Art Returns to Miami After a Two-Year Hiatus
For the first time in two years, Miami Art Week is back fully in person, and the Magic City—always a thriving cultural center—is bustling. December kicks off with Art Basel. The fair, sidelined last year due to the pandemic, returns to South Florida with representation from 254 galleries from 36 countries and territories—43 of which are joining for the first time. Among them: Lagos- and Los Angeles–based Rele Gallery, which is offering a solo presentation of the young Nigerian artist Marcellina Akpojotor, whose richly textured figural works incorporate discarded pieces of Ankara fabric sourced from local fashion houses.
Across from the Miami Beach Convention Center in Pride Park, the Design Miami fair explores the theme “Human Kind,” spotlighting designs for a more equitable and interconnected future in the form of Lebanese designer Khaled El Mays’s furniture, fabricated with wicker and leather by artisans in Mexico City, and Copenhagen-based ceramicist Sandra Davolio’s intricate porcelain vessels, inspired by the incredible biodiversity of coral.
Nearby, at the Bass museum, artist Alex Israel will use Snapchat’s augmented-reality marking technology to bring his Self-Portrait pieces to life, combining them with flouncy palm trees and supersize pelicans. Over the causeway, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, exhibitions will include large-scale abstract canvases by London-based painter Jadé Fadojutimi and several rarely exhibited Betye Saar installations from the 1980s and ’90s. The Rubell Museum’s central hall will be filled with Narcissus Garden, a monumental Yayoi Kusama piece made up of 700 stainless-steel spheres. And El Espacio 23’s show “Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection” will explore identity through more than 100 works by artists with roots mainly in Africa, as well as elsewhere around the globe, including mixed-media artist Suchitra Mattai.
Louis Vuitton is transforming its Design District women’s store into an immersive Objets Nomades showcase, wrapping the building in a version of the Campana Brothers’ modular Aguacateroom divider, which resembles a constellation of brightly colored suns with handcrafted leather rays.
Chanel will unveil a new Peter Marino–designed boutique with a smooth white stucco facade that tempers the bright light along the Design District’s main pedestrian plaza. (Marino’s work for the house is also the subject of a new Phaidon monograph, Peter Marino: The Architecture of Chanel.)
And Dior presents its sixth Dior Lady Art collaboration, the result of a virtual global tour in which the house’s iconic Lady Dior top-handle bag was reimagined by 12 artists hailing everywhere from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (Manal AlDowayan), to Dublin (Genieve Figgis).
This article originally appeared in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Harper's BAZAAR, available on newsstands December 7.
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