In case you have been living under a rock or hate culture, Miami Art Week happened this week and I went. Of all the fairs and art weeks I go to throughout the year, this one is the biggest. Art Basel Miami Beach, also known as “the big fair” or ABMB, had close to 300 galleries from around the world touting their wares at the Miami Beach Convention Center. With Untitled and NADA as the two main secondary fairs, there were easily over 500 galleries exhibiting the best contemporary art on offer today.

While I approached the week with cautious optimism, I honestly was not sure what to expect this year. In fact, I almost decided not to go and that was the tune so many fellow advisors sang this week. But it ended up being a fantastic slate of fairs! The material felt fresh (to borrow a phrase from a brilliant colleague). It was just risky enough to be interesting but not so risky that everyone wondered what they were going to do with it. I feel like I saw a lot of artists I’ve been following pushing the boundaries of their practices to new limits and it worked. For me, one of the three fairs is usually a standout, but this year I left all three (plus Design Miami) feeling inspired. Which means…it may take me a couple of weeks to roll out all of my favorites onto the site. So be patient and stay in touch with The Collection over the next couple of weeks. Here is everything I added this week. (Hint: it is not all specifically featured in this article.)

Since all three fairs were a standout, I decided to start my series of recaps with the first fair I attended, NADA, which stands for New Art Dealers Alliance. NADA has a reputation for being a little edgy, a little weird, but generally high quality emerging work. This year was no exception. I saw so much I liked, but keep in mind I am only including work under $15,000 in this recap and in The Collection. There was work that really resonated with me above that pricepoint. If your budget allows and you’re interested, feel free to reach out to me directly for more information. Here are a few key takeaways:

First, as an advisor based in Cleveland, it is really important for me to attend these fairs because it keeps me in sync with what is happening on the global art stage. I’m not talking about the world of auction records and blue chip galleries. I’m talking about artists from around the world at all different price points. I want to know, across the board, what artists are thinking about, what they’re making, and what stories they’re telling. This helps me understand the major arcs of relevancy and keep a pulse on what the legacy of our time might be.

On this front, a key takeaway from the week is that artists feel the universal need we all have to know who we are as individuals and how we fit into the world and connect with others. I had a lot of conversations about how artists are translating the personal, specific, and unique aspects of their own life into a more universal visual vocabulary that might help viewers feel more connected to each other. The work I spent time with felt authentic, honest, vulnerable, and relatable. One of my favorite artists in this vein was new-to-me Mayra vom Brocke at Linse Galeria out of Buenos Aires.

Something else to know about these fairs is that they are a petrie dish for relationship and professional development. 99.9% of the people I work with are outside of Cleveland. The lion’s share of those people are in New York so going to New York several times each year is imperative. But the fairs are the places I get to connect with the galleries I love in Toronto, Montreal, LA, London, Seoul, Argentina, Mexico, etc…in a very efficient way. Not only do I put faces and email addresses together IRL (looking at you Emma Fernberger), but I also get to reinforce existing relationships with some fantastic gallerists. I see new work from artists I already love and discover new-to-me artists to add to my tracker. Case in point: Moskowitz Bayse showing Ryan Flores and Alexa Guariglia. Sage Malecki, the gallerist I spoke with in the booth, even followed up our conversation with a few suggestions for a particularly challenging space that has stumped me for a while. I am so glad to be in touch with them now!

Moreover, Gallery Affinity out of Lagos, Nigeria, another new-to-me gallery, showed two artists I fell in love with as well. The work stopped me in my tracks but Olu’s enthusiasm for his artists kept me hooked. Samuel Nnorom makes these wonderful wall-dependent sculptures out of African wax print fabric. His mother is a fashion designer, which explains the choice of medium, but the sculptures themselves speak to the basic essence of humanity that binds us all together and allows us to live in harmony despite our differences. Lulama Wolf makes abstract paintings of women at rest or at leisure. Bucking the trend to always show African women at work, at the market, raising children, at the hearth, etc…Wolf shows the other side of femininity. She mixes her pigment with sand so the surface texture of these is gritty and rough, in contrast to her supple, sensual shapes.

And finally, the third reason I prioritize fairs in my annual travel schedule is to hone my eye and my taste. Like I said, I encountered over 500 galleries in 2.5 days. To digest that much material, you have to be able to quickly weed out what is not going to be interesting to you. You have to know what you like while remaining open to new discovery. And on that note, I work alone so getting to walk the fairs with other advisors opens up my world a little bit. We stop at booths that might not have caught my attention otherwise. We discuss the work we are seeing and I learn so much from these conversations. It is truly a delight to get out of my little silo and be with art world people who fill my culture cup! A discovery made possible by the knowing eye of Holly Hawkes was Anne Wehrley Björk at Fernberger. (Disclaimer: Anne’s work slightly overreaches our typical $15,000 cap but it is too good not to share.)

For the sake of your sanity and the capacity of your brain to absorb more material, I leave it here for today. Tune in next week for another installment of art Casey saw and liked in Miami!