Miami Museum Night
While Dior offered guests an early look at the Rubell Museum Tuesday night, on Miami Beach the Bass stayed open late for Chloé’s dinner for Lara Favaretto’s solo exhibition and Lehmann Maupin hosted a dinner for Teresita Fernández’s PAMM retrospective at Casa Tua. BY KRISTEN TAUER
The night before Art Basel Miami Beach, the art crowd was taking a moment to recognize several of the solo museum shows in the city.
Lehmann Maupin and the Pérez
Art Museum Miami hosted a dinner at Miami Beach restaurant Casa Tua to celebrate Teresita Fernández’s midcareer retrospective “Elemental,” which recently opened at the museum. The artist and gallery owners Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin were joined by Cecilia Vicuña, Hernan Bas and Angel Otero, as well as Maria Baibakova, Isolde Brielmaier, Laurie Tisch, Julie Macklowe, Joyce Varvatos, Larry Milstein and more.
“I think it’s an incredible moment to be able to do a show of this scale, that has over 20 years’ worth of work, back in my hometown,” said Fernández, who has lived in New York for two decades but grew up in Miami. “I also think it’s really important that this show is up at the same time as the Cecilia Vicuña survey show at MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art] North Miami. For me it’s an important moment to show the work that I’ve been doing for such a long time, and to give visibility and hopefully to inspire lots of Latina girls in the city who have never seen a show headlined by somebody who looks like them or who has a name like them.”
Like many in attendance, Marlies Verhoeven had stopped by PAMM to see the exhibition earlier in the day.
“It was incredible — and it was amazing to see all of the works together, because it spans a couple of decades from her career so you see early work and then the work she’s working on now all in context,” she said. The Cultivist founder is looking forward to checking out the Meridians section at Art Basel, which is dedicated to large-format work. “They’re doing it for the first year here in Miami because the convention centers now finally finished, so everyone’s excited to see that.”
PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, who met Fernández more than 20 years ago, said the conversation started over three years ago to bring Fernández’s work to the museum. After it closes in February, the exhibition will next travel to the Phoenix Art Museum.
“We consider ourselves to be of course a museum of modern international contemporary art, but we are also a museum that seeks to be defined by its location. And by that I mean that we should be the best of representing work of Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Sirmans. “For me it was always a given that this would happen here.”
Larsen Thompson, a first-time Art Basel goer, has fallen under Miami Beach’s spell.
“I called my mom: ‘I’m definitely going to move here one day,’” said Thompson, who was nearby at The Bass Museum of Art for a dinner hosted by Chloé hosted in honor of one of the museum’s solo exhibitions, “Lara Favaretto: Blind Spot.”
“I’ve been literally living my life. I played the drums upstairs,” she said, and there was an interactive element to the Italian artist’s show, too: guests were encouraged to select and take a book from one of her exhibitions. Inside of each, the artist had tucked a photo of her archival work.
“‘Women From the Ankle Down,’” said Thompson, showing off her pick. “I love this one especially because the piece in it is beautiful, I want to frame it. This beautiful woman who’s just jeweled up. That’s why I picked it,” she added. It also happened to match the orange hue of her outfit.
Bass museum director Silvia Karman Cubiñá had yet to make her selection from the shelves of books. “I’ve been so busy, and I really want to enjoy the process of selecting a book so I’m kind of waiting for a quiet moment. I love this gesture of rescuing something that was meant to be thrown away, and it finding a better home,” she said. “[Favaretto’s] work is really about giving new life to things.”
While the dinner was held in Favaretto’s honor, the Italian artist shied away from the attention; as Cubiñá praised her work in front of the crowd, which included
Leigh Lezark, Marina Testino and Anaa Saber, Favaretto draped her white dinner napkin over her head in an effort to hide. Relief came when the literal spotlight was cast upon ballerina Maria Kochetkova, who performed two dances for the crowd, including the piece “Confetti for 70 Guests,” choreographed specifically for the dinner.