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An exhibit papers Art Basel for charity

A who's who of South Florida's design community -- and Ivana Trump -- attended Paperlove, Luminaire's annual art exhibit-slash-fundraiser for UM's Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The show, held Thursday night in the shop's Design District showroom, was filled with more than 50 works commissioned by Luminaire owners Nargis and Nasir Kassamali. The sole criterion: that the work be constructed from, well, paper.

Artists ranged from Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid to Miami-based artists Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquart to Mexico-based sculptor Mira Jokic, who met the Kassamalis in Oaxaca. For Just a Moment, Jokic sculpted a tissue-like paper against a flash of gray paint atop a heavier cardboard. Working with paper, she said, wasn't so different from her normal art.

''Sculpting is like drawing from a thousand angles,'' she said. ``Paper is your first love as an artist.''

Some of the show's definitions of paper were quite inventive: Local architect Chad Oppenheim and his wife, Ilona, traced paper back to its roots, quite literally: Their auction entry, Soon to be Paper, consisted of a tree stump. Carved against its rings: ''I really can't give you anything. The only thing left is my dying roots,'' from Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree.

Spotted at the show, and the dinner at the Moore Building that followed: Trump, Mondrian Hotel designer Marcel Wanders and dozens of local architects and Design District insiders.

This was the Kassamalis' second cancer benefit: 2006's Puppylove raised $450,000 to fund research at Sylvester.

-- SARA FREDERICK

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