Brook Dorsch bought the Wynwood warehouse that now houses his Dorsch Gallery for $120,000 in 2000. Today, he estimates it is worth 10 times that.

On paper, I’m rich,” chuckles Wynwood art-gallery owner Brook Dorsch, gazing around his cavernous 7,000-square-foot warehouse as he prepares for a new show. Bought for $120,000 in 2000, Dorsch estimates his building is now worth more than 10 times that—thanks to this neighborhood’s rapid transformation into ground zero for Miami’s frenzied art scene. When the Dorsch Gallery first opened here, following eight years in a cramped Coral Gables location, only a handful of art spaces were hanging out their shingles on Wynwood’s largely industrial avenues. Today, streetwalking prostitutes and bicycling drug couriers still make up the bulk of the area’s nighttime traffic, but they share the gritty terrain with no less than 58 galleries, “alternative” spaces and museums

Brooklyn Night by John Sánchez, 2006, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”
Spiral Remnant 2 by Kerry Ware, 2006, oil on plaster and wooden pegs, 19” x 21.5”

“It’s just amazing the way this area has grown,” Dorsch says, shaking his head in bemusement, “and the Basel machine is still building.” Indeed, even more new galleries keep sprouting up faster than local Realtors can giddily print revised maps to track them—though this latest crop of art dealers seems to be drawn less by the siren song of cheap rent and high ceilings than by the commercial benefits of a Wynwood address. During this past December’s edition of the annual Art Basel Miami Beach fair, Dorsch recalls the nabe taking on a veritable gold-rush vibe: “I’d unlock the front door at noon, and before I could even finish turning around, people would be trying to squeeze their way in past me.”

Yet amidst all the artwork furiously changing hands, there seemed to be little thought given to quality—the good, the bad and the aesthetically ugly alike all flew off the walls and into the hands of moneyed collectors. Around the corner from Dorsch, a new gallery was displaying knockoffs of Richard Prince’s celebrated “Nurse Paintings,” all shamelessly derivative right down to their sultry noir images and overlaid violent slashes. Never mind. At a mere $9,000 a pop—a fraction of the seven-figure sums Prince’s originals now command—they all sold.

“A lot of art today is being done solely for the market,” Dorsch sighs. “It’s about creating decorative works without any real passion behind it all. So many of these fresh young things are not going to be remembered. They have their Artforum feature or their Art in America magazine cover, but 50 years from now they’re going to have fallen off the face of the earth.”

Accordingly, Dorsch is more than a little wary of his own growing success. For much of his gallery’s 15-year span, even as it has hosted a steady diet of experimental music concerts, underground films and Warholesque happenings, it was Dorsch’s other job as a maritime satellite specialist that paid the bills. The end result has been a hectic schedule that often left him scrambling between his artists and being helicoptered out to aid a “lost” oil tanker or outfit singer Jimmy Buffett’s megayacht.

However, in the wake of Art Basel’s attention, the last few years have seen an uptick in the Dorsch Gallery’s fortunes, with museum curators and boldfaced out-of-towners joining the flock of 20-something bohos who’ve made his spot something of a hipster clubhouse. Painter John Sánchez’s debut show there last March completely sold out, with his striking urban landscapes ending up in the homes of taste-setting collector Dennis Scholl as well as one local artist who was literally counting out his spare change before handing over his credit card.

Cat’s Paw Dharani by George Bethea, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 48"		Coming Attractions 4 by Arnold Mesches, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 80” x 60”

But while Dorsch is happy to see some of the artists in his stable enjoying the fruits of the art boom, profits—and a self-sustaining gallery—bring their own set of risks. “I worry that if I quit my day job, I’ll be dependent on the art market,” he says. “I’ll have to make different decisions about what I show. Right now I’m a little freer. I can keep my programming philosophy very simple: I only show what I’m personally excited about. And if I don’t sell anything, who cares? I still have my paycheck coming in.” It’s an attitude that lets him indulge his artists, wherever their muse may take them. “You have to believe in the people you work with, whatever path they go down,” he continues, pointing to the recent stylistic shift of Franklin Einspruch, one that had the painter eschewing his familiar aggressive whirls to instead fashion flatter, intentionally two-dimensional portraits.

“Franklin’s audience came to see his show here of really cleaned-out images. Half of them loved it, half of them hated it: ‘What the hell is he doing? Where’s the heavy movement of paint?’ ” Dorsch smiles in appreciation. It may not have been a safe business move on Einspruch’s part, but “artists always need to explore, otherwise you get stuck in a rut and end up like Romero Britto.” He cites that artist’s signature cartoon-like imps that have been endlessly stamped on everything from kitchen crockery to Volkswagens—any creative change on Britto’s part now threatens an otherwise lucrative franchise.

	Hostess by Franklin Einspruch, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 16”, courtesy of Dorsch Gallery.
	Franklin Einspruch, one of Dorsch’s prized artists.

For his part, Einspruch is quick to return the feelings of admiration. Having decamped last year to the aesthetically warmer climes of Boston in search of a more tradition-minded scene, he has few regrets over the move. “The buzz around Miami makes it seem like a major hub of art activity,” he wrote on his influential artblog.net site, creating a situation akin “to a toddler throwing a tantrum: Yes, a lot is going on, but that doesn’t mean you should either listen to it or take it seriously.” In Einspruch’s eyes, Dorsch remains a wonderful exception to all that distracting noise.

“He doesn’t have artists in his gallery who are playing games with the viewer or trying to ape what’s in vogue in contemporary circles,” Einspruch argues. “Look at Kerry Ware and George Bethea”—two fellow Dorsch-affiliated painters. “These are people who are not in it for the accoutrements of being an art star in Miami. They’re not interested in accessing the trendy side of the art world....Artists increasingly have to decide whether to pursue pop-like careers, or jazz-like careers that focus on refinement, humbling oneself to one’s art and making a long-term contribution. Miami is a much better place to have a pop-like career—if you succeed at it, you can win all kinds of recognition from collectors, museums and even granting entities. And yet in this atmosphere, Brook runs a gallery akin to Blue Note Records, focusing on solid talents for the long haul.”

It seems appropriate then that Dorsch recently featured the expressionist paintings of Arnold Mesches, whose own lengthy professional career even predates that fabled jazz record label. At 83, more than a half century since his first show, with a stack of raves from The New York Times and his work already a part of the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mesches still shows little sign of slowing down. “Coming Attractions,” his arresting new series displayed at Dorsch, played out on humongous canvases that mix eerie circus imagery with charged social commentary. So much for going quietly into that good night.

Introduced to the Gainesville-based painter by Miami Museum of Contemporary Art director Bonnie Clearwater, who obviously sensed two kindred spirits, Dorsch seems as impressed by Mesches’ unflagging focus as by his actual brush strokes. “This was his 124th solo show,” he marvels, “and that’s what it’s all about, just doing the work.”

Beginning March 10th, Miami’s Dorsch Gallery (121 Northwest 24th Street) features “Before the Wave,” a selection of paintings by Kerry Ware. Admission is free. For gallery hours, call 305-576-1278 or visit dorschgallery.com.

1. Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, & Rock n’ Roll by Evelyn McDonnell (Da Capo Press) What sets Evelyn McDonnell’s memoir head and tattooed shoulders above the ever burgeoning ranks of “mommy-come-lately” lit isn’t simply its dry wit, or the often startling personal honesty it deploys while careening through three decades of bohemianism, from the dance floor to the bedroom and back again. Even more refreshing is Mamarama’s rich chronicle of our larger cultural terrain: McDonnell moves from a small-town Midwestern upbringing on to the Ivy League elite, and from a career amidst the Lower East Side’s shabby chicdom to Miami Beach’s billion-dollar sandbar, where she’s currently The Miami Herald’s pop-culture critic, juggling the demands of a newborn child while interviewing an equally imperious Jay-Z. The post-punk milieu of the Reaganite ’80s, the Riot Grrrl media explosion at the dawn of the Clintonite ’90s, drugged-out electronica at the turn of the millennium, and today’s hip-hop world—it’s all here, complete with one priceless moment of creeping adulthood inside the Marlin Hotel’s bathroom during the annual bacchanalia of the DJ-focused Winter Music Conference. McDonnell found herself desperately fighting through the crowd for a stall to use as its designers had originally intended, “only to have the door yanked open by another trio looking for somewhere to do their illicit business....‘You’re cute. Where are you from?’ they chatted, as I sat there with my pants around my ankles and my hands covering my red face. This was at 4 p.m.—the night hadn’t even started yet.” For a woman who once defiantly marched down the wedding aisle in a gorilla mask, craving a little propriety was no doubt a humbling act. But it certainly makes for a memorable coming-of-age tale. 2. The New World Symphony takes it to the stage For all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth following the dissolution of Miami’s Philharmonic, the dirty little secret of our classical-music corner has been that, psst, the young’uns in “training” at the New World Symphony (NWS) were actually the superior orchestra. They’ve certainly been the more viscerally exciting one to behold, bearing down on their strings en masse and attacking their repertoire with a raw verve to make their elders take notice. Fortunately the NWS is still with us, and if you’ve yet to catch them in the flesh, this month’s focus on the soaring works of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev plays precisely to the NWS’ youthful strengths. With guest conductor Mark Wigglesworth taking up the baton, they perform at the Beach’s Lincoln Theatre on March 16th, 17th and 18th. For information, log on to newworldtickets.com.

3. Langerado Music Festival: three days of peace, love and text-messaging Call it an indie-rock Woodstock—less drugs, more port-o-potties and a sea of bobbing cell-phone cameras trying to capture the memories. On March 9th, the fifth annual Langerado Music Festival returns to Sunrise’s Markham Park for a weekend’s worth of outdoor performances, with just enough sonic surprises to spice up the predominantly alt-flavored bill. Friday sees former Phish front man Trey Anastasio follow Brooklyn’s latest sardonic guitar heroes, the Hold Steady; Saturday is equally varied with a lineup that includes both nuevo funkateers Yerba Buena and the Generation Y answer to ’60s jamsters Quicksilver Messenger Service, Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket. Still, if your appetite for standing in a field only extends to one day, make it Sunday, which features local groove merchants the Spam Allstars, the rootsy Los Lobos, reggae veteran Toots and the Maytals and South Beach transplant Cat Power (pictured) with the Florida debut of her new Dirty Delta Blues Band. Expect stripped-down, rawer versions of her glorious blue-eyed soul, all carried home by that same bewitching voice. 4. Reno 911!: Miami (20th Century Fox) Clearing the South Florida cinematic air in the wake of Michael Mann’s oh-so-serious Miami Vice, Comedy Central’s faux-Cops reality show ably translates its arch humor from television to the big screen. You say you want a campy shoot-’em-up, complete with painfully accented drug lords, bumbling police officers and more laugh-out-loud pickup lines than the Clevelander at closing time? Reno 911! delivers. Following a bioterrorist attack, the Beach’s finest remain quarantined inside the Convention Center, naturally leaving it to Reno, Nevada’s hapless sheriffs to patrol Lincoln Road. Unfortunately, no pastel suits are on parade, but we do get a slow-motion golf chase, an exploding whale, a Pee-wee Herman cameo and the best declaration of civic boosterism never uttered by Crockett or Tubbs: “This city has hot Latin flavor up to its nuts!” Finally, a film about South Beach whose sensibility is as gleefully idiotic as South Beach itself. —Brett Sokol