The 18 galleries participating in this year’s Survey sector at Art Basel in Miami Beach have proposed an array of historically resonant presentations. Though the works represent historical positions, many of the artists are still working today – and even if not, their work remains as relevant now as it was when it was created. Here, we highlight six presentations with significant weight.
Daniel Faria Gallery (Toronto) will present a room-size installation by American-Canadian artist June Clark (b. 1941). Titled Harlem Quilt (1997), the piece is composed of 200 pieces of fabric, sourced from a GoodWill thrift store in Harlem, each of which has a black-and-white photograph transposed onto its surface. Clark, who emigrated to Canada in the 1960s and returned to her birthplace of Harlem to create this work, took all of the photos with her camera aimed at waist level while wandering the neighborhoods nestled between 110th and 168th Streets. On the fabric are street scenes, building facades, and strangers’ faces and feetilluminated by a string of Christmas lights, each bulb aligned with an image. The work – to be presented in Miami for the first and only time since its creation – commemorates Harlem’s communities at the time, bridging the artist’s personal history with collective memory.
Also active in Harlem, Dingda McCannon (b. 1947) was a pivotal influence in collectives that revolutionized the New York City artworld during the Civil Rights Movement. She was a pillar of the group Wesui and co-founded, together with Faith Ringgold, Where We At, which, in 1971, confronted the director of the Brooklyn Museum, demanding representation for Black female artists. This act, carried out in conjunction with other similarly minded groups, led to panel discussions, acquisitions, and exhibitions at the museum. In Miami, Fridman Gallery (New York City) will present a selection of McCannon’s quilted, painted, linocut, and pastel works created between 1975 and 1989, many of which focus on the history and stories of women, be they through portraits oficonic public figures or based on friends and family. Today, McCannon’s practice feels ever relevant, as it highlights the long road to racial and gender equality in the United States.
Tanzania-born, Scotland-based artist, writer, and curator Everlyn Nicodemus (b. 1954) dedicates her artistic practice to women, too, specifically with regards to personal and Black cultural trauma and the role art can play in healing.In the 1980s, she created a series of 65 paintings with accompanying poems based on interviews with local women in the community centers, slums, and outlying villages of Skive, Denmark (1984), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (1985), and Calcutta, India (1986). She asked these women, ‘What is it to you to be a woman?’, and the conversations recalled the traumas of lived experiences including domestic violence, arranged marriage, forced labor, and dowry practices. Her resulting oil paintings are intimate, at times distressing, depictions of female figures rendered in black and white, with occasional hints of muted blues and burgundies. Richard Saltoun Gallery (London) will present this series in its entirety for the first time.
At galerie lange + pult (Zurich and Auvernier), automobiles and motorbikes will be the subject of discussion. The presentation, titled ‘Hot rods’, will focus on Blair Thurman, Olivier Mosset, and Sylvie Fleury’s individual explorations thereof, with works dating back to the 1980s.In their private lives, all three artists collect cars and/or motorcycles, a hobby which has seeped into their work in one way or another. Aesthetically, paintings by Mosset (b. 1944, Bern), are minimal, pared down canvases, seemingly disconnected from the auto world. One, for example, is black with diagonal turquoise stripes. Yet its title is Second Harley (1988): Mosset shamelessly made the work in order to afford his second Harley Davidson motorcycle. Thurman (b. 1961, New Orleans) and Fleury (b. 1961, Geneva), on the other hand, take more visually direct approaches. Fleury’s Formula One Dress (1999), a hand-tailored pilot dress made with original Formula One fabric, speaks to the sexism of the car-racing world, while Thurman’s painting Daytona (1996) was inspired by the titular NASCAR track and marked the beginning of his series based on racetracks.
A distinct American approach is seen in the practice of Joe Brainard (b. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1942–92), an artist and poet closely associated with the New York School of the 1950s and 60s. The presentation ‘Nancy, Madonnas, and Cigarettes’, hosted by Tibor de Nagy (New York City), will provide insight into the three eponymous aspects of Brainard’s wide-ranging oeuvre: The artist repeatedly returned to the iconography of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy as a poetic motif; he created a series of Madonnas inspired by Ukrainian shops near his apartment on the Lower East Side as well as by cathedrals he saw in Mexico; and cigarettes represent his favorite pastime, smoking. Untitled (Portrait of Joe) (1967), for example, is a self-portrait featuring a black-and-white photo of himself surrounded by cigarette butts.
Lastly, not to be missed is the work of Alfredo Ramos Martinez (b. Monterrey, Mexico, 1871/2–1946), an important figure in Mexican Modernism, whose work will be presented by Louis Stern Fine Arts (West Hollywood). The presentation will focus on works Martinez made in California, where he moved in in 1930 and lived until his death. Here, Martinez began to play a significant role in cultural exchange between his birth country and adopted home, and his works from this time reflect subjects such as Indigenous traditions, the Mexican landscape, and religious and spiritual themes – often all still pointing toward his experiences of daily life.
Art Basel in Miami Beach will run from December 2–4, 2021. Learn more about the show here.
Emily McDermott is a writer and editor living in Berlin.
Top image (desktop view): Dindga McCannon, Rasta Band, NYC (detail), c. 1990. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York City. Top image (mobile view): Everlyn Nicodemus, Muren [Walls] (detail), 1981. Copyright the artist. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.