I’m there with a blow-dryer at night: Finish, finish!” chuckled Hernan Bas, describing his brushwork during a recent talk at the Rubell Family Collection. When it comes to the much-in-demand canvases of the Miami art scene’s reigning It Boy, quick-drying acrylic paint is his material of choice. “I have no patience for oil,” added Bas.
That's an apt metaphor for the current state of Miami's art world—both the latest crop of barely legal New World School of the Arts grads eager to make their mark, as well as the gallery owners and collectors just as impatient to tear through their slim portfolios in search of the next art star. The post-Art Basel frenzy continues, and in its wake no one has time for anything as laborious as letting the paint dry. Indeed, the numbers speak for themselves: Prior to Art Basel’s 2002 arrival in town, the bleakly industrial Wynwood neighborhood was home to only a handful of galleries—alongside crack houses and a disturbing tableau of the walking wounded.
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| The Spinello Gallery in Wynwood. |
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Five years on, that urban blight now uneasily coexists with upwards of 70 galleries and “alternative” spaces. It’s a flowering—both creatively and economically—which can still be hard to spot during the day. But on the second Saturday of each month, those warehouse gates and doors fling themselves open to host the Wynwood Gallery Walk—a coordinated series of exhibitions and openings that draws roving crowds of hipsters and the well-heeled alike, all stepping gingerly around the broken glass strewn across the sidewalks.
“This is Paris in the ’20s!” gallery owner Fredric Snitzer previously enthused to me, and based on last month’s Gallery Walk, it’s hard not to share his passion. True, there’s plenty of dross competing for attention, and more than a few galleries whose gold-rush mentality is matched by their aesthetically slipshod programs. But wading through the throngs of young’uns on the make also brings evidence that Miami is now home to some of the most exciting artists around, from New York to, yes, Paris.
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Gallery owner Brook Dorsch and painter Brandon Opalka in front of Opalka's The Great Republic wall mural at Dorsch Gallery. |
Snitzer was presenting the debut solo show of Fort Lauderdale’s Alex Sweet (a New World grad, natch), whose portraits of ominously jungle-shrouded warriors—all intricately burned into slabs of wood—were nothing short of jaw-dropping. Around the corner at Gallery Diet, performance artist María José Arjona invoked the psychic fallout of the daily violence in her native Colombia, blowing misleadingly playful bubbles that burst into blood-red splotches on the gallery walls, herself, and any less-than-spry passerby. The David Castillo Gallery offered up the alien-pod-like, glittering sculptures of Wendy Wischer, while the Dorsch Gallery featured Brandon Opalka’s striking 131-foot-long Day-Glo wall mural, The Great Republic.
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Performance artist María José Arjona blew misleadingly playful bubbles that burst into blood-red splotches on the gallery walls, herself, and any less-than-spry passerby. |
A few blocks away, the scrappy Twenty Twenty Projects spotlighted the paintings and silk-screens of Daniel Newman, maintaining its proletarian-chic vibe by handing out cans of Busch beer – no vodka sponsors here. And despite the appearance of a who’s who of scenesters, no spottings of Bas, either. “I don’t go out to the Gallery Walk,” Bas explained back at the Rubell fete. “I feel like I get swamped, and sometimes I don’t want to talk to people.” The glad-handers, the advice seekers, the (ahem) nosy journalists? They send him running back to the seclusion of his studio: “I like the friends I had before I was ‘Hernan Bas.’ ”
It’s a sentiment apparently shared by the art-power couple of sculptor Mark Handforth and filmmaker Dara Friedman, the latter of whom anxiously bolted away inside Twenty Twenty when asked to pose for a photo. But Friedman needn’t have worried: The pair went otherwise unnoticed. Yes, Handforth’s sculptures remain hot sellers at auction, regularly fetching six figures. And Friedman’s videos have turned heads in New York exhibitions from the Whitney Biennial to the Museum of Modern Art. But both figures established international names for themselves in Miami’s pre-Basel days. And for today’s art scenesters, that period may as well be the Stone Age.
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| Artist Susan Lee-Chun in front of Sylvan Lionni's Kaddish at Locust Projects gallery. |
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Artists Jason Hedges and
Alex Sweet at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery. |
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Scott Murray, director of
Twenty Twenty Projects, and Alex Kuechenberg. |
| April 2008 In Pop Culture |
2009 South Beach Wine & Food Festival:
There Will Be…Cheese.
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| Michael Schlow at Burger Bash. |
It just wouldn’t be Miami without a little electoral fraud– even the hamburger grill-offs are suspect. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the 1,500 ticketholders attending the South Beach Wine & Food Festival’s February 21st Burger Bash were accidentally given two voting chips instead of one. Tensions were already high as the crowd poured into the oceanfront tent where 19 restaurants from around the country – including local faves Joe Allen, Prime One Twelve, Morton’s The Steakhouse and Hollywood’s Le Tub– faced off for bragging rights to the title of “best burger.” All day, Manhattan’s Le Parker Meridien hotel Burger Joint had been talking trash about its New York rival and last year’s winner, Shake Shack– which has its 2007 award prominently featured on its website, complete with photos of the triumphant crew alongside event host Rachael Ray.
The upset victor turned out to be the cheddar-, onions- and horseradish-sauce-topped Schlow Burger from Boston’s Radius restaurant, though according to Festival event organizer Randy Fisher, it only finished five votes ahead of Shake Shack’s signature Shackburger. The third-place runner-up, whom Fisher declined to name, was “more than five and less than 25” votes behind– still within the margin of those illegal double votes.
“It’s just not fair,” gripes Burger Joint spokeswoman Marisa Zafran. Of course, for Zafran, it’s personal—she doubled as her restaurant’s prep-line chief during the Bash, frantically preparing 600 patties, and she quips that she has the sweat-drenched clothes to prove it. “This is pretty serious for a burger festival. It sounds like we’re in a political scandal!”
It isn’t quite Florida’s notorious Bush vs. Gore re-count of 2000. And Dylan’s Candy Bar, which was serving palate-spoiling gooey s’mores to the crowd, doesn’t exactly make for a convincing Ralph Nader stand-in. “The stakes are a little less serious this time around,” chuckles Shake Shack general manager Jon Vandegrift. Besides, “everybody had the same opportunity to capitalize on those extra votes.” Still, it’s easy for Vandegrift to be so magnanimous. Festival director Lee Brian Schrager has already announced that because the race was so tight, he’s inviting Shake Shack to return for next year’s Bash. Meanwhile, Vandegrift is already mulling a trip to Boston to better scope out the competition and regain the crown. No such luck for anyone else crying foul, though. Aside from Radius and Shake Shack, Schrager says it’ll be a whole new field of beef in 2009. “This is not Burger King where you can have it your way,” he quips. “It’s our way.” |
Miami Rock City
For the first time in more than a decade, Miami actually has a critical mass of genuinely exciting rock bands. That’s right, the land of turntable-focused DJ culture and grinding salsa has somehow managed to produce a new array of guitar slingers worth trekking out to see. Foremost is the Jacuzzi Boys, and while their name may conjure up all sorts of unfortunate post-disco connotations, this is a trio straight out of the garage in both sound and stripped-down style. At a recent show I caught at Churchill’s, the band roared its way through a set of fuzzed-out pop nuggets, with equal nods to the heartfelt strum of the Byrds and the sun-blasted rush of the Meat Puppets.
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| The Jacuzzi Boys |
Still, the Jacuzzi Boys were practically genteel in approach compared with another band on that same bill—post-thrashers Torche, whose stacked Marshall amplifiers say it all: This is a group that starts out loud and then moves on to deafening. Fortunately, Torche marries sure-footed melodies to all that squall, alongside a more-than-passing familiarity with Black Sabbath’s satisfying sonic crunch: It’s toe-tapping and tinnitus-inducing all at once.
Another Miamian whose gigs are worth tracking: Lee Williams (above), an MC with one foot in the hip-hop world and the other in laid-back, old-school soul—complete with slinky horns and pleasingly thick Fender Rhodes piano runs. Though he has decamped to Brooklyn, Williams hits town enough (often performing at Jazid) that it’s like he never left. Meet Lee, his latest CD (much of it recorded in producer Aaron Fishbein’s Miami Beach The Franchise studio), finds Williams in a contemplative mood, alternately rapping and crooning his way through the daily trials of life and love (I’ll leave it to a better scorekeeper to track all of the various relationships that get namechecked here), with literally torrents of verse spilling out over the grooves. It’s heady stuff, though on CD you miss the sight of Williams flashing a killer smile as his band snaps into place behind him.
Whether he was recording in New York or Los Angeles, his Cuban-exile status always made the late Israel “Cachao” Lopez an honorary Miamian—and many of his classic ’50s descargas are thankfully compiled on the newly issued The Havana Sessions. Five decades on, these songs still sound as vital as ever: Cachao lets his deftly fingered bass do the walking, while all around him the legendary figures of Latin jazz jam away.
– Brett Sokol
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