Art Basel – Miami Art Week 2021: Exhibitions to See

Art Basel Miami is one of the most important art fairs around the world. It has become in one of the main spots for the art community, as well as for art collectors and as lovers. Because of its great impact on the city, there are several exhibition and art events which will take place during the fair, from December 2 to 4. Here are three exhitions on Miami’s top museums to see:

Hugh Hayden: Boogey Men
November 3o, 2021 – April 17, 2022
ICA Miami

“Hugh Hayden: Boogey Men” features a suite of monumental new works created for the occasion and debuting at ICA Miami. In his innovative work across mediums, Hayden creates anthropomorphic forms that explore our relationship with the natural world. Formally trained as an architect, Hayden deploys laborious processes—selecting, carving, fabricating—resulting in dynamic, surreal, and critical responses to personal experience and social and cultural issues. Renowned for his use of wood—taking disparate species and manipulating them to reveal complex histories and meanings—Hayden crafts intricate metaphors and meditations on experience and memory that question social dynamics and the ever-shifting ecosystem.

Featuring a series of new works that contend with personal and recent political themes, “Boogey Men” is bifurcated into two spaces that suggest suburban interior and exterior and which highlight the artist’s interest in socially producing spaces. A white carpet creates a dramatic cul de sac, which will grow dirty as visitors pass over it during the exhibition. At the center of this space is Boogey Man (2021), 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.

Cast iron skillets hanging in the kitchen at Bainbridge House are from Hugh Hayden’s series, ‘American Food.’ They are modeled from African Masks and historical artifacts in the Princeton University Art Museum collections. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

 

 

Reginald O’Neal: AS I AM
November 29, 2021 – October 2022
Rubell Museum

The exhibition, “AS I AM” consists of a suite of paintings from the artist’s first solo exhibition, “AT THE FEET OF MOUNTAINS”, and two new large commissioned paintings, using historic images and people present in his life to juxtapose the past and present.Reginald O’Neal (b. 199s, Miami, FL / lives and works in Miami, FL) is a painter whose artwork reflects on the Black experience in his Miami neighborhood. He states, “my desire is to embrace the unappreciated, defaced and misrepresented, as well as illustrate the true beauty within my community. It is for people looking from the outside, but mainly a mirror for residents of the community to see ourselves for who we are.”

 

 

– Zhivago Duncan. Pretentious Crap
November 3o, 2021 – September 25, 2022
Perez Art Museum

Zhivago Duncan creates elaborate multimedia works accompanied by sprawling narratives. Much of his production is authored under the guise of various alter egos, including “Nacnud Ogavihz” (Duncan’s name spelled backwards), or the semi-amnesiac Dick Flash, the supposed creator of Duncan’s large-scale sculptural installation Pretentious Crap (2010-11), which was donated to PAMM by Diane and Robert Moss in 2014. As the sole survivor of a global apocalypse, Dick Flash roams the world collecting the remnants of his ancestors’ ruined civilization, puzzling over the mysterious objects he encounters. With no memory of his former life, Duncan’s avatar repurposes found scraps of cars, airplanes, and trains, placing them inside a massive display cabinet where they spin futilely in infinite circles, severed from any connection to their original uses. In the artist’s words, Dick Flash “fabricates a new iconography, commemorating his interpretation of an extinct empire and its tragically flawed constituents.” The installation serves as a critical allegory, encapsulating the challenges faced by present-day artists as they attempt to make sense of the chaotic nature of contemporary culture.