Alumni Featured at Art Basel Miami Beach and Surrounding Events

By
Catherine Fisher
December 09, 2021

Art Basel: Miami Beach ran from December 2 through December 4. This year, the fair featured Josh Tonsfeldt '07Tanya Merrill '18, and Raelis Vasquez '21. Several faculty and alumni also participated by showing work at galleries associated with the art fair in Miami.

Tonsfeldt’s work was exhibited as part of Broadway Gallery’s booth. The piece featured a three-channel video installation by Indigenous American filmmaker Sky HopinkaHere you are before the trees (2020). Alongside the film were Tonsfeldt’s otherworldly resin casts of inverted flat-screen monitors. The juxtaposition of these two works addressed the fleeting nature of memory.

Merrill’s paintings were featured as part of 303 Gallery’s booth.

Vasquez’s work was included in two booths: Jenkins Johnson Gallery and Jeffrey Deitch gallery. His paintings explored personal and political motifs inspired by his lived-experience as an Afro-Latino artist in the United States. He addressed the harmful and inaccurate stereotypes associated with his ancestry by revealing historical erasures as well as the traumatic and disruptive experience of immigration. 

Faculty member and alum, Esteban Cabeza de Baca '14 was featured in Garth Greenan Gallery’s booth. His painting, “Ojo Caliente a Paternal” (2020) was done en plein air like many of his works. According to the press release, “the artist’s hybrid techniques and influences form a complex braid, interrogating the dialectical relationships between colonialism and its critique.”

Running concurrently with Art Basel was another fair, The New Art Dealer’s Alliance or NADA, at Ice Palace Studios in Miami. JAG Projects, a roving entity imagined by alumnus and curator Jesse Greenberg '11, had a booth at NADA featuring artist and alumnus, Matthew Fischer '11. Fischer’s work utilizes stained glass to invoke the religious dimension but with a twist in which each piece has a money slot—calling into question what we in the US truly deem sacred. Also in the show were tin pieces which Fischer makes from found objects.

Jeffrey Meris '19 has a solo booth at NADA through Fragment Gallery

Khari Turner '21 was also featured in a group show at Ross-Sutton Gallery as part of Art Basel: Miami from November 28 - December 5. Black Excellence - Black Elegance included eleven artists who were asked to create new work based around the theme of Black elegance and excellence. Turner’s paintings blend realism and abstraction by presenting life-like mouths and noses on abstract figures.. He also incorporates water into his paintings, namely from oceans, rivers, and lakes that are of historical importance to Black people such as the coast of Senegal or the lower Manhattan docks. 

Hugh Hayden '18 created new work for The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. In a special exhibit, Boogey Man, on view until April 2022, Hayden splits the space in two, suggesting the division between the internal and the external. The press release explains, on one side sits a white carpet which evokes a cul-de-sac and standing centrally is “a monumental work in stainless steel. Depicting a police car draped in a white cover, this ambiguous, anthropomorphized form takes on a cartoonish, even childlike ghostly presence, while also evoking the ominous silhouette of a hooded Klansman, making a powerful statement on the role of police brutality in the United States.” On the other side is Roots (2021) which incorporates a “skeletal figure made of bald cypress trees, its surfaces proliferated with bifurcating branches.” Here we see Hayden’s insistence on the importance of heritage and tradition. 

Finally, Together, featuring Priscilla Aleman '19, was a hybrid multi-format art platform that launched as part of Miami Art Week, November 29 through December 5.