After pandemic hiatus, Miami Art Week returns with ‘an explosion’ of local art and artists
Local galleries that have championed Miami artists will be putting works by local notables on prominent display.
Californian Jared McGriff trained as an architect, got an MBA and worked in Bay Area tech. When the inveterate sketcher realized a few years ago that his true calling was making art, though, he made an unusual decision: He moved to Miami.
It was an against-thegrain call. For years, homegrown Miami painters, sculptors, photographers and conceptual artists complained they had to decamp for New York or L.A. to make a name for themselves, not to mention a living. But for McGriff, and a growing cohort of visual artists both native-born and from elsewhere who have chosen to make Miami their working home, that’s no longer the rule.
In fact, they say, Miami is increasingly a place where talented artists can not merely survive, but thrive.
For clear evidence, look no further than the upcoming Miami Art Week, the annual international extravaganza centered around the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, which is returning after a pandemic-year hiatus.
In sharp contrast to past years, in which local artists were largely eclipsed in their own South Florida hometown by big-name and even emerging artists from elsewhere, work by Miamians this time will be featured attractions in a dizzying number of art week showcases and platforms around the region.
Take McGriff, for one: A mere five years after arriving in Miami as a complete unknown, the late-budding artist has his first solo show of impressonistic paintings of Black figures at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, timed for maximum art week exposure. And he says it’s entirely due to his decision to take a risk on Miami.
In Miami, McGriff says, he found a welcoming and dynamic art ecosystem, nurtured patiently over decades, that has grown to include a broad range of galleries, collectors, grant-making foundations, nonprofit spaces, public and private museums and vigorous public art programs.
That ecosystem has proven fertile ground for a community of artists as diverse in origin, outlook and output as Miami itself. Many of them are making distinguished art, some of it with social and political themes of great currency, much of it deeply rooted in Miami — and they’re now drawing intensifying interest from the larger art world.
“It’s tremendous. It’s beyond what I expected,” McGriff said while sketching a watercolor study for a painting in his studio, a working space at the Spinello Projects gallery, which has long nurtured Miami artists. “Miami is a good place for creative folks, definitely. I found there was more going on here, more art spaces, more interest in art, more civic art investment, and the art community is less segregated than in the Bay Area. It’s a thing here to care about art.”
Though McGriff is a relatively recent arrival, his story will be far from an anomaly during this year’s art week.
The NSU museum is showing not just McGriff but also hosting a solo exhibit by 90-year-old Cuban-born Margarita Cano, long a presence on the Miami art scene. The 2-year-old Rubell Museum in Allapattah is dedicating a gallery to a solo exhibit by young Overtown-born and raised street muralistturned-oil painter Reginald O’Neal, who works in a studio next to McGriff’s at Spinello in Allapattah. Rubell is also showing works from their collection by established art star Hernan Bas, who was born and raised in Miami but is now principally based in Detroit.
Elsewhere in town, the Coral Gables Museum is showing a retrospective of Cuban exile master and longtime Miami resident Julio Larraz’s surrealistic paintings. On view at downtown’s HistoryMiami is a series of artfully rendered photographs documenting the consequences of climate change-induced rising tides around the region by
Russian-born Ana Samoylova, who is based locally. The images are up for one of the world’s biggest photography prizes.
There are also exhibits at Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design at the Freedom Tower of densely layered abstract paintings by Venezuelan-American Loriel Beltrán, a New World School of the Arts grad, in the first of what will be a continuing series of shows dedicated to local artists at the institution entitled MOAD Projects.
There’s a new nonprofit, the Green Space Miami gallery, in the Miami Modern historic district on Biscayne Boulevard, which is showing work in various media by 10 Miami artists of color. The gallery is an offshoot of Miami’s Green Family Foundation, longtime local art supporters.
Wynwood Walls, which has a long track record of commissioning murals by Miami artists, has upped the ante this year by holding an open call for locals to paint a prominent wall at the outdoor street-art museum’s entrance. The winner was veteran muralist and graffiti artist
Quake, the artistic moniker for Miami native Alexander Vahan, in collaboration with colleague Hiero Veiga.
Local galleries that have championed Miami artists, meanwhile, will be putting works by local notables on prominent display. They include Spinello, which is showing a clutch of new O’Neal works. Another Spinello exhibit features paintings of men in her life by Dominican-born Bernadette Despujols, who splits her time between Miami and New York, and a third, on two floors, is dedicated to cut-out paintings by Mexican-American Miami resident Mateo Nava. Emerson Dorsch will show collage-like works by Miamian Yanira Collado at its Little Haiti gallery and at its Untitled Art fair booth.
David Castillo’s gallery in the Miami Design District is exhibiting installations by Mexican-born Miami resident Pepe Mar, while LnS Gallery, on the edge of Coconut Grove, features works in various media by another local, Tony Vazquez-Figueroa,
who was born in Venezuela.
LONG TIME COMING
Another veteran Miami artistic fixture, Carlos Betancourt, born and raised in Puerto Rico of Cuban parentage, has several projects going at once during art week amid what he calls “an explosion” of locally anchored creativity.
The two most prominent may be the animated Florida wildlife scampering across the facade of downtown Miami’s InterContinental Hotel and an installation at Miami Beach’s Española Way, in collaboration with his work and life partner, architect Alberto Latorre. Commissioned by the city of Miami Beach and drawing on Iberian and Latin American traditions, “Milagro!” consists of enlarged tin charms specially made by Mexican artisans that will be suspended over the historic Mediterranean-style street from two 1920s buildings as a symbol of hope.
For Betancourt the Beach piece is a homecoming — and a validation — of sorts.
A pioneer in Miami’s rise as a center for art, Betancourt was one of many artists who set up studios in a dilapidated South Beach in the 1980s, before gentrification pushed them out. For years, he said, Miami did not take its artists seriously, and institutions favored artists from outside over the locals.
But the city’s art community nonetheless grew organically as artists began arriving from elsewhere, often as exiles or refugees, drawn to the freedom to create and experiment that Miami allowed, Betancourt said. That made it possible for artists like himself, rooted in Miami, to persevere through some economically hard times.
Now Miami’s art community, bolstered by cadres of young, homegrown artists, is earning the recognition that long eluded it, he said. It may appear sudden, he noted, but it’s been building a long time.
“All the right elements have always been here,” he said. “For a while it was a little bit disturbing to see the amount of peo“By ple who didn’t believe in this place. Miami looked outwards too long, to places like New York. There was an insecurity factor. There were dozens of artists working in a community that did not support them. People would say, ‘Why don’t you move?’ But in those years you could see the shape of things to come.
“The sense of freedom you feel in Miami, you don’t feel anywhere else. It’s very authentic. People come to express themselves freely. People are able to keep their culture, keep their language and a strong sense of self. That allows for extreme freedom to be creative. There are a lot of artists who use Miami as a muse, there are plenty of them, and it’s unstoppable.”
Not all the platforms for Miami artists consist of exhibits. Eminent art book publisher Rizzoli is releasing a book on Larraz to coincide with the Gables Museum show. The nonprofit Oolite Arts, which provides studios and grants to local artists, will publish its first monograph, on the intricate drawings of Colombianborn Miami artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor. Oolite’s second book, now in preparation, will be on Collado.
SURGE OF ATTENTION
Artists and patrons say the reasons for the surge in attention for locals likely arise from a combination of factors.
One is the ever-rising profile of Miami itself as a lure for the affluent and the cultured, a trend that has been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic isolation, meanwhile, allowed time for increased reflection by artists, collectors and art supporters and a deepening awareness of what was going on in their own backyard. Artists could focus on working without distractions, however welcome they would have been, of exhibitions and the Art Basel carnival.
Another may be that the themes of identity many Miami artists naturally incorporate into their work — Black and Hispanic perspectives, issues of immigration, belonging and minority life in America, as well as questions revolving around gender and sexuality — have gained an urgent prominence in the broader art world.
And, to be sure, it’s also the payoff for decades of extensive civic and private support for the visual arts as a key — and distinguishing — ingredient in Miami’s culture and economy. Foundations and nonprofit groups like Oolite Arts, the Miami-based Knight Foundation, developer Jorge Pérez’s family foundation and government agencies such as Miami-Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs have invested millions of dollars in art and culture locally.
Groups like Oolite, the Bakehouse Art Complex and Fountainhead Studios have provided affordable work and exhibition spaces, along with a ready and like-minded community and encouragement, to hundreds of artists.
The Pérez Art Museum Miami, meanwhile, has taken a leading national role in acquiring and showing works by artists of color, including many based in Miami. Its current exhibit of works drawn from its permanent collection includes pieces by several Miami artists, including Cuban-American José Bedia and Haitian-American Edouard Duval-Carrié.
“We are at an inflection point,” said collector and art patron Dennis Scholl, president and CEO of Oolite Arts. “The work is
‘‘ I FEEL AT HOME HERE. IT IS ONE OF THOSE CITIES WHERE YOU DON’T FEEL LIKE AN IMMIGRANT. YOU FEEL LIKE YOU BELONG. Miami artist Loriel Beltrán
being done here at the highest level.
“You take all the hard work by the artists and the arts ecosystem, and you put in a moment where the world is looking at Miami in a very different way — that is the alchemy that is creating all these opportunities. It simply means that our artists in our community are starting to get a seat at the table. The institutions are thriving. The artists are being supported in a number of different ways, and they are delivering on the promise.”
Whatever the reasons, something has definitely changed for Miami artists, said Rina Carvajal, director of Miami-Dade’s MOAD.
When she first arrived in Miami in 2004, she said, promising Miami artists almost invariably left town to pursue their careers. But more and more are staying, and they’re embracing an assertive Miami identity in their art and working lives, Carvajal said.
“Miami is in a different moment,” she said. “I think Miami is more empowered as a place, as a cultural destination. Many people want to live here. I think we have something different. We have very good artists, and they have more reasons to stay than before. There has been a kind of leveling up. I don’t know what the cause is, but it’s good.”
Still, Carvajal said, more can be done to support visual arts in Miami. MOAD will continue its solo showcases for local artists and plans to bring Miami art and artists to neighborhoods and communities across the county through its Museum Without Boundaries initiative.
She cites Beltrán as an example of the first-rate work being produced in Miami by artists rooted in place. Born in Venezuela, Beltrán moved to Miami at 15. He makes art by building up layers of paint in molds, often letting it sit for years, before painstakingly assembling it into abstract images that recall Op Art and other elements of Latin American, U.S. and European modernism.
Beltrán, now 36, said he stuck it through in Miami even after the 2008 real estate crash, when many artists fled the city, because he could not imagine making art anywhere else.
“I feel at home here. It is one of those cities where you don’t feel like an immigrant. You feel like you belong,” he said. “I think my work relates to different modernist practices in Latin America. They are also influenced by postwar European and American painting. Miami is the place where that all comes together.”
Beltrán, who works in a studio in East Hialeah, said he considers the renewed attention and status of the city’s art community a rebound from the promising years before the crash.
“Everything stalled,” he said. “I just put my head down and got to work. I feel we’ve been building momentum. I think that’s building back and I hope we can sustain it. We finally have enough things going on to make a real active art scene. But I am going to be doing my work regardless.”
PANDEMIC EFFECT
Anthony Spinello, whose gallery has been seeking out and supporting Miami artists since 2005, credits the pandemic for hastening recognition of what’s been happening in the city’s art community all along.
Basel not being here last year, it allowed people to see what was always under their noses,” Spinello said. “I don’t think it’s anything new, but people are coming to it. It was a unique occurrence that allowed us to recognize what is already here.”
Uber-influential collector and patron Mera Rubell concurs.
“The pandemic made everyone feel a little more introspective. We were quarantined in Miami, and it was easier to focus on what was close to us,” said Rubell, referring to husband Don and son Jason, who help her oversee the family museum in Allapattah.
It was while marooned in Miami that they first saw Reginald O’Neal’s paintings at Spinello. At just 29, the former street artist — who has no formal training — has developed a classic Old Masters oil painting technique that Mera Rubell likens to that of a modern-day Rembrandt.
“What we discovered was someone really talented. Not since Hernan Bas have we had such a star,” Rubell said. “From the moment we walked in, we were blown away by what we saw. What he portrays about his family, about the community and the history is profound. It’s about loss and failure and forgiveness, personal devastation, what it mean to be Black in Miami and in Overtown. And each one of the paintings is heartwrenching.”
O’Neal renders scenes and people from Overtown and his family history in an approach he said was inspired by Caravaggio and his chiaroscuro technique of stark contrasts between light and dark. He said he turned to oil painting thanks to Axel Void, the artistic name of Spanish-Haitian-American street muralist and fineart painter Alejandro Dorda Mevs, who took him under his wing. Dorda, who has since moved back to Spain, took him on trips to paint commissioned murals across Europe, where they would visit museums to study classic paintings, O’Neal said. He also voraciously pored over art books in Dorda’s home.
“I never touched a spray can to paint again,” he said.
O’Neal seems nonplussed by all the fuss. A Booker T. Washington High graduate, O’Neal spent his youth pursuing rap and street art and, even after Dorda introduced him to classic art and oil painting, he said he had little knowledge of the art world until Spinello brought him into the fold. He did not at first realize the significance of having the Rubells buy and show his work.
Now he says he’s proud and astonished to see his canvases on the wall in a Rubell Museum gallery next to one dedicated to the work of one of his heroes, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“I don’t come from this world of art, so I’m new to this whole space. But at Rubell, I was, “Damn, I’m showing in the same space as this dude?’ It’s like icing on the cake. It’s super great.”
He said he’s not sure what to expect from art week, but hopes demand for his work and that of his peers, like Spinellomate and friend McGriff, will surge.
“I think it’s coming. Since Basel was not happening, we could show up for each other more. I’m not sure people were paying attention before,” O’Neal said. “But now I
feel we’re getting respected by other parts of the nation. It’s long overdue.”
ON THE WALLS
In the 12 years since developer and preservationist Tony Goldman began recruiting graffiti artists to paint murals on his warehouse buildings in Wynwood’s old industrial district, locals have been a part of the mix. But much of the limelight has gone to well-known street artists from outside Miami.
In recent years, though, his daughter Jessica Goldman Srebnick said, the local street-art community has grown in scope, ambition and accomplishment. That led to her decision this year to issue a call to local artists for the first time for a prime wall at the Northwest 26th Street entrance to be painted for art week, she said. It’s one of 13 new murals to be painted at Wynwood Walls as part of what she called the Class of 2021.
“There is vibrant community of local artists here. And it hasn’t always been that way,” said Goldman Srebnick, who is Wynwood Walls’ chief curator. “The depth of the local artistic community has really grown over the past few years. That has made it viable for an artist to grow and make a living here.
We’ve been working with local artists for a long time, but we wanted to give them an opportunity to participate in an even bigger way.
“We got more than 50 submissions. That would not have happened previously. It was surprising to us. We were thrilled.”
For winner Quake, who grew up tagging in Kendall and South Miami, and getting busted for it by cops, the Wynwood Walls commission marks a high point in a long struggle to make a living by making art in Miami. Though he earned a finearts degree from the University of Miami, he got a job as a graphic designer to pay the bills while he kept doing graffiti on the side.
It was the Wynwood explosion in the past decade, and the international recognition it brought to his work and that of his crew of collaborators and peers, that propelled his artistic career, Quake said. He launched a collaborative business, Cushy Gigs Creative, to do commercial mural work and employ his crew, while continuing to pursue graffiti art.
“It was a passion project. It didn’t lead to anything but trouble,” Quake recalled. “We were largely ignored in Miami. But Wynwood — it sort of exploded around us. It gave us an international eye on what we were doing. It also gave us opportunity. We’re talking about getting paid to spray paint. These were things we could not have dreamed of. I now make a fulltime living as a mural artist. I have two kids and I bought a house a couple of years ago, with graffiti money, essentially.”
Quake developed a distinctive, throwback style of letter-based graffiti art that recalls and modernizes the illegal street art of the 1970s and 1980s. His winning proposal for Wynwood Walls incorporates his old-school, hyper-kinetic style with the more painterly, hyper-realistic and detailed murals that now dominate the scene, in order to trace the evolution of graffiti in the neighborhood, he said.
“When you see these quote-unquote fine art murals, a lot comes from a graffiti background. It’s important to showcase that,” Quake said.
“We’re continuing to be true to ourselves. We pride ourselves on the Miami style.”
Andres Viglucci: @AndresViglucci