This article is the final installment in a four-part series about the history of Art Basel Miami Beach published in the run up to Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. The first chapter can be read here, the second here, and the third here.

The ripple effect

The fair rippled out throughout Miami, prompting events all over town that have only multiplied over the years. Design Miami was created in 2005 to heed requests to include design galleries. ‘The significance of the Art Basel Miami Beach phenomenon influenced the entire South Florida region,’ says Bonnie Clearwater, former director and chief curator of MOCA North Miami. ‘“Miami Art Week” has spread north to Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. … What happens around the fair – at private collections, museums, artist studios, and on the street, not to mention the parties,’ she adds, ‘has become as much of an attraction as the fair itself.’

In the first year of Art Basel Miami Beach for example, Jeffrey Deitch presented a special project in the then nascent Miami Design District at the invitation of Craig Robins, the visionary developer of area: an installation of paintings by Kehinde Wiley, with works on the walls and on the ceiling. This began a tradition of special exhibition projects in the Design District almost every year, Deitch says, which have included an art products store and the exhibition ‘Live Through This’, which documented the New York art vanguard of the mid-2000s.

Deitch’s then gallery, Deitch Projects, became famous for its lively performance program, which began in 2002 at the home of collector George Lindemann. ‘George had emptied his house prior to an extensive renovation project, and invited us to use his beautiful 1930s Spanish revival house for an immersive performance project,’ Deitch says. ‘It was one of the most extravagant events I have ever hosted. Fischerspooner performed on a stage above the pool and they all jumped in at the finale, reemerging for the encore.’

Deitch maintained the Miami performance program while he was director of MOCA in Los Angeles, presenting LCD Soundsystem. His last event featured Miley Cyrus and The Flaming Lips in 2014. ‘It was a phenomenal performance, but by that time, our party was too high-profile and too popular,’ he says. ‘There was a riot of uninvited fans trying to get in.’ After that, Deitch switched to exhibition projects, starting with an ‘Unrealism’ series in 2015. This year, he will have his sixth Design District collaboration with Gagosian, an exhibition entitled ‘100 Years’.

The second challenge was that Art Miami opened each January, with a deal stipulating that no art fair could take place 45 days on either side of its dates. Art Basel Miami Beach was cornered to December, at that time considered off-season. But it proved ideal for access to hotels and restaurants, and superlative for Latin American and European travel. To seal the deal, collector Mera Rubell explains, ‘We arranged for a delegation of Miami Beach city officials, including Mayor Neisen Kasdin and Commissioner Nancy Liebman, to accompany me to Switzerland to experience the world-class nature of Art Basel firsthand. The trip was a success.’

In 1999, the contract was signed. A 2001 e-flux announcement promised, ‘The art world’s new favorite winter meeting place will offer unique experiences as well as lots of sun!’

Once Art Basel had settled on Miami, a local team was assembled that included Goodman, who worked on promoting the fair as the Florida representative for Art Basel; Taschen, who became events manager; and Reed, who became responsible for VIP relations along with Sara Fitzmaurice and Sascha Nikitin.

Having helped develop the Art Basel VIP relations network, as well as the concept of art fairs hosting trustee groups at their shows, Sara Fitzmaurice – founder and president of public relations firm Fitz & Co. – became part of the effort. The small but determined group went into high gear, planning details and getting the word out.

In 2003, the New York Times’s T Magazine also commissioned artist Jessica Craig Martin to capture the week, creating an art and fashion spread that featured more than 25 artworld insiders as the models. There is Amalia Dayan, then working at Gagosian, wearing Helmut Lang and white gloves handling a 1963 Warhol Liz; Yvonne Force in Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche with dealer Sandra Gering in her booth in front of a Leo Villareal; Stefania Bortolami in Helmut Lang at the de la Cruz’s opening of their private collection.

‘We knew Art Basel Miami Beach was securely on the map,’ says Fitzmaurice, who helped organize the shoot – published in 2004 – and was herself featured in it.

In 2005, collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros hosted a brunch at CIFO Art Space that became very popular and was included in the VIP program and continued for 18 editions. ‘One of the greatest accomplishments of Art Basel Miami was the international public invited and brought to the city, that, thanks to the fair, started to be involved with Latin American art,’ she says. ‘All this interest encouraged me to be more involved.’

According to longtime Art Basel VIP Representative and Senior Business Advisor Stefanie Block Reed, New York, Los Angeles, and even Orlando’s convention center had been in consideration. The Art Basel team visited Miami for intense weeks of meetings. They met with Braman, as well as Robins. An initial meeting with the Miami Beach Convention Center proved demoralizing, Robins shares. ‘We needed a foot in the door. One of my good friends Nick Pritzker owned the company that managed the convention center, so he organized a meeting for the director to meet with Norman, Sam, and I.’

The trio aimed to overcome two challenges. Art Miami, the longest-running Miami art fair at Miami Beach Convention Center, met the city’s stipulation of 1,500 hotel rooms sold to secure its fair dates. Art Basel Miami Beach would need the same guarantee. Braman called Goodman, then president of Garber & Goodman Advertising and Marketing, to help find a way. Based on the hotel statistics of Art Basel in Switzerland, Goodman confirmed it could happen... and went on to work with Art Basel for 22 more years.

‘One of Sam’s great allies in making the fair successful was Isabela Mora, whose role was described to me as an “art connector”,’ remembers Marc Spiegler, who joined Art Basel in 2007 as co-director and has led the organization since 2012. [As of November 2022, he will pass the baton to Noah Horowitz, who’ll take on the new role of Art Basel CEO.] ‘They traveled relentlessly – sometimes together, sometimes apart – and she helped build up a group of super loyal collectors, people who at the time were not nearly as famous as they are now, such as Eugenio Lopez, Patricia and Juan Vergez, Patrizia Sandretto, and Dakis Joannou. Today, we have a VIP team of more than 30 people, but I’ve never met anybody with Isabela’s ability to make people incredibly passionate about both collecting contemporary work and being part of the artworld.’

Fredric Snitzer, the longtime Miami gallerist, says he was ‘very excited’ at the prospect of luring Art Basel to Miami Beach. While Art Miami existed, Snitzer says it ‘was not doing a good job in terms of quality’. Snitzer, who opened his gallery in 1977, was one of the early champions of contemporary Latin American art in the United States and has led the way with Cuban artists, launching careers such as that of Hernan Bas. His shows have included ‘They would rather Die’, an exhibition of a documentary film, paintings, and actual rafts used to flee Cuba. When the fair decided to come to Miami, Snitzer was asked to serve on the selection committee, and did so until 2021. He has also had a booth in the fair every year since the beginning.

The second part of this story will be released Wednesday, November 16, 2022.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 runs December 1–3, with VIP preview days from November 29–20, 2022.

The artists, of course, were always at the center. ‘Looking back over 15 years with Art Basel, Ryan McNamara’s Meem4Miami: A Story Ballet About the Internet in December 2014 was one of my proudest moments,’ Spiegler says. ‘It had started as a prize-winning commission from Performa and we worked with them to bring it to Miami Beach, hosted in the former Playboy Club. It was not easy, because the piece required a large team of disciplined people – always hard to find in Miami. Ryan managed in this surreal environment to physically recreate the experience of surfing the Internet, by wheeling people all over the building into environments that channeled everything from classical ballet to strip-club vibes.’ It was not easy, though. McNamara recalls showing up to a rehearsal space with 15 other performers for his only rehearsal to find a Wyclef Jean concert in progress. Other fun memories, McNamara says, included walking into his Airbnb living room ‘to find the musician Robyn sitting on the couch holding a Wasa cracker like a phone to her ear’.

There have been countless memorable art installations. In 2006, among the most talked-about works was in the booth belonging to Gavin Brown’s Enterprise: suspended by a motor on the ceiling, a packet of Camel cigarettes spinning round and round by Urs Fischer. Price tag: $160,000. In honor of her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in 2014, artist Jennifer Rubell created a performance piece featuring a wedding party in black tie and cake for the attendees. In 2015, a knife attack at the fair’s Nova sector – which focuses on young artists – was confused by some for a piece of performance art; fortunately, the victim survived. ‘I was doing an interview with Noah Horowitz [Art Basel’s Director Americas from 2015 to 2021 and its newly appointed CEO] at the time that the stabbing happened,’ Spiegler remembers. ‘Suddenly everybody’s walkie-talkie was beeping. We took a hidden path through the building over to the Nova section. It was Noah’s first year, and I remember him looking back at me, arching his eyebrows and saying, “What have you gotten me into, man?” And all I could think of to say was, “This never happened before!”’

And then there was the banana. When Maurizio Cattelan pinned his (somewhat overripe) banana to the wall of Perrotin with gray duct tape, it made international headlines. Critics debated the artistic merits of the installation, given that three buyers paid between $120,000 and $150,000 each for such pieces, and two additional artist proofs went to museums. That Christmas, Wooldridge ordered plastic bananas from Amazon and taped them to canvases as gifts for friends. Clearwater gave a lecture titled ‘When is a Banana a Work of Art’ to a packed audience at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in February 2020 (the video of the lecture is on the museum’s YouTube channel). ‘It generated such massive worldwide attention that it got everyone talking about how we define art and assign value,’ Clearwater says.

In the years since the fair began, Miami Beach has solidified its reputation as a vibrant, hip cultural capital. ‘It’s put Miami on the international cultural awareness map,’ says longtime Art Basel VIP Representative and Senior Business Advisor Stefanie Block Reed. The fair has helped spur other major art developments such as the reopening of the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013 and the opening of ICA Miami, funded by collectors Norman and Irma Braman, which opened in 2017. The fair has also been a significant economic boost for Miami and helped shape its transformation from a mid-tier regional city to a world-class metropolis. Wooldridge says: ‘People who thought of Miami as a simplistic backwater completely changed their view.’

More recently, the pandemic saw many wealthy people flocking to Miami to buy or rent homes. ‘There is an energy and spirit here that can’t be matched,’ Wooldridge says. ‘So many places are stuck in an unmalleable paradigm. We’re still becoming. You don’t have to have a family legacy to make a difference in the community; you just have to show up and dig in. I love that.’

The fair has helped inspire the Knight Foundation’s goal of expanding art in Miami, foundation president Alberto Ibargüen says, ‘and made art the norm here’. Similarly, the fair itself has become a tried-and-true tradition, one many look forward to as a fixture on the calendar after Thanksgiving and before Christmas, a chance to gather with denizens of the artworld under sunny skies. ‘Most years, I get to the Art Basel, Design Miami, and Art Miami fairs at least twice, and I try to make a stop at most of the others around town,’ Wooldridge says. ‘I want to see as much art as I can. Sometimes my eyes and feet give out first.’

The first installment of this story can be read here, the second here, and the third here.

This article was originally commissioned for the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine 2022.

Robin Pogrebin has been a reporter for The New York Times since 1995, where she covers cultural institutions, the artworld, architecture, and other subjects.

Captions for full-bleed images: 1. View of the Miami Beach Convention Center. 2. Street view of the Miami Design District. Photo by Ra Haus. 3. Art Positions at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2008. 4. Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan's banana in Perrotin's booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2019.