A skull-staving double whammy at the Kevin Bruk Gallery has the polished allure of the Bellagio’s high-kicking showgirls and, conceptually, pays out like a juicy row of cherries on the casino’s slot machines. Inside the sinister-sounding KBG — the cocky dealer’s chosen name for his capacious new digs — Bruk…
The summer of 1977 I was seventeen years old and working a pay-by-day gig on a construction site in the Grove, jackhammering concrete slabs at a shoddily laid duplex. The pay was crap ($40 a day), the work murderous, and my girlfriend Maritza, who was several years older and had…
What first sprang to mind upon encountering Christian Duran’s New Growth, 2005, was a landscaper I once saw driving along a highway in Detroit who had stenciled “The Marquis de Sod” on his rusted panel van. Looming quixotically in the South Gallery at Ingalls & Associates, the cryptic yet palpably…
For decades a seamy varnish of intrigue has crackled over the contemporary art world regarding Ana Mendieta’s marriage to Carl Andre. Many have believed that the controversy surrounding her demise marginalized her artistic legacy. Others believe that justice took a whitewashing. Cuban-born Mendieta was an outsider who had struggled to…
When the Museum of Contemporary Art launched its rookie campaign with “Defining the Nineties: Consensus Making in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles,” many in the contemporary art world considered the museum a swaddling upstart trying to elbow a spot at the big boys’ table. “Ten years ago, when Bonnie…
Take two firecracker curators with a taste for edgy shenanigans, rub them against Miami’s marquee collectors, and — voila! — you have an audacious exhibit to spark off the art season. “Hanging by a Thread,” curated by Nina Arias and José Diaz, features the work of more than 25 artists…
For thousands of years portraits have been a favored vehicle for trumpeting the virtues of the rich and famous, lionizing our fearless leaders, and at times letting the air out of history’s biggest windbags. “Portraits have been used to preserve the memory of the deceased, provide continuity between the living…
Alabao! From bongo-banging bathing beauties to piquant pistoleras in their birthday suits, Leo Carbajal’s Cuban women are a mouthwatering draw. One of the top fashion photographers of his era, Carbajal is celebrating the first retrospective of his work during “Cuban Women of the ’40s and ’50s: A Photographer’s Perspective,” at…
Behind her loom, shoehorned into an area the size of a phone booth, artist Frances Trombly weaves sculptural gems that celebrate the wonders of childhood. Trombly’s “studio,” a retrofitted closet in her Edgewater apartment, literally spills over with spindles, brightly hued bundles of yarn, and the sundry boxes of media…
Summer is sizzling at the Frost Art Museum with its “Florida Artists Series: Tori Arpad and Kate Kretz,” a striking exhibit in which divergent approaches to confronting ideas about the body embrace conceptual and visceral perspectives with élan. The exhibit pairs the work of Arpad and Kretz, both associate professors…
Legend has it that Japan’s origins stem from the outcome of a sumo match when the behemoth god Takemikazuchi defeated a tribal rival, giving birth to the Land of the Rising Sun. Accordingly, more than mere bovine bullies clad in kinky codpieces to our Western eyes, Japan’s sumo wrestlers are…
Spawned from Fifties hot-rod and surf-rat culture, the lowbrow movement is creeping over the art world like a mutant strain of B-movie kudzu with signs that stodgier establishment sticklers may have to resign themselves to the fact that bad taste is here to stay. Pioneered by “Kustom Kulture” czars Ed…
With the art market hotter than Las Vegas asphalt in August, Art Miami is celebrating the fifteenth edition of what organizers and local participant galleries are calling “Miami’s hometown art fair,” citing the presence of Art Basel last month as more of a boon than threat to its stability. Ramon…
The Gifts I Could Never Give You: In this show Bert Rodriguez shelves the “conceptual prankster” tag and wears his heart on his sleeve. You can’t help but share his lament. The work delves into the detritus of failed relationships, shifting perception from visual displays of marketing props, mannequins, neon…
Very few people can claim a life as varied as that of the legendary “Fight Doctor,” Ferdie Pacheco. Displaying more moves than a juggling octopus, the polifacetic Pacheco has experienced success as a cartoonist, pharmacist, medical doctor, and corner man to twelve world champs, including Muhammad Ali. He went on…
On any given night, people across the planet can follow the crime-busting antics of trend-setting detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. Incredibly, twenty years after the premiere of Miami Vice and its resulting headlock on pop culture, one can still witness sockless mooks in pastel sports jackets dodging the fashion…
Experiencing the work of Haiti’s master sculptors, one can almost hear the rhythm of the resurrection drums, a link with the ancestral spirits and divinities alive in these artists’ fingertips. During the past half-century, from the forged-iron graveyard crosses of Georges Liautaud to the found-object fabrications of Pierrot Barra to…
A weblike charcoal-and-gouache drawing in “Beyond Havana: Intersecting Time and Place” at the Bettcher Gallery clues you in that artist Nereida Garcia Ferraz is picking up strands from her old life to spin the new. In this exhibit, her first solo show in Miami, Garcia Ferraz combines digital photography, painting,…
Cakewalk: Aesthetic experience and erogenous pleasure have always been close relatives, to be sure. But rather than any genuine countercultural agenda, artists in 2004 are armed with a stylist’s finely tuned eye for the retro, a fascination with the abject and unlovable, a salacious eye for soft porn, and an…
i am the resurrection: Works by Daniel Arsham, Ian Cooper, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Howe circle cautiously around Goth culture and the spate of recent school shootings by teenagers. The works suggest the saturation of violence permeating contemporary life, and explore the twin afflictions of victimization and vengeance plaguing youth…
i am the resurrection: Works by Daniel Arsham, Ian Cooper, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Howe circle cautiously around Goth culture and the spate of recent school shootings by teenagers. The works suggest the saturation of violence permeating contemporary life, and explore the twin afflictions of victimization and vengeance plaguing youth…
Robert Wyndam Bucknell strikes an engaging argument as an aspiring art star humble enough to paint his toenails gold and title his solo show at OBJEX Artspace “Why I Think I Am So Fucking Special: It’s All About Me.” An impish yet erudite 27 years old, Bucknell is a capacious…
