Get Smashed, Grab Stuff

At the annual Locust Projects Smash and Grab Fundraiser, everyone is a winner. Even you. Fifteen years into championing innovation on the Miami art scene, Locust Projects is once again putting together some scratch to produce its shows and public events. Here’s the way it works: You buy a raffle ticket that is guaranteed to win one of the more than 100 works installed at Locust Projects (3852 N. Miami Ave., Miami). When your ticket is selected, you have a few seconds to run to the piece you want and claim it before the next name is called. Much of the art is one-of-a-kind and with a market value well above the raffle ticket price. Add an open bar and you get a melee that usually requires Locust Projects to be hosed out the next morning after all of the art has been taken home. Not all philanthropic art lovers are psychopaths, and not all psychopaths are philanthropic art lovers, but for the surprisingly wide band of that Venn diagram, this is the biggest event of the year. The shindig is a chance to score significant artwork by some of the more exciting Miami talents. Reed van Brunschot has made ten tiny folding chairs out of plastic and resin and arranged them in a circle like a poorly attended support group dwarfed by everything around it. Emmett Moore questions the nature of materiality with a blown-up image of granite printed onto an octagon of birch plywood. Also up for smashes and grabs are a Nicolas Lobo print, a unique wall sculpture by textile artist Regina Jestrow, a mixed-media piece by Jiae Hwang, and works by Farley Aguilar, Domingo Castillo, and Jenny Brillhart. There’s a haunting, sudsy photo portrait by Dana Lauren Goldstein and a more sinister turn on Michael Scoggins’ usually carefree loose-leaf doodle paintings. The event runs from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., but the smashing and grabbing begins promptly at 7:30. Raffle tickets cost $450 apiece and come with event admission for two. If you simply want to watch some well-heeled art collectors panic, you can pay $50 per person for admission only.
Sat., Oct. 26, 6:30-9:30 p.m., 2013