’s had fully kicked in and years before the federal government moved to schedule their use.
What is not as clear — but has been speculated upon — is that Pinchot Meyer may have personally introduced President Kennedy to psychedelics, causing him to consider mollifying his stance on key matters of national importance.
Another two canvases in the set therefore imagined what Pinchot Meyer’s studio might have looked like in late 1964, after a supposed CIA break-in to remove evidence of a conspiracy (Anne Truitt apparently insisted that Pinchot Meyer kept a diary, but it was never found).
The final two canvases depict the walls of that same studio in an alternative history in which Mary Pinchot Meyer was still living in 1969, by which time the Washington Color School had become quite prominent ,and she likely would have shown her work alongside the much more famous artists we know today.
Talmadge’s installation is both sentimental, shocking, and incredibly well-timed to the 60th anniversary of the ne plus ultra of conspiracy theories — the JFK assassination. It underscores how too many women artists have been overlooked in the historical record while raising questions of an alternative version of events in the 1960s (had JFK not been assassinated, how would have American history turned out differently?)
The last I heard, these six canvases were for sale separately for $75,000 each, although 56 Henry was hoping to keep them together and sell them, preferably to a museum. How terrific it would be for thousands of people to avail themselves of an immersion in an otherwise arcane historical footnote that reveals as many details nearly lost to history as it obscures.
What personally struck me so much about this work (and although I don’t normally subscribe to conspiracy theories, this one seemed too plausible to ignore) was how natural it felt to me to learn that psychedelics had impacted the work of Washington Color School artists like Mary Pinchot Meyer. I can see it in the use of color, form and sacred geometry that spans thousands of years across cultures and continents.
In fact I saw further examples of such sacred geometry throughout Miami Art Week, which has inspired me to consider a curatorial concept on the subject (more on this in a future email).
I saw lots of affordable and fun work by artists who are destined for greater fame
Believe in Yourself (2023), acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 inches by Barbadian artist Sheena Rose — acquired from Johannson Projects’ booth at Untitled Art Fair by none other than Venus Williams herself.
I’ve been seeing a lot of great work by Caribbean diaspora artists lately (including April Bey’s standout Afrofuturist tapestry portraits and of course Alejandro Pineiro Bello’s colorful dreamscapes) and this past week further validated my suspicion that there are artists from this region worth watching.
Perhaps my favorite discovery came at the outstanding Untitled Art Fair where I saw a dozen beautiful canvases by Barbados-born Sheena Rose. Reminiscent of the work of African-American artist Derrick Adams, whom I have been following since at least 2019 and has spent years depicting black people in fanciful moments of leisure, Sheena’s paintings appear as colorful cutouts in a retro-1970s design style that is unpretentious, approachable and fun.
Two paintings by Sheena Rose presented by Oakland, CA based Johannson Projects, seen at Untitled Art Fair Miami, Dec. 5-10, 2023
Several of Sheena’s works are already in museum collections in both the U.S. and the Caribbean, and I don’t see how she would not be destined for more attention, given that her style is both original and iconic (not to mention that her work is in Venus Williams’ collection).
Prices for these paintings started at around $5,000 and topped out at just over $15,000, which is very reasonable especially since I saw prints and multiples by Derrick Adams (who was recently poached by Gagosian) selling for twice that amount. Especially for anyone who loves women’s sports, a Sheena Rose painting would be a great entryway into a contemporary art collection of lasting value. Please contact me for more details.
Top Miami Museum Show — MUST SEE
Self portrait by Sasha Gordon (b. 1998) in her first-ever solo museum show Surrogate Self at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.
The commercial frenzy of Miami Art Week is always paired with outstanding programming of art in various non-selling exhibitions across the city. These take place both in public institutions such as the Perez Art Museum Miami or the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum, as well as in private collections that are generally open to the public, such as Jorge Perez’s El Espacio 23, Martin Margulies’ The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, and the De La Cruz Collection (among no fewer than a half a dozen others).
Although I haven’t made it to all of this season’s shows yet (and it’s interesting because it’s difficult to say exactly how many art museums and public/private collections there are in Miami these days), there were several that art aficionados such as yours truly had been eagerly anticipating since the summer.
Foremost among these was Sasha Gordon’s Surrogate Self, presented by the outstanding Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, a museum I have frequented since 2016. Housed since 2018 in a beautiful new building in the Miami Design District, the ICA presents a blend of contemporary art programming, balancing reverence for older, established (and sometimes overlooked) high-classical post-war contemporary artists with stunning new talent, much of it from historically underrepresented segments of society. Their budget for acquiring works by emerging artists seems ample, and therefore I often encounter budding art world superstars on their gallery walls years before they make it to the the mainstream art world’s awareness.
Sasha Gordon, a 25-year-old Asian American queer painter from New York, is one of these. Like Frida Kahlo she paints herself almost exclusively, working in a soft, somewhat caricatured yet hyper-realistic style. This evokes the beauty of Old Master portraits while relaying complex allegory around her own identity. These paintings are highly impressive depictions of her own vulnerability and deserve to be gazed upon up-close.
Another self-portrait by Sasha Gordon evoking classical mythology in the artist’s first solo museum show Surrogate Self at the ICA Miami.
I was able to personally congratulate Sasha on her outstanding work at the ICA’s opening event on December 5 (which happened to be the artist’s very first trip ever to Miami).
Although you only have until March 10 to see her show at the ICA Miami, I do believe that we will be seeing much more of Sasha Gordon’s work in the future — at this rate I could imagine something along the lines of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York or at the Hammer Museum in L.A. in the coming years.
