October's Second Saturdays Art Walk: Falcon's Wolf, Snitzer's Thugs, New Marketplace

In about 50 days, Miami art fair week (AKA Art Basel) drops on the city like a Haiti freighter in the Biltmore pool. Wynwood will glory in the treading of a million tourist footsteps on her concrete tits. Right now, though. the hood's a local's playground with an intense creative thrumming whirring through its core. We checked out Saturday's art walk and caught neon whiplash, Overtown soul, and a whole lotta naked white girls. Here's a short photo essay what we saw.

We started out the night at this prime parking spot. Creepy or awesome? You decide.

The Center For Visual Communication has its own lightbox. Who's down to change the words around?

Darby Bannard and artist wife Kathleen Staples in front of one of her paintings at the Abstract Miami show at the CVC. Bannard said, "I don't know why we had to do this the same day as the UM game. Anyways, it's real painting versus crap."

Next we went up to 36th street to Abba Fine Art to check out a collection of early Purvis Youngs. If you don't know his story, basically Purvis was a Liberty City dude who got out of a couple years in jail in the 60's and started painting through the streets and alleys of Overtown on old discarded objects with house paints. He'd also make his own frames (see above). Over the years he developed a strong language of icons representing good and evil in the urban environment.
Our favorite new feature of the art walk is the vendors market next to Harold Golen gallery, across the street from Butter, behind Wynwood Amphitheater, (the giant abandoned factory full of graffiti). In the middle of an expansive grass lot a dj played old hip hop records, Bullfrog's Gastropod, Carrito Conrado, and others sold munchies, and a variety of entrepreneurs had their wares for sale.
In fact, the move toward commercial artistic expression outside the galleries is proliferating all over the streets. We take this to be a very good sign in the building momentum toward a critical mass for a creative explosion.
At Rick Falcon's show, Living To Die, Dying To Live, metaphor rich, illustrative paintings met sculpture, photo, and video work (produced by Swampdog). Our favorite piece is the wolf sculpture disintegrating into symbols of infinity.