Posted on Fri, Dec. 04, 2009
Some art to stay behind after Art Basel
BY TOM AUSTIN
Special to The Miami Herald
CHARLES TRAINOR JR / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Olaf Breuning's mural "Collage Family" is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami Thursday.
Art Basel Miami Beach comes and goes each December, but this year, some of the art created to coincide with the giant trade show will hang around after the show ends this weekend.
In Miami Beach, an interactive sculpture has been installed at a new parking garage on Lincoln Road. And in Wynwood, acclaimed artists are painting huge murals on the exterior walls of galleries and other structures.
Saturday night, Wynwood will be awash with the Art Basel set -- curators, dealers, collectors, art party people -- streaming through galleries that have sprung up in the hardscrabble urban landscape dotted with slices of beauty. Along an exterior wall of the Dorsch Gallery, for instance, is a luminous Brandon Opalka mural, Nature is Imagination Itself, a depiction of a redwood tree.
On Thursday, a crowd milled around as banks of overhead lights shone down on a mural project produced by the New York gallery Deitch Projects and Miami development firm Goldman Properties.
That evening served as the official unveiling of a major effort that has ramped up Wynwood's legacy of street art, which began with raw and possibly illegal graffiti that still adorns the area.
But this particular creation, what organizers of The Wynwood Walls call ``vernacular pop art,'' is legal. It also is the result of 15 international artists including Japan's Aiko and Brazil's Os Gemeos, working with a real-estate developer and a prominent gallery.
FOSTERING THE SCENE
Tony Goldman, one of the founders of modern South Beach, has taken a big stake in real estate in evolving Wynwood. Most of Wynwood Walls' murals are centered around his son Joey's eponymous restaurant on Northwest Second Avenue at 25th Street.
Gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch handles several of the artists involved, including Shepard Fairey, who is best known for his iconic Obama Hope image.
In Wynwood, in Miami's Lower East Side, graffiti has taken off, and artists are conscious of the tradition set by such pioneers as the late Keith Haring. And Wynwood Walls has evolved into an old-school mash-up, with masters and sort-of-young Turks feeling one another out in the new era.
Two days before the unveiling, Goldman rhapsodized about art's transforming ``the entire vocabulary of a neighborhood.'' Deitch pointed to neat plastic boxes of art supplies and observed, ``These artists are a lot more organized now than the early days of graffiti.''
Os Gemeos is an artist collaborative team of twin brothers, Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo.
For Otavio, surveying their wall of bright ``very Brazil colors'' with a carnival bus motif, the work was business as usual.
``In Brazil, graffiti is technically illegal, but the police don't really do anything. They have more important things to worry about.''
Graffiti artists tend to be a fun bunch, from former Miami resident Kenny Scharf (``The city has gotten slightly overbuilt since I left'') to the legendary Futura, in braided ponytails (``The look-at-me stuff is for the kids, but they're also doing some dope-a-- artwork'').
Stelios Faitakis of Greece incorporated traditional Byzantine imagery such as flying angels into his homage to Florida.
``In this part of my mural, the Native Americans fight the white ones, and, over here, it's happy hour on Ocean Drive,'' he said. ``It's always happy hour there.''
ON LINCOLN ROAD
Across the causeway in South Beach, another grand unveiling was staged for the Basel troops. The 1111 Lincoln Road building, a stunning concrete cathedral designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, premiered a public sculpture designed to tie the past of Lincoln Road to a more heavily designed future. The Basel set and a few like-minded locals -- including Brandi C. Reddick from Miami-Dade County's Art in Public Places and Dennis Leyva, arts and entertainment liaison for Miami Beach -- had gathered to watch for a discussion with Sam Keller, former director of Art Basel, Pierre de Meuron and the artist Dan Graham.
The Graham sculpture, two-way mirrored glass and steel in a free-flowing amoeba shape that allows viewers to walk inside its walls, had come about, in part, through the Art in Public Places committee in Miami Beach. Leyva, coordinator for the committee, saw Graham's piece as a perfect tie-in to the new pedestrian plaza that now occupies the western end of Lincoln Road. Done by Raymond Jungles, the plaza is all cypress trees, Brazilian mosaic pieces and ambition.
``Dan wanted to do something that was interactive,'' Levya said, ``a piece that would complement the streetscape and engage children and regular folk.''
Graham, whose solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York earlier this year was an eye-opening experience for Reddick (``I never realized the complexity of his work until I saw everything together at the Whitney'') also had Keller on his side. Keller jumped into the middle of the piece and explained the gestalt: ``You see yourself in the glass, reflections of the sky and other people, and it creates an embracing sense of community. South Beach is a catwalk, and this is the perfect sculpture for the city.''
AN INSPIRATION
For his big day on Miami Beach, the artist -- who has worked with such forward-thinking music groups as Sonic Youth -- had put on shorts and a paisley shirt. At 67, Graham pretty much does and says what he wants, and he left the opening hoopla early for a coffee at a nearby cafe.
``Morris Lapidus, of the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc, was a big inspiration for this piece, and next year is the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Road, which he also designed,'' Graham noted.
Graham's sculpture is titled Morris's and the artist, as it happens, shares the aesthetic rigors of the master of Miami Beach.
``Usually, I like my sculpture to be surrounded by grass, so that people can flop around it and experience the work. Art is like anything else: It needs to be used every day.''
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