MIAMI — I have made it to Friday without forgetting my press pass in an Uber or developing cafecito-related heart palpitations, and by Miami Art Week standards I’d call that a win. Yesterday we discussed serious matters, like the financial sustainability of the art-fair ecosystem, but today we are tired and regret having that third margarita at Bacara, so we will look at art.
I saw a dizzying amount of standout work at Art Basel Miami Beach, NADA Miami, and Untitled Art, but the week’s most underrated ticket was the Open Invitational, a new fair for nonprofits and galleries focused on artists with disabilities, or “progressive art studios.” Co-Founder David Fierman, whom I caught up with during Monday’s opening night, emphasized the importance of centering different ways of seeing the world.
“There’s a lot of purity in this work that is lacking in some of the higher echelons of the market,” Fierman told me. “Let’s have a story where people make a positive impact on people’s lives and do it in a really sustainable, human-to-human way.”
On that note, and without further ado, I’m sharing below my favorite works at Art Basel Miami Beach, NADA, the Open Invitational, and Untitled Art — from Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo’s ceramics to Michael Angelo Mangino’s pithy text paintings and Alissa Alfonso’s whimsical sculptures.
Hop and Lydia Peternell, co-founders of Studio Route 29 in New Jersey, a “progressive art studio” that supports the creative practices of adults with developmental disabilities
What struck me first about this year’s Photography Show, running through April 27 at the Park Avenue Armory, was the near-total absence of traditional photojournalism. Without the deluge of protest imagery or the urgency of crisis photography I’ve grown accustomed to while doom-scrolling social media, I worried the fair might be edgeless; rehashing the archive […]
A federal judge in Illinois sided with Scottish artist Peter Doig last month in an outlandish decades-long legal dispute over a desert landscape the painter denies creating. On July 29, the court upheld an earlier ruling that a Chicago art dealer, the disputed work’s owner, and their lawyer are liable for $2.5 million to be […]
Catherine Murphy is one of a handful of artists who changed observational painting between the 1960s and ’80s, when painting’s dominance was being contested. Murphy, along with Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and others, learned from abstraction and found a way to expand the parameters of observational painting, overturn assumptions regarding the relationship of two- […]