Meet the artists representing Brooklyn at Basel
Art Basel, Miami Art Week's crown jewel, is underway and borough artists are out in full force
Every (normal, non-pandemic year) December kicks off with Miami Art Week, an annual extravaganza where art fairs, gallery openings, mural fests (and more!) descend on the Magic City, drawing exhibitors and attendees from around the globe.
Art Basel is of course the main attraction. Since 2002, the prestigious Swiss fair has headquartered their Western hemisphere event in Miami, at the crux of North and South American cultures. Over the years, the art extravaganza has seen a cottage industry of other events explode around it: everything from non-Basel mural festivals to gallery openings are all now held at the same time.
New York, as always, is heavily represented, and Brooklyn Magazine just happens to be on the ground in Florida. We’ll be reporting on the scene and providing daily recaps from the heart of the city’s art action—sunshine, spray paint, Tom Ford Soleil Blanc and all—through a Brooklyn lens.
On our first day in City Center, we pay a visit to the Miami Beach Convention Center for Miami Art Week’s crown jewel to see who’s repping the borough at the art world’s most audacious annual exposition.
‘Pluralism in Motion,’ detail (Vittoria Benzine)
José Parla is an artist’s artist. This year for Art Basel, he’s showing one painting titled “Pluralism in Motion” (2021) with Ben Brown Arts. Parla’s work dances between calligraphy and graffiti, but his tangles of abstract expressionist lines resemble topographies thanks to their immense texture. As we can see here, Parla’s work often holds hidden messages disguised with varying degrees of subtlety.
Parla’s close confidante and colleague Hank Willis Thomas also showed a singular work with Ben Brown Arts.. A socially-conscious creative powerhouse working out of the Navy Yard, Willis Thomas founded the For Freedoms and spearheaded the Brooklyn revival of the Wide Awakes last year.
While Art Basel is best known for exhibiting international galleries, the event also curates themed “sectors,” or collections, with names like Positions and Conversations to explore art around particular topics. In 2019, Art Basel added Meridians to this lineup, a sector focused on large-scale, monumental works. For Meridians, Willis Thomas also put forward “Freedom” (2021) a symbolic flag in the spirit of his latest gallery show, “Another Justice: Divided We Stand,” on view at Kayne Griffin Gallery in Los Angeles.
‘Freedom’ (photo by Vittoria Benzine)
“Through massive labyrinthine quilts and human-like sculptures, the exhibition interrogates the gossamer presented by American ideals against the grimy reality many Americans live day to day,” Dream McClinton reports for the Guardian this week.
‘Nine Virtues,’ detail (photo by Vittoria Benzine)
BK-based Tunji Adeniyi-Jones joins Willis Thomas at Meridians with an imposing and mesmerizing triptych titled “Nine Virtues” (2021). Wall text for this work says it “marks a step forward in the Nigerian-British artist’s engagement with the aesthetics of Western African Modernism, and specifically, the legacy of the Nigerian pioneer artist Ben Enwonwu.” Nine bodies contort with otherworldly grace, powered by the tension of complementary colors orange and blue. Eighteen hypnotic eyes challenge the viewer to face their muse-like vivacity.
It’s not just artists out here. Organizations like Bed-Stuy-based Welancora Gallery are sharing their curatorial eye at Art Basel to demonstrate Brooklyn’s world-class taste. They’re presenting a series of bronze relief sculptures called “Visual Tales” by Helen Evans Ramsaran. “The work is inspired by Ramsaran’s childhood imagination playing with clay in her first studio, which was under a fig tree,” explains gallery founder Ivy N. Jones. This is their first time showing at Art Basel, Jones noted, “another opportunity to show the world that Brooklyn is one of the best places to view and experience art.”
Ahead of his impending 2022 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley is showing one work titled “If It Feels Good, Do It” with Andrew Edlin Gallery. Look closely at the carefully assembled collage of detritus Riley’s arranged here, from a rainbow of rusty Bic lighters, plastic bottle caps, and seashells alike. Past the rainbow facade of impeccable maximalism lies Riley’s social commentary about waste and climate change.
‘If It Feels Good, Do It,’ detail (photo by Vittoria Benzine)
Sophia Narett proves that the borough is crafty, too, with her intricate embroidery titled “The Moment We Met,” on view at Art Basel with LA-based Kohn Gallery. This earthy network of nudes and otherworldly elements pairs intense hues with visually arresting details, all connected by strands of yarn that dangle and tangle like the vast mycelium networks beneath a forest floor.
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Marc Dennis works out of Dumbo, where he typically paints portraits and still lives in jaw dropping hyperrealism loaded with rock n’ roll edge. He’s showing this painting called “Love You Too” (2021) through Palm Beach-based Gavlak Gallery. Dennis specializes in “trompe l’oeil,” the technique of using hyper-realistic imagery to create an optical illusion. Here, Dennis has replicated Post-It notes, transcribing them with DMs and messages and comments he’s received from loved ones throughout the pandemic.
‘Love You Too’ (photo by Vittoria Benzine)
Following previous showings with nearby Untitled Art Fair, 2021 marks Dennis’s first time representing Brooklyn at Basel. “Brooklyn sort of serves as the world’s borough,” the artist tells me. “To be represented at Art Basel provides a level of distinction and a sense of pride.” If he could bring one bit of Miami back to Brooklyn, he says it’d be the bathroom in the King Suite at the Setai Hotel in South Beach.
Keep your eyes out for more recaps as Miami’s art week parties on.
