The eighth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach arrives at a sobering time for a contemporary art market that had soared to giddy heights in recent years but now struggles to survive.
María Martínez-Cañas, one of Little Havana's own, is tucked into her home studio not that far from Ana Mendieta's carving of one of her trademark silhouettes, an outline of her body on a Ceiba tree.
Design Miami, the pedigreed fair of designers, dealers, curators and discerning consumers, moved from the Moore Building last year and into a hip big top fashioned of tent materials.
To the more cultivated devotees of Art Basel Miami Beach, the satellite fairs orbiting the main event are often more engrossing than all the mainstream action. And naturally, South Beach mainstay Todd Oldham has the right style perspective. This year, the designer -- who has just redone Wish restaurant and added an oceanfront extension onto The Hotel -- will preside over an installation of contemporary art in a familiar and sort of mainstream setting: A Celebration of New Voices: In, on, and about the Wolfsonian.
There are no better calling cards for South Florida's art scene than the world-class private collections showcased at their best during Art Basel Miami Beach.
The Knight Foundation will name 20 winners of grants totaling $3.7 million to energize the arts in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
Long slogs around the Convention Center, even amiable strolls through Art Basel's many satellite fairs are sure to set appetites ticking. Art may feed the soul, but you must feed the body. Here is a restaurant-insider's guide.
Yes, you're here in the semi-tropical sun to soak up the spectacular offerings of Art Basel, but South Florida also has other serious shopping haunts. Here's a guide:
As the creator of perhaps the most widely seen piece of artwork in recent history -- the red, white and blue poster of Barack Obama underlined by the message HOPE -- Shepard Fairey has been catapulted to global fame. His works will be everywhere during Art Basel Miami Beach -- inside the fair, as a mammoth mural in Wynwood and on the side of Miami Art Museum.
![William Kentridge's <em>Drawing for the film Stereoscope [Felix
Crying]</em>, 1998-99.](http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2009/11/27/10/6265330.bigthumb.prod_affiliate.56.JPG)
William Kentridge's enigmatic charcoal drawings of a burly balding man -- sometimes naked, sometimes in a business suit, but always angst-ridden -- seem to encapsulate the weight of living in this troubled world.
Although Art Basel has enriched this area's cultural life, local artists are seldom deemed worthy by fair officials to be part of the extravaganza.
Editor's Note: Most obituaries for artist Jeanne-Claude, who died at 74 on Nov. 18, focused on The Gates, the massive installation for which she and her husband, Christo, festooned 23 miles of footpaths in New York's Central Park with billowing saffron fabric. But a former Miami Herald art critic remembers the impact an earlier collaboration had on South Florida.
Miami artist Stephen Gamson's style is drawing raves and talk of pop-art stardom.
Shaking off the cobwebs of recent history, a misunderstood artistic icon who lived through the Great Depression, two world wars and the civil-rights movement proves that he can still lift our sagging spirits with his poignant paintings of courageous Americans and his humorous view of daily life.
After getting hammered during the global economic crisis, art prices seem to be making a comeback.
''People sometimes run out of our exhibitions,'' photographer Mirta Gómez says. ''They don't want to see what's being shown.''
For any number of anonymous winters, the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog vacationed in Miami Beach -- walking around, looking around, taking in everything. To me this is one of the more interesting and salient points to be made in looking ahead to the two Herzog & de Meuron buildings we are getting.
The inspiration for the upcoming A Very Wolfsonian Weekend Gala -- which includes visits to classic-car museums, a talk by renowned car designer Chris Bangle and Mitchell ``Micky'' Wolfson's 70th birthday party -- began, of course, with the art of design at the Wolfsonian-FIU on Miami Beach, founded by Wolfson.
New York poet Frank O'Hara once wrote that he could not delight in a simple patch of grass if there were not some evidence of his beloved city nearby: a record shop, a train, or ``some other sign that people do not totally regret life.''
With designs for a new Miami Art Museum in place, its director has decided to step down and return to architecture.
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