MIAMI — The tents have emerged and there is a stressful excitement in the air as Art Basel descends on Miami Beach for its 21st edition. But while out-of-towners might come in for just a few days, Miami’s local artists and activists grapple with environmental, economic, and political issues year-round, all while facing access barriers to fairs like Art Basel in their own city.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues promoting what he calls a “war on woke” by passing ultra-conservative legislation to combat any “liberal ideology” in schools and higher-ed departments, along with anti-immigrant legislation already causing worker shortages in the state. From abortion bans to defunding DEI programs in colleges, authorizing carrying concealed guns without a permit, book bans, “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and the attempted erasure of Black and queer history, these were enough reasons for the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group to issue a travel advisory to Florida in May. In October, a Black history teacher took her complaints against Florida’s assault on education to the United Nations. And in the last month, the chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Florida was ordered off its university campus after hosting a teach-in. At the same time, Miami’s residents are grappling with climate gentrification and living in the least affordable housing market in the country.
For many locals, the Art Basel bubble remains too exclusive and removed from Florida’s political climate and the issues Miami grapples with.
Trenise Bryant, co-founder of Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing (SMASH) and former chair of the board for the Miami Workers Center, grew up in the historically Black neighborhood of Liberty City where rents are rapidly increasing. Although she has never attended the fair — due to traffic, how costly it is, and the fact that, in her own words, “Art Basel isn’t for people like me” — she does recall a protest that collided with the fair almost 10 years ago.
“When I think of Art Basel, I think of that time we blocked all the traffic in 2014,” Bryant told Hyperallergic. She describes hundreds of locals marching through I-95 and Wynwood for Black Lives Matter, protesting police brutality and the death of local artist Israel “Reefa” Hernandez. This year, Bryant would like to see art that addresses the more critical social and economic issues, “the different bills that have changed our lives in Florida, the lack of autonomy for women’s bodies, or how there are so many houseless folks,” she said.
A spokesperson for Art Basel told Hyperallergic that the fair is providing a platform for underrepresented and marginalized groups while “unequivocally” supporting “racial justice and LGBTQI+ equality and the vital importance of defending and protecting queer, non-white, and marginalized voices,” adding that it aims to “foster a culture of open debate and conversation about the pivotal issues of our time.” Yet with an Art Basel day ticket costing a whopping $75 — and just a handful of smaller fairs offering free admission — the fair is accessible only to those who can afford the high entrance fee.
Outside of the fairs circuit, local and free projects and exhibitions speak to other realities. The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami opened an interactive installation about book bans in its project room. At Tunnel Projects in Little Havana, Palestinian artist Nadia Tahoun, co-founder of Flower Shop Collective, will host a four-day gathering housing international artists and four who are from Palestine. Claiming their ground and taking up space during Art Week at the AIM Biennal, curated by Marie Vickles, Gean Moreno, Amy Rosenblum, and william cordova, 56 artists will display site-specific art across the city that grapples with environmental and economic challenges. Chire Regans, known as “VantaBlack,” who addresses gun violence, trauma, and grief in her works, will present a public art piece about Black motherhood and the legacy of care at Locust Projects. Indigenous artists from Voices of the River of Grass will show site-specific works on climate change affecting their ancestral home of the Everglades, among other topics.
As the teaching of Black history faces new limitations by the state, the cultural legacy of Miami’s African-American communities is also at risk. Curator and creator of Black Miami-Dade Nadege Green has documented how historically Black neighborhoods such as Overtown and Liberty City used to be vibrant arts meccas during segregation, when Miami Beach was reserved for White people only under Jim Crow zoning laws, but these stories are still overlooked. Liberty City’s Historic Hampton House hosted Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Josephine Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali during the Civil Rights Movement. The opening reception for their exhibition, Gimme Shelter, was packed and will be up throughout Art Week. Decades before Miami gained recognition as a cultural center, members of the Miami Black Arts Workshop, founded in 1969 in Coconut Grove, created spaces for people to learn about arts and activism. Purvis Young painted the people of Overtown in the ’70s and ’80s, while Charles Humes Jr. made art about the waves of migration, displacement, and homelessness.
This year, the press has finally caught on to highlight Miami’s thriving local arts community, but those who still want to see the fairs face the cost barriers. Lou Anne Colodny is an artist and first founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami, which focused on showcasing local artists during the ’80s and ’90s. She was later the director of its precursor, the Center of Contemporary Art, for 15 years. When Basel arrived in 2002, she recalled, “They were bringing new international work that many of us were unfamiliar with, and all of the artists and nonprofits were given free passes, along with passes for guests, while adding the local artist studios to their catalogue.”
This gave Colodny a sense that the fair was open to including Miami’s locals. Today, its philosophy has changed, according to Colodny, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. “The art there is less experimental now and, understandably, more oriented towards commercialism,” she said. “Basel has also priced itself out of the market for most artists working here. It has changed from being more inclusive to becoming much more elitist.”
Art Basel recently announced a new platform to support philanthropic giving by donating a percentage of art sales to the Miami Foundation or the International Committee of the Red Cross. Still, discounts for fair visitors are reserved for students or seniors and Miami Beach residents if bought on November 20 and 21, excluding the other municipalities in Miami-Dade County. So far, only five Miami Beach galleries are exhibiting at the fair (Fredric Snitzer Gallery, David Castillo, Spinello Projects, Piero Atchugarry Gallery, and Central Fine) — an increase from just three the previous two years.
Multimedia artist Gonzalo Hernandez has visited Art Basel every year since he came to Miami from Peru six years ago and remains fascinated by the international art it brings. Collages from his 2003 series AB Basel (The Center of the World) are made using old Basel catalogues. One of them, from 2002, unsurprisingly featured mostly White male artists. “I also wonder, is being in the fair the main goal? And what happens to artists once they reach that Art Basel peak?” he pondered.
For Miami, becoming a cultural hot spot after the fair came to town also brought challenges at the infrastructure level. Since 2004, artist william cordova, a Miami native who participates in Art Basel and co-founded the AIM Biennial, has observed and documented how parts of the city have changed since its inception. For example, Wynwood’s entire artist and working-class neighbors were displaced rapidly once developers saw the value in the area in the early 2000s.
Art Week brings exposure, money, and opportunities for local artists who are hard at work all year through grants and new philanthropists moving in. But there is more to do at the city and state policy level to protect the locals that made Miami what it is from being ultimately priced out. Additionally, sea levels in the area are projected to rise from one to three feet by 2060, rendering higher ground inland — much of it in predominantly Black neighborhoods — more desirable to developers. “This is also happening in Little Haiti, Allapattah, and even Liberty City,” cordova told Hyperallergic. Group shows across Miami, such as DISplace at GreenSpace Miami, also address realities linked to gentrification and urbanization in the city, and the Department of Reflection led a panel at FIU’s Wolfsonian Museum to discuss what Miami’s infrastructure and who created it tells us about the city’s past.
“We went through three years of trauma,” Carl-Phillipe Juste, co-founder of Iris PhotoCollective (IPC) Arts Space based in the neighborhood of Little Haiti, told Hyperallergic. Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and the political extremism of Florida’s governor, he noted: “You can’t just erase that with champagne and dance music.”
“I hope there is still room for art to pull up a mirror and speak to the promise of Western democracy and its failures,” added Juste, who is participating in and curating Defiance, Open Resistance, Bold Disobedience at the IPC Arts Space. “And if artists can do that and bring the money, too, then even better.”
