For most Miami residents, Art Basel is a week of horrific traffic. For some, it’s a chance to engage in a multitude of cultural offerings bubbling up all over the city. For fewer, it’s a chance to buy art offered by a selection of international galleries. According to statistics from…
The arrival of the international art dealing behemoth known as Basel draws many Magic City residents to a slew of festivals, fairs, and public art displays in early December. And while much of Miami Art Week is geared toward billions of dollars of spending, we plebeians can still enjoy the…
The image of the prototypical feminist has not changed much since its inception: She’s angry, unshaven, and suspicious of men, if not downright misandrist. Judy Chicago, on the other hand, laughs easily. She wears dangling blue earrings and affectionately introduces her husband.
The playgrounds of the rich and tasteful aren’t the focus of the Faena Festival, a free series of exhibitions and performances commissioned by the Faena District for Miami Art Week. For its inaugural program, the theme is “This Is Not America,”
When looking at Ebony G. Patterson’s work, it might be best to think of an optical illusion. What’s obvious in “Ebony G. Patterson… while the dew is still on the roses…,” Patterson’s exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami, is that her work often holds difficult contradictions.
My sister and I recently stumbled into a recurring inside joke. It starts with one of us asking for a favor, to which the other will reply, “As a woman of color, I find it really problematic that you expect that kind of emotional labor from me. I think you…
If art reflects life, the art world has had a lot to deal with in the past year. It’s no surprise that many local art institutions’ programming reflects the identity crisis sweeping the nation. A good example are two shows that ended the Wolfsonian-FIU’s previous year of programming: “Wit as…
The Miami of two decades ago would be unrecognizable to recent transplants. Back then, Wynwood was still a working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood with discount clothes and weave shops. And 20 years ago, folks were lining up to go to bars and clubs in Coconut Grove. The first Art Basel didn’t arrive…
A particularly pointed political cartoon made the rounds on Twitter and Facebook after Donald Trump took office. In it, his face, puckered in his signature duck lips, is tilted up toward a globe precariously sitting on an American flag atop a table. Trump’s baby body greedily grasps at the flag with poop-covered fingers, allegedly smeared from his seeping diaper.
I left Miami without knowing exactly how my hometown had affected me. I began to get an inkling with a realization about colors. Where I was in Colorado, the flowers could be paler and more delicate; the sky could be a spacey, airy blue, but nothing was quite as vibrant…
The ultimate goal for PageSlayers is to foster the next generation of writers of color in Miami. Youngsters encountering writers like MacArthur fellow and Haitian-American memoirist Edwidge Danticat and Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves might feel professions in the arts and humanities are more legitimate on the one hand, and on the other, they’re encouraged and empowered to express themselves.
Before Solo cups became the stuff of beer pong and mystery punch in the realm of teenage iconography, they were the conduits of makeshift fence signage. Messages like “CONGRATS CLASS OF ’18” and “GO FALCONS” are spelled out by plastic circles in front of schools all over America…
Growing up in Miami is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived it. Like most millennials native to South Florida, Audrey Gair found this out after moving away to Baltimore to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I was totally struck by how all of my classmates were white,” Gair reflects…
Before Kanye stumbled his way into stating that slavery “sounds like a choice,” it was something of an exercise in fifth-grade history class to ask yourself what you would have done in times of injustice. Would you have spit at young black children marching into newly integrated schools? Would you have kicked black women…
In Trump’s America, events that showcases a marginalized group’s work are sometimes called divisive or whiny. The American Black Film Festival, which kicked off in Miami Beach this past Wednesday, is such an event. It spotlights both the problem with the President’s borderline fascist thinking and the blatantly problematic reality…
For “Water Rights,” Rahaman is installing an LED screen onto a barge that will float from South Pointe Park to around 30th Street and back. In stark contrast to both the increased police presence and the never-ending banners beckoning people into clubs and restaurants, the slow-moving exhibition will show a selection of photos from Rahaman’s work in Jacksonville, Palatka, and Miami Beach, among other places.
The artist uses varied color combinations to play with space in her paintings.
The radio host wants to bring people together in a different way.
In a series of untitled photographs produced in 1972, Ana Mendieta presses her body against a plate of glass. The clear plane flattens her nose, stomach, thighs, breasts, lips, and tongue in sometimes grotesque and sometimes comical ways. But whether they’re awkward or graceful distortions, all the photographs produce the unsettling desire to see what we simply can’t — a portrait of the artist.
Watching a video by French-born artist Laure Prouvost is like overhearing something in a fever dream. Colors seem impossibly vivid, images move in quick succession with little opportunity for you to comprehend them, and somewhere, someone is addressing you with words that are only vaguely familiar…
Look up in Miami and you’ll see rows of empty luxury condos, strip club banners flying through the clouds, and, now, three headless chicken sculptures. These latest additions to the Magic City skyline are part of Whithervanes: A Neurotic, Early Worrying System, thanks to Locust Projects.
One of the undiagnosed ills of Miami is the tendency of its homegrown artists to leave for broader horizons. It has all of the cultural diversity, money, and institutional backing to expose young people to an amazing upbringing in the arts, but seems to fall short in distracting them from…
