What could inspire a more terrifying nightmare of Hollywood excess than the garish façade of a Planet Hollywood restaurant? Perhaps the sum of its muscle-bound financial backing parts: Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now reduced to a miserable eight locations, the Planet Hollywood brand is synonymous with the…
If you’re intimidated by Miami Beach traffic during Basel week, plenty of art fairs on the mainland will keep you busy. Art Miami, which marks its 25th anniversary, and its sister fair, Context (3101 NE First Ave.; art-miami.com, contextartmiami.com), are the most significant of the Midtown big tops. Together, they…
How surreal has Art Basel Miami Beach become? This year, fairgoers at the main event inside the Miami Beach Convention Center will encounter both Lady Gaga and Barbie amid the billions of dollars in high-end fine art. No, really. Both the iconic divas are on the calendar this year. The…
Painted portraiture is almost a rarity these days. Sure, there are tons done in the abstract, but photo-realistic work done in a contemporary setting isn’t at all common. That exclusion isn’t surprising, considering contemporary art has always had a problem embracing portraiture outside of photography. And at the turn of…
Dance is the most ephemeral of the arts. You can buy a picture, a sculpture, a photograph, you can buy a CD and own a composition, and you can even buy and own a script. Dance, however, is an explosion of energy that exits in a finite space and time,…
Miami’s newest museum is set to get a permanent home. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Miami), currently housed in the Moore Building, will eventually become a three-story art museum with a 15,000-square-foot sculpture garden. If planning works out, the new space will open in time for Art Basel Miami…
Miami Art Week is here, and outside the gallery walls, graffiti artists are busy at work painting the streets of Wynwood, Midtown, and the Design District. The biggest mural project of the season, however, is going down at Jose de Diego Middle School, a formerly stark white space craving color…
December is upon us, which means hello Basel madness, goodbye any semblance of a normal life. The five straight days of art-related raucousness and aesthetic oddities you’ve been waiting for since 2013 have almost arrived, ready to shower you in champagne and questionable choices. And despite the fact that there…
It doesn’t take a genius to notice the strengthening ties between the art world and the entertainment industry. Late last year Lady Gaga released Artpop, an album suffused with joint efforts from art establishment giants like Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic. For her latest album, Sia transformed promotional appearances into…
While Art Basel Miami Beach is largely about the latest and greatest in modern and contemporary visual art, fashion has gradually been making the yearly festivities its biggest stomping ground. Creation takes countless forms, some of them garments, textiles, and wearable art. For all of those style-savants who would rather…
Every gallery in the game makes their best play for Miami Art Week. Some solo with a singular sensation, some group up to highlight a roster, and some book a booth at one of the many fairs which occupy our town during the annual onslaught. Very few galleries, however, have…
Wynwood’s long been synonymous with art, but unless you’ve happened to be on hand during the commission of a mural, the opportunities to actually see how the art comes to be are few and far between. This Miami Art Week, Peter Kappa is vowing to change that. Not only will…
Ron Terada is a Vancouver-based artist operating in the fields of painting, video, photography, sound, and graphic design. Art on the Move is an ongoing public commissions initiative and for this project, Dominic Molon, the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School…
As long as there is human expression in art, there will be problems with art. Humanity is filled with contradiction. People love and hate. They can create and destroy; they can inform or withhold. There is the desire to express and impress. Art created and consumed by such beings is…
As Art Basel Miami Beach looms, the Miami Beach Cinematheque is cuing up the films of one of the 20th Century’s greatest, most iconic artists: Andy Warhol. The retrospective “Warhol’s Silver Screen/Silver Factory” began this month. The films, dating from 1964-66, all explore famous starlets of a by-gone era and…
If all you do during Art Basel Miami Beach is stick to the big fairs, you might as well call it a day and go back home. Seriously. Some of the best contemporary art we’ve seen during Art Basel has been away from the convention center and tents. Local galleries…
In the bowels of Craigslist, buried in the catacombs of ‘Community’ is an ad with a plaintive plea. “WE NEED A MURAL!” its title reads in all caps. “SHOW US WHAT YOU CAN DO!” It’s a pithy post, no longer than one sentence, with a photo of a long, single-story…
Lofty305 woke up at 9:40 a.m. in his Midtown Manhattan apartment. It was a Monday. He brushed his teeth with non-fluoride toothpaste and rinsed his XS afro with coconut oil. He ate two Butterfingers, worked out at the building’s gym, and snacked on hummus. Then he started painting. He painted…
The art fairs are coming! Seriously, last time we counted, almost 20 major art fairs are setting up shop in Miami and Miami Beach during the first week of December, hoping to make record-breaking sales thanks to the hoopla surrounding Art Basel Miami Beach. And though the Miami Beach Convention…
Wynwood acted as the artistic subject for 25 high school students from the Miami-Dade Public School System as they told their stories through photography last weekend’s Play To Win Foundation’s Through My Lens: Art is Life photography workshop. The teenagers, who came from Allapattah and Overtown, worked with photography mentors…
Tons of new acts come to town during Art Basel Miami Beach, but one returning favorite is the Film sector. This year, curators David Gryn, the director of London’s Artprojx, and Zurich collector, This Brunner, embrace the theme of playfulness. The sector will present more than 80 films and videos…
Since 2008, Design Miami has played with the idea of what makes a tent. Tapping inventive designers to create the entrance to its yearly Art Basel showings, recent entrances include 2012’s giant canopy made of inflatable white columns titled Drift, and 2013’s TENT PILE by formlessfinder, an enormous, pyramid-shaped sand…
